by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It definitely seem as thought we’re careening towards “the fourth turning” as explicated in the book The Fourth Turning. The key thing for me is Trump was such a weird person — and so bad at being president — that what should have happened in 2020 didn’t happen.
So, it’s going to happen in 2024.
And, even then, it hasn’t happened yet.
There are any number of different things that could happen that could speed up or slow down the fucked up things happening in America which make either a second American civil war or a slide into autocracy — or both — inevitable by 2024.
But the key take away from both my personal predictions and those found in The Fourth Turning is we’re on the cusp of unpreceded instability both at home and abroad in the coming years. And when it happens, it’s likely to be dramatic and awe-inspiring. The whole world that we’ve taken for granted for the last 80-odd years is going to go tits up at an astonishing speed.
I say this specifically because the Republican Party is now fascist in the old-school meaning of the word. They are filled with rage and it’s only a matter of time before the Proud Boys morph into something a lot closer to the Nazi SS than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. It’s very possible that 2024’s election will be marred by such political violence that that, by definition, causes it not to be free and fair.
We may look back at 2020 as the last free and fair election in our nation’s history.
The other option is we descend into a second American civil war and we bomb — nuke? — the hell out of each other until we finally decide if America is going to remain a liberal democracy or go full throated fascist. The ultimate outcome of such a war is something I just can’t predict four years away from it.
I have some very strong opinions on how the Blue States could win such a civil war, but no one listens to me and, lulz, I’m a nobody and probably always will be. “Normal” people just see me as a deranged Internet crank who is “both stupid and oblivious.”
But anyway. Maybe the novel I’m working on will be a success enough that I can afford to move to, I don’t know, Perth or something.
