by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The America I know and love will end very soon, probably in the winter of 2024 after the presidential election. Either we elect an autocrat who successfully strangles our zombie liberal democracy or he bungles that transition and there’s a civil war.
Now, as I’ve written before there are plenty of “known unknowns” that might delay this choice of autocracy or civil war, but there’s no avoiding the choice at some point. There are plenty of reasons why this is, but the chief reason is the rot at the core of the American political system.
Now that Republicans have become a old fashion fascist party, I just don’t see there being any way for us to escape our doom. The only reason why we escaped our fate in 2020 was Donald Trump was too old, too lazy and too unfocused to get the job done. He flirted with the necessary tactics to destroy America, but in the end he choked.
Really, at this point, I would suggest that only a major regional war with, say North Korea — started at just the right moment in the 2024 presidential cycle — would be enough to punt our impending existential crisis down the road one more presidential cycle. Or, if Elon Musk so disrupted the trucking industry that the far Left and the far Right fused together in opposition to job-killing technology.
Otherwise, we’re fucked by no later than late 2024.
In its own tragic way, I would suggest that in a way a second civil war might at least give us some opportunity for redemption like the first Civil War. Though it would be such a horrific tragedy that such a redemption would only happen because both sides would have suffered equally enough that they would be willing to renew the American Covenant.
If we become an autocracy, then, well, there is no hope. Our new autocratic Republican ruling class will simply keep cutting taxes and social benefits, continue to make it harder for women to have sexual agency and continue to keep minorities under the jackboot of systemic racism. In the end, America and Russia will be politically identical and I get pushed out of a window by ICE agents for being too much a of loudmouth.
