by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I continue to grow more and more aggravated by how the “woke” elements of the center-Left do the cause of democracy no favors by wallowing in how many genders can dance on the head of a pin. I see it in my own family, where the Traditionalist relatives are officially all-in with the rise of fascism within the GOP ranks.
They don’t really think in those terms, but that’s what they want — A Very American Autocracy. As long as America’s transition into fascist autocracy is peaceful, my relatives — whom I love dearly — will be quite pleased that, at last, they don’t risk having their lives ruined simply because they’re conservative and, as such, don’t fit the media agenda of the “woke cancel culture mob.” UGH.
I have long thought that if we had National Service between the last year of high school and college that many, many problems would be solved in our very divided American culture. If you forced good old boys from West Virginia to bunk in the same room with woke, fey libtards from New York City or Los Angeles, then they would be forced to confront that on a basic level, they weren’t so different after all.
But there is a grave, existential flaw in this plan — it could only have been successfully implemented when it was first proposed by the Clinton Administration in 1993. Now, if you tried to do it, there would be a battle royale over what the agenda and purpose of this hypothetical National Service would be, with the center-Left seeing it as a way to make a new generation of Woke Shock Troops, while the center-Right would see it as something akin to an updated Hitler Youth.
As such, it seem to me there is a simple solution staring us in the face: bring back the draft. But make it unisex. I don’t know how much you would have to actually use it because just the fear of being drafted would be enough to force a lot of center-Left people to sit up and take notice as to what’s really important in life. Maybe they wouldn’t be so busy trying to destroy the heteronormative world — and, as such, stoking the rise of American fascism — and maybe they would cool it with “trigger warnings” and “microagressions” and any number of other dumb concepts that only divide America even more than it already is.
I continue to be vehemently anti-MAGA, but it’s tough to get my Traditionalist relatives to support democracy when they think that Democrats are little more than the tools of Satan because of all the talking points handed down by Fox News and Right wing podcasts. Maybe, if we had the fear of the Draft to focus the minds of the “woke cancel culture mob” we might be able to save American democracy through something other than a civil war or military junta.
But this spicy hot take is just a daydream. It’s never going to happen. We’re past the event horizon for autocracy, civil war or military junta around late 2024, early 2025. Good luck. You’re going to need it.
