The stage is now set for a very dramatic existential choice of autocracy or civil war. The signs of this impending crisis are everywhere. One of the biggest of these signs is that the Republican Party is now a violent personality cult. As such, since it usually takes no more than 5% of a nation’s population to effect a revolution — we’re in a serious crisis going forward!
“Not great Bob,” as they say on Mad Men.
As I keep saying, if I was smart enough to give you some sort of simple explanation as to what to do to prepare for this existential choice I would be writing for VOX not a blog.
All I know is, at some point in the future, probably around January 2025, the United States is either going to become an old fashion autocracy or we’re going to have a very modern civil war.
That’s it. Those are are only choices.
Again — the Republican Party is now a radical, violent personality cult on a systemic level. So, either they get their way and turn us into a nation of “blood and soil” that is under the perpetual minority control of white Christians, or we have a civil war to sort things out, may best the ideology win.
I have no advice for you after painting this pretty dystopian future for us. Just keep your powder dry, I guess? Get a passport? Just don’t sleep how dangerous our future is. No longer will being a “fierce resister” on Twitter mean shit when ICE is knocking heads of anti-MAGA people in the real fucking world.
The only advice is do have is to enjoy these few remaining years of peace and quiet before the Fourth Turning blowing everything up in a ways not seen since WW2.
The pendulum has finally swung all the way to its logical extreme when it comes to abortion rights — Roe V. Wade is probably going to be overthrown at some point in the next year or so.
I like to make myself feel better about this now near-certain blow to women’s rights by thinking that the end of the fail safe of Roe would be such a political thunderclap that there would be some serious consequences for Republicans who will be giddy over this event.
But it’s begun to sink in that this is very naïve.
What’s going to happen is there will, at first be serious political froth and rage on the part of a lot of motivated women. The whole thing could, in fact, begin a new Modern Women’s Movement.
And yet, our democracy is so barely functioning that what is more likely to happen is we’re going to go back to the bad old days where abortion is something that wealthy people have safe and ready access to. Everyone else is fucked.
What’s more, there will come a point where a number of Red States will get so wrapped up in their new ability to fuck women over that they will demand women be charged for miscarriages AND carry fetus to term even if it means their certain death.
And that’s it. That’s the way things will be for the next 50 odd years until the pendulum swings all the way back again. Instead of people on the Right ranting about how “every life is precious,” we’ll have people on the Left ranting about how many adult women are dying or otherwise having their lives ruined because they absolutely have to carry any fetus they have to term. A whole infrastructure will exist to help poor women in Red States get safe, legal abortions in Canada.
I say that last part because SCOTUS is cued up to totally reverse itself and do the exact inverse of Roe — abortions will be illegal on a national level, no matter what individual states may want.
The next thing that anti-abortion activists will set their sites on is any form of birth control, period. Nothing is off the table. It could get to the point that if a woman has sex, she has to risk getting pregnant no matter what. Their will be no legal method birth control, even for married people.
And because of our undead democracy, that’s it. That’s what we’ll be stuck with for decades and decades. All of this will happen in the context of us living under an autocratic white Christian enthostate, to boot!
Life for the wealthy will continue as it did before with ready access to important (illegal) birth control while poor women will die because MAGA New Right fuckers are cocksuckers.
I only do this because, well, it is one of the two major existential choices America faces between now and January 2025, so I need to do it to help make my abstract civil war fears concrete.
Ugh. The MAGA New Right.
From what I’ve seen of other people’s ideas of a modern American Civil War, a lot of people have a poor grasp of how one would actually happen. I’m kind of obsessed with history and so I have a pretty good grasp as to how things would actually happen.
The first misconception — found a lot within the bullshit MAGA New Right echo chamber — is the idea that good old boys, fed up with Cancel Culture and Critical Race Theory will rise up and overthrow the Deep State in Washington. While anything is possible, I’ve not seen any indication that good old boys drinking Miller Lite on the back porch of their cabin have the organization and gumption to do such a thing.
It’s all abstract bullshit they say to their friends to make themselves feel better because the idea of a MAGA “revolution” is the worst thing they can think of.
What’s more likely to happen is elected Republicans across the country will make a serious fucking miscalculation about what they can get away with in the lead up to Congress certifying the 2024 election results. They will bungle what would otherwise be a political history gimme — America’s peaceful decent into autocratic white Christian minority rule — and the bolts will finally pop off the Union.
And by bolts, I mean states.
Sorry for how shoddy this looks.
So, it wouldn’t be good old boys taking things into their own hands, it would be establishment Republicans who, after weighing their options, decide to leave the Union on a State level (if they don’t get what they want.) Now, obviously, I think it would go down like THIS: it wouldn’t be Red States that left the union in 2025, it would be Blue States because the dead hand on history is very much moving in Red State favor.
As such, President Pompeo would “legally” be president, but the way he got that legality would be so dubious that Blue States would begin to leave the Union en masse and THAT would be the civil war. (The only way I see Red States leaving the Union would be something connected to the Cyber Ninjas “audit” in Arizona. That would be in the near term and would definitely benefit Team Blue for some very specific reasons.
But I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Republicans are craven and bloodthirsty — and so absolutely fear the abstracts of Cancel Culture and Critical Race Theory — that they will either nullify any Biden win or they’ll fuck with Electors in such a way that no one reaches 270 and the election is thrown into the House (President) and Senate (Veep.) This latter option would take the situation in 2000 to the next level and the same arguments would be made — we’re a republic, not a democracy, lib and what happened was constitutional so shut up.
But it’s possible that they’ll bungle this and Blue States will leave the Union.
Then what?
How Blue States Could Win.
It all comes down to California. If California joins the Blue States then they have a fighting chance of defeating the forces of Trumplandia USA. If the state simply sees the crisis as an opportunity to gain its independence, things get pretty dark pretty quick.
Not that any modern civil war wouldn’t be dark. I don’t think the fucking idiots who want to experience the glory of a Second American Civil War appreciate how bad the whole thing would suck.
First and foremost, it’s inevitable that WMD would be used by both sides. And the two sides would radicalize as the forces of war began to do their thing. Also, there is a good chance that no matter which side leaves the Union there would be a race war in the South.
You can stroke one out all you want to the idea of having the opportunity to, at last, show dem dar libtards what you really think about them, but the Southern African American community simply is NOT going to brook the “rising again” of the white South. Significant violence would break out throughout the South to the point that all those fucking MAGA New Right people who were so giddy at the idea of a civil war will live to regret it.
What would you do?
There is one potential solution to this impending clusterfuck and that would be that the U.S. Military stepped in an absolutely last ditch effort to keep the Union together. We could endup with an acting President Jim Mattis who would serve as part of a junta just long enough for passions to cool down and maybe some sort of fair and equitable Constitutional Convention to be held.
But that’s extremely speculative on my part.
If we did somehow find ourselves in a civil war, the entire post-WW2 liberal global framework would collapse and there would be WW3 while we were preoccupied. A few billion could die from starvation after India and Pakistan zap each other and cause a mini nuclear winter. UGH.
And the MAGA New Right WANTS that? What is wrong with those people.
A modern American civil war would be bloody, tragic, avoidable and horrific. It would likely rearrange the borders of North America (Goodbye Canada!) and no matter who won millions of Americans could up and leave the country just because they were mad their side didn’t win.
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.
The thing I notice about Ms. Cyrus is she loves to belt out songs. So, it would make a lot of sense for her to do at least one Meatloaf “Bat Out of Hell” type album where the songs are so over-the-top and theatrical that when she belts them out at the top of her lungs they’re really good.
Ms. Cyrus seems to be thrashing around a lot with different styles and genres of music. It’s like she wants to be a modern Joan Jett, but hasn’t quite figured out the right combination of songs and producers to do it.
Having said that, I think its inevitable that Ms. Cyrus is going to dabble in Amy Winehouse retro music at some point in the near future. It seems a rite of passage for your typical female pop singer that they do at least one throwback album where they get to dress like a woman in the 40s to early 60s.
I wish Ms. Cyrus would form a all-girl rock supergroup for at least one whole album. That would be cool.
Folks, we’re in trouble. The two sides now misjudge each other. Twitter liberals don’t take the MAGA New Right seriously and the MAGA New Right has a growing violent personality cult element to it that glorifies organized political violence.
In a sense, a number of different things ranging from a resurgent Lost Cause mythos in rural portions of the old CSA combined with vast income disparity and education disparity is leading to the so-called Fourth Turning of 2025.
I still think we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy in the late 2024 – early 2025 timeframe. We’re going to become autocracy and it’s going to be very popular with a sizable portion of the electorate, just like how it was with when Putin established an autocracy in Russia soon after coming to power a long fucking time ago.
But, I do occasionally think what might happen to me if an actual fucking modern civil war broke out in the United States. I’ve written about this before at length. Like I’ve said before, I know that should The End come I have two destiny to either die soon after it starts or to find myself in the surreal situation of being some sort of leader.
Given where I live right now, this prediction is holding up pretty well. Either a MAGA fucker is going to murder me in the opening days of a modern civil war in the United States or I’m going to follow the trail of refugees to north of the Mason Dixon line and become some sort of leader in the new revolutionary Blue government.
Or something. Something like that.
Put another way — I’m not someone to sit by and watch a revolution take place around me. If the country buckles, I’m heading to NYC one way or another to see if I can help the anti-MAGA war effort.
That sounds fantastical and delusional at the moment — it is — but given how dark things are at the moment, I can’t help but think about it.
The long answer is…oh boy. The thing about Trump is he shares a huge number of qualities that Hitler had but — at least to date — one: he’s all talk. He talks and talks about very Hitler-like in 1933 type things…but so far a combination of his laziness and the strength of our democratic institutions have managed to keep him check.
Me, 2025?
In fact, that’s the thing I — and a lot of other people in the anti-MAGA movement got wrong about Trump. We were so busy being hysterical about how much Trump in the 2015 – 2017 timeframe was similar to Hitler that we were oblivious to the crucial ways Trump was NOT like Hitler. Hitler had an organic bloodthirsty quality that popped out early with how he got rid of the more radical SA soon after he gained power in Germany.
Meanwhile, Trump often says violent things out of frustration or ignorance, but his actual violent actions have — again, to date — been few and far between. What’s more, while Hitler in 1933 was actively knocking heads in his quest to gain power….in 2020 Trump sat on his hands for months. He wasted a huge window of opportunity between Biden was the nominee to when the election was called by FOX.
So, like I said, Trump isn’t an American Hitler.
But, he is kind of the bridge to an autocratic America that if it went off the rails could lead to very Nazi-like crimes against humanity — especially in the South. It may not be Trump who sets up the conditions for America’s “Final Solution” for black and brown people, but it damn well is going to be a MAGA New Right Republican.
Or, put another way, our current liberal democracy is so fucking hanging on that the moment we get a MAGA New Right president it’s over. All the conditions and all the metrics are there for American democracy to be snuffed out for good. The whole system is so fragile that a President Pompeo or Hawley or Cotton or DeSantis could easily establish themselves an autocrat without blinking an eye.
Probably via some sort of Koch Brother inspired Constitutional Convention.
So, like I said, Trump hasn’t proven to be the American Hitler I, and others, feared.
But the danger of the Untied States slipping into a Nazi-like autocracy is a clear and present danger.
I have been way too vocal about working on what is now four novels. I need to just shut up and do the work. The more I talk about all of this, the more people roll their eyes and tell me to just “write a short story.”
Fuck that.
Hell yeah.
But while I’ve gotten a huge amount of work done over the last few years, it’s been more of a drift than any organized, disciplined thing. That’s why it’s been difficult for me to write short stories to shut the naysayers up. I would rather fail in an outrageous, spectacular fashion than write short stories that obviously would never get published.
What people really mean when they say “write a short story” is they’re tired of hearing about a novel that seems to be taking forever to finish. But, in all honesty, if they think that way, if they lack the ability to support my long-term dream of writing a novel they’re not my friend and I don’t want them in my life.
I’d rather be alone and a failure than have friends and have them think I’m a failure because I could not pass their “test” of getting a short story published. If that did happen, it’s not like I would shut up about the very thing they find so annoying — writing.
If they don’t like me talking about writing, then they don’t really like me and they can fuck off.
Our time on this planet is brief. I’ve finally begun to reach the existential angst of someone who knows this is just about the time when my age group begins to fade into non-existence. We have a solid 20 years ahead of us if we’re lucky, but the process of demise has just about begun.
As such, I’m going to slow drift towards figuring out how to flesh out a second creative “track” of working on a screenplay or three. I have a lot of movie concepts rolling around in my mind, but it’s pretty obvious that the learning curve is far, far sharper than I thought when I finally swallowed my pride and bought Final Draft 12.
I was thinking it was going to be a WYSIWYG-type editor.
Boy, was I wrong. I have to figure out how to use it format my screenplays. It doesn’t hold one’s hand at all. Which is something of a shock. How something that doesn’t really make it easy for a novice to format a screenplay to become the industry standard is curious to me.
And yet, I still have four (four!) novels to develop and finish as quickly as possible. But I’m feeling pretty good about that “main” creative track. Things are going really well in real terms, it’s just a lot — a lot — slower than I would prefer.
But I’m going back to writing again pretty soon now, even though I haven’t filled all the holes in my outline for the first book.
In the end, the point of Trump’s Big Lie is the MAGA New Right no longer sees the concept of a liberal democracy with an ebb and flow as legitimate. Everything is now an absolute zero sum political game. Compromise, by definition, is weakness and, as such, must be crushed.
Any policy or law that helps the common good but doesn’t demonstrably help the cause of Trumplandia must, too, be crushed.
The end game is minority white autocratic rule — or civil war.
A prime example of this is how the MAGA New Right thinks Fox News is a bunch of RINOS and they now have gravitated towards OANN and NewsMax. The MAGA New Right WANTS to be given a media narrative that only makes sense if you’re preparing for the violent overthrow of a liberal democracy that will usher in a long-term autocracy.
Because, lulz, that’s what they want.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg on such bullshit. They don’t want an investigation of the January 6th insurrection not only because a honest investigation probably will implicate some pretty powerful people in the Republican Party, but they still support the aims of the insurrection itself.
They are enraged that Mike Pence did his job and didn’t throw the whole process into chaos after they made it clear to him they wanted him dead for not doing just that.
It’s shit like this that make me think that it’s pretty clear that no later than 2024-2025, we’re going to be faced with the existential choice of civil war or autocracy.
It’s difficult for modern Americans to wrap their minds around the idea of a civil war, while an autocracy is a lot easier so they assume that’s what’s going to happen. But I beg to differ — no fate but what we make. There’s a greater than zero chance that the MAGA New Right bungles our transition from liberal democracy to autocracy and there is an organize murder of Americans by Americans for political reasons — a civil war.
It’s not like I want this, far from it. But there’s a reason why I have sent off for a new passport. It will come in handy when I’m in a refugee camp in Maine near the Canadian border.
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