by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Republicans are experiencing political flop sweat over the upcoming Congressional investigation into the events surrounding the January 6th Capitol Insurrection.
The question is, why?
There are two major things that might be proven that would make Republicans uncomfortable. One is a direct funding and organizational link between the Trump Administration and what happened. The other is that a number of Republican members of Congress were in cahoots with the rioters.
Both of those things, if proven, would be hurt Republicans in the upcoming 2022 mid-terms.
And, yet, I don’t really think they have THAT much to worry about. First, Congressional Republicans have established the conditions such that anything, no matter how damaging, that the commission finds can be spun to the base as a “Pelosi’s partisan witch hunt” and have you heard of Critical Race Theory and Cancel Culture? For everyone else, the ideological negative polarization and recursive thinking has grown so intense that there is literally nothing the commission could possibly fucking find out that would change anyone’s mind within the violent personality cult that is the modern Republican Party.
The other issue is, I’m not so sure we can take for granted that there will be a free and fair election in 2022 in the first place. It’s very possible that by 2022, the Republican Party will essentially be the theoretical fascist Patriot Party and even if Democrats win, those wins won’t be certified by hyper-partisan state and local election officials.
The fix is in, in other words.
So, in a sense, all the hand wringing by Republican leadership now is more out of an abstract fear than any sense that anything concrete will happen to hurt them. What is likely to happen is by the fall of 2022 what would now be considered shocking — that elected Republicans actively worked with a violent mob to attempt a coup — will be seen exclusively through the lens of partisan politics and fuck you lib.
I don’t think Twitter liberals appreciate how far down the road to tyranny — or civil war — the United States has gone at this point. I know just in my own personal life my various, numerous conservative relatives are so consumed by both-siderism, negative polarization and recursive thinking that there is no talking to them. (Which, that, in itself, is pretty depressing in a putative liberal democracy.)
As I keep saying — at some point between now and when the presidential results are certified in January 2025, we, as a nation, are going to be faced with the existential choice of civil war or autocracy.
I generally think we’re gong to slide peacefully into autocracy that culminates in a Constitutional Convention that codifies the MAGA belief that America is a nation of “blood and soil.” All my dystopian nightmares will come true — just a few years later than I predicted — and I will die at the hands of an ICE agent one way or another because I refuse to fucking shut up.
Thanks for coming to my TEDtalk.
