by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The idea of being “woke” has become a catch-all for the MAGA New Right. Anything they don’t like, or whenever they don’t get what they want, they ascribe it to the “woke mob.” All of this, of course, is part of the broader idea of being “Red Pilled.” When you’re Red Pilled, you believe that white Christians — especially men — are under attack by, you guessed it, the angry woke mob.
The is constantly at the forefront of my mind because I have far more conservative relatives who talk about their personal fear of being canceled simply for being conservative. Because of a combination of negative polarization and an extensive permission structure, they’re MAGA in all but name. They simply can not, will not, do the one thing necessary to save American democracy — make common cause with people like me to defeat the rise of fascism.
So, we’re fucked.
They don’t have any red line other than eventually, inevitably, when I get drunk sometime in the 2030s and rant at the top of my lungs about what a fat fuck President Mike Pompeo is, regardless of how many gastric bypass surgeries he has and I get detained by ICE. Of course, my conservative relatives think I’m nuts for even suggesting such a thing — they’re the good guys, after all, and nothing like that would ever happen.
Once we’re an MAGA New Right autocracy, the poors will stop being lazy and no one will ever again have to fear being “canceled” simply for a stray conservative comment in public.
This, of course, totally ignores the realities of living under an autocratic regime. Form follows function and the moment it’s simply accepted that it’s almost impossible for Democrats to have any real power, Republicans will begin to abuse this new power to the hilt. They will push through a fascist, Objectivist agenda that will gut the social safety net and turn back the clock to the 1950s.
The thing is, it’s not like Republicans are hiding any of this. In fact, that’s all they do, is scream at the top of their lungs about all the fascist things they want to once they have the power to do so.
And, at the moment, it definitely seems as though Republicans are going to transition the United States into an autocratic state. At some point after 2025, many, many center-Left people will flee the United States. There will be a lot of talk of an “American diaspora” and an “American brain drain” but by then it will be too late.
Trump then his hand picked successor (DeSantis? Pompeo? Flynn?) will strangle American democracy once and for all and the seething rage of white Christians in the United States will serve as the bedrock of our new autocratic state. We will be politically identical to Russia. There will be huge protests every once in a while, but in general, nothing will change.
America will grow poorer, more inward looking and probably leave NATO to form an alliance with Russia. I can’t predict the future, so I don’t know specifically when and how this nightmare scenario will happen, but all the macro trends I see are definitely heading in that direction.
At least, I suppose, Republicans will no longer have the abstract fear that a stray conservative comment at work or in public will ruin their lives. They will have burned everything to the ground to get it, but they will no longer have to worry about being “canceled.”
The other options is, of course, we have a civil war, bomb ourselves into the Stone Age and it takes 20 to 40 years for us to recover one way or another. At the moment, I honestly don’t know which option we will pick as a nation.
