by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
At the moment, Joe Biden and the Democrats are f u c k e d.
Right now, here’s our prospective future: the Republicans decisively take Congress in 2022. They proceed to impeach both Biden and Harris repeatedly simply for breathing. The Senate for the years 2023 – 2025 is permanently in session as an Impeachment Court. Trump runs again. Trump wins — probably fair and square despite his natural inclination to cheat. After a turbulent late 2024 – early 2025, Trump is sworn in and immediately begins to rant about the need for a Constitutional Convention. Then and all eyes turn to his veep. It will become conventional wisdom that it will be Trump’s veep who ultimately strangles American democracy once and for all.
I honestly believe that’s our future as of late 2021. And, yet, if I had made a prediction about the 2020 election in late 2019, I would said Trump would easily win re-election and do his final consolidation of power in 2021, not 2025. Things I could not predict, namely, COVID19 and how amazingly stupid and lazy Trump is as an autocrat. Throw in how good a candidate Joe Biden was and there was an opportunity for ding-dong Trump to self-own and lose the election. Which, of course, is what he promptly did.
So, what are some possible unexpected events that might punt our slide into autocracy down the road another election cycle? Before I begin, some context: autocracy is popular in the United States. We are an autocracy without an autocrat. And a Democrat could win fair and square in 2024 and everything will be in place for Republicans to steal the election through a combination of an administrative coup on the state and local level and a brazen manipulation of the Constitution on the Federal level.
- The Omega COVID Variant
One thing that would dramatically change America’s peaceful drift into autocracy would be if a new, more potent strain of COVID19 began to spread. It would have to be A LOT more potent however. We’re talking The Stand levels of death. That would so upend everyone’s expectations on a political and economic basis that Biden would be given the opportunity to rise the occasion in a way that Trump simply can not on a human level. Again, Republicans are fucking fascists and they would steal the election from Biden one way or another, but if Biden was seen as some huge national hero and they stole the election, they would be pushing their luck. - World War 3
If two or more major regional wars faired up and Biden, again, rose to the occasion and got to play FDR, then it would maybe grow far more difficult for Republicans to brazenly steal the 2024 election. They still obviously would try, because, lulz, but they would definitely be risking a civil war in ways that they might not otherwise. - A Massive Self Own By MAGA
This is the darkest of the scenarios. In this one, Republicans just can’t help themselves. They pull off some huge, coordinated terrorist attack in the name of MAGA / Trump. It’s so bad that for the duration of the 2024 political cycle, Democrats have just enough political clout that even Republicans find it a bit more difficult to steal the election after the fact. Again, they’ll try because they’re bloodthirsty and have no shame, but if they did self-own in some massive way, they might at least pause for thought. - An Unexpected New Democratic Leader
Biden is old. And Harris hasn’t really impressed me as his veep. So, theoretically, some new person we aren’t even thinking about might zoom through and pull a Obama in 2008. The only person I can think of is AOC, but she’s so young, brash and polarizing that it’s debatable if she could get anywhere near to pulling it off.
