by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
American liberal democracy is dead, but for one thing — our national self-perception. It was only because of a very specific set of events that Trump did not win a second term and have four years to demand a Constitutional Convention that would turn the United States, at last, into nothing more than Trumplandia.
But the anti-democratic problems in American politics that brought us Trump continue to push us towards an autocratic managed democracy future. And this is when I find myself struggling to figure out what happens next. History would suggest that we’re going to quietly slip into autocracy and that will be that. It will just be conventional wisdom that for a Democrat to become president, Democrats will also have to control Congress. This won’t happen very often because of voter suppression and gerrymandering.
That will be it.
We will turn into an Americanized version of Putin’s Russia. And, honestly, it’s easy to imagine that as long as MAGA autocrats don’t go after freedom of speech head-on that there will be something of a truce in our politics — MAGA autocrats will weld hard power for generations to come while liberals will vent on TV and Twitter, accomplishing nothing.
And, yet, form follows function. It’s very easy to imagine President Pompeo, or President Cotton or President Hawley (the list goes on) growing greedy and demanding a Constitutional Convention that would do away with some pretty basic freedoms that Americans simply assume will always be there. And that’s when — if we haven’t had one already — we may very well have something akin to a civil war.
This is not to say that we might not have a civil war as part of MAGA’s bungling of our transition from liberal democracy to autocracy. That’s a very real possibility between now and January 2025.
But I don’t know. I just don’t know. All I do know is everyone is going to have to pick a side soon enough. It will be existential and unavoidable.
