by Ender
One of the more alarming things to happen in modern American politics is how thirsty the MAGA New Right is for autocrats all over the world. The latest thug to have their Tiger Beat spread cut out and pasted on their bedroom wall is Hungary’s autocratic superstar Viktor Orbán.
Talk about what the fuck.
It’s astonishing that it feels like two eras — the late 1850s and the late 1930s — are fusing together in some sort of weird political Frankenstein’s monster. It’s like as if the leaders of Slave Power went on a tour of the Russian Empire and were impressed with how docile the serfs were. Ugh!
What really astonishes me is how all of this is happening is broad daylight and it’s not a huge scandal. It’s like how all those Republican Senators celebrated the 4th of July in Moscow — of all places — a few years ago. That was another what the fuck moment.
What we have to take seriously is the Republican Party is radicalizing in broad day light. It’s now a fascist autocratic white nationalist party. By definition, if it ever gains power again, it’s going to finally extinguish our undead democracy. Given that even an undead democracy has a natural ebb and flow to it, Republicans are going to gain power again.
And they’re probably never going to let it go.
Any discussion of this clusterfuck, however, has to address that the very thing that has allowed the MAGA New Right to gain so much power in broad daylight — Trump’s “chaos agent” nature — is also the movement’s greatest weakness. Trump flings off so much inept chaos just by existing, that he could very well start a civil war that would at least give Blue States a fighting chance at destroying the Republican Party cancer.
So, in a sense, Trump remains a macro historical wildcard. He has such absolute control over the fascist Republican Party that it’s possible he might transition us into an autocracy. And it’s also that because he’s a fucking idiot, he could bungle that same transition and cause a civil war that leads to the destruction of the Republican Party just as much as the first Civil War prompted the destruction of Slave Power once and for all.
But the fact remains — the Republican Party must be destroyed if we are to remain a free country. On a systemic, intuitional basis, the Republican Party is now fascist, autocratic and white nationalist. I’m not thrilled at the idea that the United States would ever have to go through the tragedy of civil war again, but if my only other option is to live in an autocracy like Orban’s Hungary, what the fuck else are we going to do?
And, yet, no fate but what we make. There’s still a chance that we’re going to drift towards some sort of situation where we have an autocracy — a Democrat can only become POTUS if Democrats control Congress — but the fascist Republicans will be so busy making abortion illegal and giving plutocrats yet another tax cut that they whole pushy-pushy out of windows thing will remain just a running gag for me.
I hope.