by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I just don’t think that Twitter liberals really appreciate how fucked the United States is in 2024. All the macro metrics point to something rather catastrophic happening one way or another — either we become an autocratic managed democracy or we have a civil war.
The reason why Twitter liberals are so blasé about all of this is they simply refuse to take MAGA’s glorification of political violence seriously. But a sizable portion of the American electorate has bought into the Trump Big Lie and we simply aren’t going to make it through the passions of another presidential cycle. The goal, of course, of Republicans in 2024 is sucker punch us by convincing the average voter that the only way a Democrat can become president is if Democrats control Congress. They’ve already conditioned us to accept a massive difference between the popular vote and the Electoral College as well as Republicans blocking any SCOTUS nominee that they have the power to block.
It’s just a brief jaunt to Republicans saying, “If we control Congress, we will nullify any Electoral College vote we don’t like.”
That will be the moment of truth. Either we shrug and accept this to be the case and Republicans simply run the country for generations to come because we’ve given up — or there’s a tragic and violent civil war. I would like for there to be some sort of middle ground, but we punted the problem of MAGA down the road in 2020 because of a very curious, very specific set of circumstances and it’s not going to happen again.
Everyone will face a stark, existential choice.
I guess there are a few less startling scenarios — like a MAGA Republican winning fair and square and then being content to have “hard power” while the center-Left has “soft power,” but that may be wishful thinking. Republicans no longer see liberal democracy as a legitimate form of government. They only see it as a means to an end: getting or keeping power.
You can only be hysterical about how much you hate CNN and MSNBC for so long before people take you both seriously and literally and decide to do something about them. So, it’s very easy to imagine some fascist MAGA POTUS starting off slow with clamping down on dissent, then growing more more brazen because form follows function if nothing else.
Then before the next presidential election rolls around, we’ve had a Constitutional Convention designed specifically to “root out woke cancel culture” once an for all. It will likely be marketed as some sort of “Second Bill of Rights” but, in fact, it will be a massive power grab meant to turn the United States into a white Christian ethno state.
But let me stress, again — I’m often wrong. I’m just sketching out what seems likely given macro metrics as of early 2021 and then extrapolating forward four years. Anything can happen.
