by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
While I continue to vacillate widely between thinking we’re going to have a civil war in late 2024, early 2025 and thinking we’re going to simply give up and become an autocracy, I see clear path towards the latter at the moment. Given what happened to the Roman Republic, I think there is a really good chance we’ll become a zombie democracy.
Or, put another way, if we’re able to avoid a civil war as part of the next election cycle, it seems logical that we’ll continue to ostensibly be a democracy but, in reality be anything but. We’ll become a legalistic, autocratic “managed democracy” like they have in Russia. A lot of how this goes down exactly will depend on if it’s Trump or DeSantis who is the GQP’s 2024 presidential nominee.
If it’s Trump, then, lulz, the possibility of the United States having a civil war grows significantly. If it’s DeSantis, then, yeah, we’ll probably lurch towards a few presidential cycles where we all think we’re a democracy, but, in fact, we’ve finally transitioned into autocracy. I just don’t see DeSantis ever peacefully leaving office.
He’ll pull a Putin and be POTUS for eight years, then become Speaker of the House and be the power behind the throne until he gets around to having enough power to call a Constitutional Convention. All of this would be happening in the context of millions of smug Twitter liberals fleeing the country for the four corners of the globe.
Our current political situation is very unstable and untenable. Something’s gotta give. This is very much the quiet before the storm. And as I keep saying, the only thing that really worries me is America’s original sin, race. It’s because of race that I could see us zooming past Russia’s form autocracy into something a lot closer to Nazi Germany.
