Image Credit: Brett Mackenzie
Right about now, I’m wondering, and perhaps you are too: how much longer is America going to last? If your gut is asking that question, I’m here to tell you: it’s not wrong, paranoid, hyperbolic, it’s exactly right.
America now faces a true nightmare scenario. It goes like this, in three stages. Stage one, the GOP escalates and retaliates, seeking vengeance for a “stolen” election. Stage two, democracy’s snuffed out, state by state. Stage three, that paves the way for democratic collapse at the federal level. That appears to be the central approach the GOP is now overtly and explicitly taking — and the crisis America’s facing. Let’s take each of those step by step.
Stage one. The Democrats have refused to punish the GOP’s authoritarian fascist wing — just as I and other survivors and scholars of social collapse were afraid of. What happens when you don’t punish such malign forces? They don’t magically give up and go away politely, because they’ve come to their senses. They double down. They escalate, harden, and retaliate.
So the GOP is now home to a new wave of rising stars. Figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley and Kevin McCarthy and so on. I’m here to tell you, again, that what your gut is shouting at you about these people is right, They are not normal. They embrace violence, intimidation, sheer outright craziness. They revel in hate, and find the damage they do and the hurt they cause delicious. These are not normal people. They are the kinds of figures it takes to produce a true and final social collapse — the violent fanatical extremists, who, revelling in the pain and suffering brutality causes, think of themselves as righteous swords of justice and truth.
Today’s MJTs and Josh Hawleys are tomorrow’s Saddams, Gadhafis, Udays, and Qusays. No, I’m not kidding. Your gut is right. Take it from those of us who’ve lived all this before — we know a certain personality type when we see it. Trump? A malignant narcissist. These figures, though, are different — they’re sociopaths, who enjoy causing harm and hurt, and find no meaning or purpose in their lives without it. These kinds of personalities becomes tomorrow’s torturers, death squads, dictators — that is their path and destiny when given power.
That’s stage one — the Dems didn’t punish the fascists, so now the truly hardcore and dangerous fanatics are assuming power of the movement. What, you might ask, should the Democrats have done? They control the House, Senate, and Presidency. They should have put in place a special process of extraordinary justice — something like a Nuremberg Trials — for the coup attempt of Jan 6th and the abuses of power of Trumpism both. You have to show the fascists you are willing to bring them to justice — or, thinking you are weak, rightly, they will simply escalate and harden.
That brings me to stage two. Escalation and retaliation. The fascists have taken over the GOP. Yesteryear, maybe, in the brief interregnum between Presidencies, there was talk of a “civil war” within the GOP. “Moderates” like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney — still off the charts hard right in global terms, but nonetheless not exactly MJTs — versus the new wave of fanatics. Who would win? Seasoned observers and scholars of social collapse warned: it wasn’t going to be much of a fight — the fanatics would win, because the Dems weren’t serious about punishing fascism, and the GOP’s base believed in it heavily. And so, winning control of the party, the fanatics would double down on extremist tactics.
And that is exactly what’s happened. Texas is just about to pass a bill that lets elections be overturned without any real evidence of fraud or malfeasance. That’s it — bang, the end of democracy in one of America’s biggest states. It’s not a joke, and it’s not something to be taken lightly. It is a huge deal. Because what it means in practice is that Texas can stay ultra-conservative — and then use its power in the next Presidential election, to vote ultra conservative, no matter what, too. There goes the whole country.
And yet Texas is just one state. In state after state, the GOP’s new wave of authoritarians is waging a soft war on democracy. They’re attacking it with everything they’ve got, procedurally, formally, institutionally. In Arizona, the vote is being “audited” by a company called Cyber Ninjas — go ahead and laugh — whose leadership is ultra conservative. Efforts to restrict voting rights and even to stifle any kind of thinking are underway across the country — Republicans are literally banning critical race theory in some states. Think about that: what kind of a country begins to ban theories? Critical ones? Soviet style societies do, of course.
Why is the GOP waging a full-blown soft war on democracy itself in state after state? It is now employing a strategy common in social collapses. Having failed to seize power at the federal level, it’s now attempting to curtail and pervert and suffocate democracy at the state level.
They failed on Jan 6th — thanks to a few brave officers and sheer dumb luck — but remember, they built a gallows, chanted death threats, were out for blood, wanted to assassinate and massacre political leaders — all to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. They came this close — within a hair’s breadth of succeeding.
The fanatics in the GOP have reasoned that if they can’t seize power at the federal level, what they can do is suffocate democracy dead at the state level. And if they can do that, then next time, they can seize power at the federal level. How will that work?
That brings me to stage three, which is the really scary one.
You and I both are beginning to entertain thoughts like this. The Republicans retake the House in 2022. Democrats’ fragile alliance between minorities and progressives and young people splinters. Minorities and young people, in particular, feel betrayed by the Democrats softly-softly approach to fighting fascism with a whimper — which many feel amounts to complicity. So turnout is low, and the GOP retakes the House.
What happens then? Well, then American democracy has a very good chance of coming to an end. There are altogether too many ways it could happen. The House could refuse to certify election results. The case would go before the Supreme Court — if it even heard it — and it’d probably decide in the GOP’s favour, since it’s stacked now with arch-conservatives.
Or maybe, by then, democracy would have been successfully snuffed out in state after state. Especially key states, which were crucial swing states this last time around. Texas, Arizona, Georgia. There, Republicans have managed to pass such severe and extreme restrictions that democracy simply fails. The House doesn’t even have to act — votes are lost, thrown away, not counted, people are disenfranchised, and so forth.
Bang. American democracy has come to an end.
Because this time around, if the Republicans win the Presidency in 2024, all bets are off. Trump’s first term only saving grace, only small mercy, was that sheer incompetence got in the way of malice. That will not happen a second time around. The GOP has gotten much, much better at the practical side of fascism, fast. Their soft war on democracy proves it. If they take the Presidency in 2024, you can count on the stuff of nightmares coming true.
What kind of stuff? Well, last time around, America saw all the following: concentration camps, kids in cages, ethnic bans, “raids,” minorities hunted in the streets, purges, hate, vitriol, the press and anyone different demonized, minorities scapegoated. This was the stuff of fascism. Still, the sheer incompetence of the first Trump Administration meant it was bumbling and fumbling, not quite on a tremendous social scale.
Make no mistake, though, that is what the GOP’s fanatics want. They want an ethnically cleansed homeland of the pure in blood and true in faith — and everyone else is not a human being in formal, institutional, even legal terms. The GOP’s new wave of fanatics — MJT, Josh Hawley, and so forth, want to create a society that resembles Iran, North Korea, or Russia much more than it does Canada or Europe.
And the scary part is that unlike Trump and his coterie of bumbling fools, they’re slick and organized enough to make it happen.
If the GOP ascends to the Presidency in 2024 — and heaven forbid takes the Senate and House back, too — then America is going to see truly horrific and terrible things. Things like knocks on the door of critics and dissenters, who get carted away to concentration camps. Which are already full of minorities, who’ve been hunted down by paramilitaries. Who’ve been elevated to the position of SS’s, given formal power to do all the violence they want. To preserve a certain social order: men, true in blood and pure in faith at the top of a social hierarchy of personhood, the women they effectively own beneath them, and then, in declining position of “racial purity”, everyone else, who’s treated like chattel, like subhumans, like things, not people at all.
Take everything you’re imagining, and telling yourself, “no, don’t be ridiculous. That’s implausible. It’s not going to happen here!” — and stop telling yourself that. The last time you told yourself that, it happened here. It’s a lie, every time. It can’t happen here. All it does is let “it” happen here — fascism, authortiarianism, social collapse. Take all that stuff of your worst fears right now — what is it? I bet it goes like this. Secret polices, gulags, demagogues, fanatics controlling your town or city, extremists in charge of social institutions and systems, hate pervading society, violence and brutality as social norms, the true believers revelling in it all, enjoying the hate and harm and hurt, because it proves they’re pure of blood and true of faith. Take all that, and believe it.
That is what’s on the way for America. If. If what? If things continue their light-speed downward spiral. If the GOP’s continues being allowed to harden, escalate, retaliate. To snuff out democracy state by state. Until, by 2022, there’s little enough left to ensure that by 2024 there’s none left.
Don’t do it. Don’t lie to yourself. Don’t say “it can’t happen here!”
It is.
Umair
May 2021
How Much Longer is America Going to Last?
The GOP’s Snuffing Out Democracy, One Step at a Time. So What Happens Next?
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