by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I keep vacillating wildly between thinking it’s obvious that we’re simply going to give up on democracy and thinking we’re obviously — when forced into a corner — going to have a civil war.
To this day, I still can figure out which course of action we’re most likely to pick.
I say this because the last 30 or so years have been a steady progression towards autocracy. At each opportunity to avoid taking the next subtle step towards a manage democracy, we’ve zoomed past any possible speed bumps without blinking an eye. So, with that in mind, it seems logical that when MAGA Republicans make their last power grab and nullify in Congress the election of any Democrat that we’ll just shrug and that will be that. Autocracy will be established in the United States and the dynamic of form follows function will kick and and I get pushed out a window by ICE.
And, yet, there’s a big difference between lulzing the slow decline of our democracy and having to confront that we’ve officially crossed into autocracy and Republicans have finally consolidated power for generations to come. So, it also makes a lot of sense that once fey Millennial hipsters realize that MAGA is officially their new overloads that they will freak out on an existential level and we’ll have a civil war.
But one thing is clear — there are a lot of red lights flashing on modern America. I ponder almost every day why MAGA has such hatred within it and I still can’t figure it out. Or, put another way, I can’t figure out why otherwise sane, educated people support MAGA, even it’s “cruelty is the point” mantra of governance style.
If you look back at what happend in 2020, it’s kind of astonishing how close we came to losing our democracy for good. The combination of Trump being extremely lazy and stupid, Biden being very centrist and Trump’s bungled handling of the pandemic was something I could not have easily predicted in late 2019.
I kept thinking around election time 2020 how epically lazy and stupid Trump was for not pulling some pretty basic autocratic plays. But he was all talk. The frightening thing about Trump is, of course, that that “talk” is what his followers voted for. That’s what they wanted in 2016 and 2020: the “you’re fired” guy from The Apprentice.
As such, I wouldn’t get too excited if somehow we magically found the sliver bullet necessary to end Trump’s malignant political career. Trump was simply a vessel for our democracy’s destruction — he had no leadership skills. Once he’s out of the way, there are a dozen young would-be MAGA Republican autocrats waiting in the wings to finish the job Trump started.
