by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’ve talked a lot about the existential choice of autocracy or civil war that America faces around 2025 as part of the so-called “Fourth Turning.” But there is a third option — military junta.
In a sense, this option makes a lot more sense than either autocracy or civil war because it could be just the temporary fix to our problems. The scenario I’m thinking of is rather than what the Reds want, which is autocracy or what the Blues might want out of desperation, which is civil war, we would simply turn the reigns of power over to the military.
Once we did that, it’s easy to imagine the whole point of the exercise would be a convening of a Constitutional Convention that would address the concerns of both sides. This would be a way to take the existential issues of 2025 out of the hands of our undead politics and turn it over to a hopefully objective existential body that would help us become a more perfect Union.
There, unfortunately, so many problems with this on-paper ideal solution that it’s highly unlikely it would happen. What’s more likely to happen is either we slip peacefully into a MAGA New Right autocracy or Blue States grow so enraged that they leave the Union and all hell breaks loose.
The biggest problem is, of course, the U.S. Military on a systemic basis will do everything in its power to avoid this very solution, even to the point that the whole country collapses into anarchy. This would happen when the military simply refuses to pick a side when Trump fucks everything up like he always does and we just don’t know who the “real” POTUS is and Blue and Red States go for each others throats.
Another problem might be, that the not even the military will be able to withstand the forces tearing the country apart and the largely MAGA enlisted men pick the opposite side as the brass. So, instead of a unified military being able to step in for a few crucial months, everything collapses in on itself and we bomb ourselves into oblivion using illicitly seized caches of WMD.
If MAGA gets its way and we turn into an autocracy then, well, lulz.
The point of all of this is we need to start preparing ourselves for some pretty astonishing choices in the 2024 -2025 timeframe. And it’s going to suck so, so bad. It’s going to be horrible.
But the current autocracy without an autocrat status quo can not stand. We have a short-term solution to a long-term problem.
