by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Any discussion of the Republican’s obsession with the Critical Race Theory canard has to understand the context of conservative Traditionalists in America. From what I can tell, Traditionalists, because of the corrosive nature of the Woke Agenda (ugh) feel they have nowhere else to turn but the MAGA New Right.
Or, put another way, combine the extreme abstract fears of your average conservative voter about being “canceled” simply for being conservative, an extensive permission structure and extreme negative polarization and it’s inevitable that Republicans would use CRT as a budgen.
The issue is — the average Traditionalist doesn’t see themselves as racist and they sometimes live in near-constant fear that just by not following the woke agenda media agenda they will have their lives ruined. In large part, much of this comes from how rapidly the urban center-Left is receding from the rural center-Right.
The two poles of American political life are literally living in different (mental) countries. And, as such, your typical Traditionalist is dismayed by how national organizations as, say, the company they work for, adopts elements of the woke agenda that your typical urban dweller takes for granted as just a part of life. This difference in worldview is extremely destructive and corrosive to the point that Traditionalists are excited at the prospect of autocracy.
To the point that will bend themselves into rhetorical pretzels to delegitimize the very idea that the United States is even a democracy in the first place. That’s why I think when Trump wins re-election in 2024 it will be his veep who will be our first autocrat. Trump remains too stupid and lazy to be able to use the leavers of power to make his autocratic desires a reality.
But there are a dozen far younger people who Trump could pick to be America’s Putin. This seems very obvious to me because, lulz, the entire edifice of the Republican Party is now hell bent on ending American democracy once and for all. The only question for me is do they pull it off peacefully, or do they bungle it and we have a civil war.
And it would be in that civil war that we would see the end of the Woke Agenda because, lulz, if you’re dodging bullets and bombs you really don’t have time to quibble about your pronouns.
I still think — as of right now — we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy. The whole system is designed to give the fascists the benefit of the doubt and even if the worst happens and we have a the Certification Crisis in the 2024 -2025 timeframe that I believe is possible, in the end, we’ll lulz it and slip peacefully into a MAGA New Right autocracy.
Only Trump saying the quiet part out loud, I think, might spark Blue States to leave the Union and cause a massive clusterufck of a Second American Civil War.
If we do pick the autocracy route, I’m prepared to face my fate. I’ve had the luxury, the benefit of being a loudmouth kook in a Western democracy and when that comes to and end, I doubt I’ll last very long. It may not happen overnight, but sometime in the 2030s I might get drunk, rant about how fucking fat fuck President-for-Life Mike Pompeo is a fat fuck no matter how much gastric bypass surgery he gets and, next thing you know, ICE puts a bullet in the back of my head.
And there’s really nothing we can do at this point to stop that existential choice of autocracy or civil war. We’re living through macro trends in American history and, as such, we are having a real problem understanding the end game of it all. It’s not like the Woke Agenda is going to stop existing or the MAGA New Right isn’t going to continue to use CRT as a bludgeon.
Gird your loins. The end of the United States as we know it is upon us. Pick a side and be willing to suffer for your choice. Good luck.
