by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The bad guys of American history are going to win. Anti-Trump political forces simply aren’t strong enough. When the time comes, we’re going to become an autocratic managed democracy no different than Russian.
But.
For that to happen, some prep work would have to be done. We would have to slip into autocracy in the context of there being some sort of thin veneer of legality to it all so instead of getting upset, the average person just shrugs. As long as freedom of speech isn’t really harmed — outside of maybe changing libel laws — then people will be content.
That’s why Trump is such a wildcard. Under any normal circumstance, he would be the guy to put the bullet in the head of American democracy. But while he may have autocratic impulses, he just doesn’t have to mental acuity necessary to pull it off. He wants to be an autocrat without actually doing any of the hard work necessary to…be an autocrat.
Add to this Trump being not only bonkers but a self-own artist and, well, you have the makings of an extremely unstable situation. Or, put another way, while the macro historical trends definitely indicate the Bad Guys are going to win, there’s a chance that Trump, specifically, is going to so bungle that transition from liberal democracy to autocratic managed democracy that he manages to punt that final transition for a generation.
The reason is — American self-perception. We still have a very strong sense of being in a “free country” and if Trump did something bonkers in a spasm of panic that went against that, then there could be severe consequences, at last, for the people who want to turn the United States into a white Christian ethno state.
But all of this would come at a cost.
It’s very likely Trump would do something really, really insane that would scare the shit out of us all at the time — we just wouldn’t know, exactly, what was going to happen or if any of us were going to make it out alive.
As such, we have a situation where Trump really wants to stay in power for various reasons and yet he’s too incompetent to actually pull it off. He may try, but he’s going to be so brazen and bonkers about it that he will fail. There is, of course, always the chance that should we manage to get past January 6th without a successful coup, that Trump will go transactional on Twitter.
He will begin to demand Red States leave the Union and we may very well have that civil war that so many right wing nutjob cocksuckers seem to crave.
Anyway. What do I know. I’m always wrong.
