by Ender
It’s very easy for Twitter liberals to get really worked up and to place on the blame America’s impending political clusterfuck solely on the shoulders of this or that person, as if we could somehow magically get rid of them then all of our problems would be solved.
This is so dumb because everyone from Trump to Bannon to DeJoy isn’t the problem, but, rather a symptom of our problems.
That someone like Trump could become president with the help of someone like Bannon is simply the practical application of severe macro problems in our politics. A prime example of what I’m talking about is what happened post-election day in 2020.
All these people who popped up to help Trump’s slow moving attempt to illegally stay in power were simply opportunists. Someone, somewhere, was going to pop up to do the very same thing. Who did it specifically did not really matter.
But let’s talk about Steve K. Bannon.
He likes to see himself as Lord Zod, destroyer of the administrative state. I think, in fact, he may have even compared himself to Lenin. Such suck-your-own-cock self-aggrandizement is pushing it, but not by much. Here’s what happened last time, with John Eastman trying to end our democracy.
While it’s highly like that someone like Bannon would have sprung up as we careened towards the Fourth Turning, the verdict is still out if he is A Great Man like Lenin who not just was a part of history, but MADE history. But even Lenin needed the conditions for him to strike.
This is the point in this post when I point out that I know myself well enough to know that if we really did have something as horrific as a civil war that *I* might just find myself in a historic situation. That sounds really fucking delusional — and it is. But I know myself well enough to know that either I’m going to die the first day of any civil war or I’m going to somehow weasel myself into some kind of leadership position in Blue State forces…somewhere. It may not be much, but would be a shit ton more than what I’m doing with my life right now.
But that is really fucking delusional thing for me to say at the moment.
The reason Bannon is so dangerous is he is attacking the very fiber of our liberal democracy. He’s attack it at the local level where it is its weakest because the requirements for participation are so low. These are usually filled with just average people off the street who believe in civil society and want to help out.
Bannon, meanwhile, wants to do to these otherwise pretty mundane offices what Trump has done to SCOTUS — fil it with a bunch of MAGA New Right ideologs who will come through for Trump (or DeSantis, or whomever) when the time comes in the 2024 – 2025 time frame (or the 2022 mid-terms.)
And, yet, the best laid plans of mice and human tumors often go awry. Bannon is probably going to be successful in destroying our democracy, but he also might be successful in destroying our democracy. There will come a moment at some point between now and January 2025 when Bannon’s plot will just about to succeed and, yet, it will not have totally succeeded. Here’s why we migtht have a civil war instead.
- Republicans have come to glorify political violence
Something you see a lot these days within the bullshit echo chamber of the MAGA New Right is the belief that because “liberals won’t leave us alone” that they are being “driven” to extremism. There’s a lot of leading not-so-vague talk as to what all this would ultimately mean. But it’s clear that for a number of “thought leaders” within the MAGA New Right that they have accepted that at some point in the future, they’re going to have to resort to violence to get what they want. - Republicans no longer believe in democracy
It is now clear that like any good fascists, Republicans no longer believe in democracy unless it’s for the specific purpose of gaining and keeping power. This view of the system they’re supposed to a part of leads them do extremely distablizing things that help push the country to the brink. - Trump 2024
Just Trump being the 2024 nominee would, in itself, be enough to cause a civil war at some point in late 2024 – early 2025. He just has a special knack for “owning the libs” in such a way that if he stole in 2024 election and said the “quiet part outloud” that Blue States would grow so enraged that it would be they, not Red States, that left the Union and caused a Second Civil War. But Ron DeSantis is polling exceptionally well at the moment, so either Trump politically shivs him at some point, or he co-ops him, making him his VP, opening the door to DeSantis becoming America’s Putin at some point down the road a little bit. - Steve K Bannon.
Bannon and his toadies are actively working to destroy the framework that we use to administer free and fair elections. So, it’s very easy to imagine a situation where this gambit works in ways that Trump himself is too idiotic to pull off personally and it will be so egregious that, again, Blue States leave the Union and we have a Second American Civil War. - Extreme negative polarization
We’re in for a bump four or so years, no matter what, because negative polarization, on a systemic level, has reached a critical mass. When one of your political parties is fascist and would rather crash the global economy instead of even appear to work for the good of the nation — you got a problem. - A lack of shared values
As the big blow up on Twitter in the last 24 hours about a Stephen Colbert song and dance gag about getting vaccinated proves — we can’t even agree on what’s funny. A combination of this and negative polarization is leading to the United States being two nations, one Red, one Blue and when we get around to attempting to elect the next president, the system simply won’t be prepared for the passions it will stir up. - A potentially historic miscalculation on the part of Republicans
It’s possible that, much like European powers in the lead up to WW1, when the time comes and Republicans have a choice between peacefully transitioning us into autocracy or fucking with us all so we want to take up arms, they will choose the latter not because they have to, but because they want to. It’s possible that by the 2024 — 2025 period, Republicans will see a civil war as their only choice to consolidate power, even if it’s clear that they could get everything they ever wanted within the system they so obviously loath.
There will be one last death struggle for our democracy and either, like in 1861, we manage to crawl ourselves back from being dominated by Slave Power or, lulz, we don’t and Bannon is named reichsfuhrer.
One thing that is key to understand about Bannon. He is doing the one thing that so many so-called “Resistors” on Twitter can not or will not do — he’s doing real shit in the real world. He’s doing the hard work of effectuating his personal vision in the real world.
And that’s what makes him so fucking dangerous.