One of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite professors (that I’m about to butcher) was
“No one in history thought they were living in history. They were just… living; it’s easy for us to look back in the present and think of two people in history as contemporaries and ask 'why didn’t he learn from the mistakes of this guy? Surely they knew each other, they’re both right here together in this book. Why didn’t he just run over to page 43 and ask if it was a good idea to invade in the winter?”
I think it can be said that from around 1953, with the inception of the Warren Court til now, the US has been progressing away from authoritarianism. That exception to the rule is over. We are diving head first back in.
We will never see progress again towards racial, economic, sexual or gender based rights. The fascist right has control of the presidency, house, senate, and judicial. They will gerrymander the whole government and demolish any legal tool meant to check their power. We lost for good. Representative democracy is dead. The Constitution is dead. It’s over.
I hear you that the situation is daunting. It’s frightening to forecast where things will go in the U.S. Still it’s inaccurate and unhelpful to say representative democracy is dead.
First off, even the Nazis lost. If it comes to violence fascists will ultimately lose.
But also, the U.S. was founded in slavery, only land owning white men could vote. We had the civil war, we had Jim Crow. So we have a history of hopeless looking oppressive situations, and made progress away from them.
Most importantly, believing that fascists are unbeatable makes them so. If you don’t believe it’s possible, you won’t try.
I’m still staggering from this election, it sucks. I don’t intend to roll over, and I believe, after much unnecessary suffering and probably death, that we will win.
Here is what I see happening once Trump takes office. With the help of Congress and the supreme court, he is going to lock down voting so that Republicans will never lose power again. Then he is going to eliminate presidential term limits. He is going to be defacto president for life like Putin. That is what I mean by representative democracy being dead.
Whether it is Vance or Don Jr or someone else, he will pass off leadership to an heir. His pet supreme court is going to reinterpret the constitution to mean whatever is convenient.
It could take years for people to get desperate enough to take up arms, and years and millions of deaths to end the threat. By that time there is all likelihood that the United States are no longer still united.
Now maybe he just makes himself immune for his crimes, collects billions in foreign bribes, and retires to his new resort Vietnam. That is best case scenario, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
