10-17-2022, 06:01 PM
Democrats cannot afford to allow any prosecution of Donald Trump to look like a partisan, vindictive exercise. MAGA is a powerful mass movement with Donald Trump as its focus. Let's not ignore the Qranqery of QAnon. These people hold the niceties of liberal democracy in contempt because they hold liberal democracy itself in contempt. Get enough people into position in which to take over the critical offices of government, and there can be something much like the Bolshevik take over of Russia in practice.
I have my own mental list of people who need to go to prison for their roles in the Capitol Putsch, and that is likely much like yours. I will give no clues.
If you thought the election of 2020 was critical to American history in ways in which none since 1860 was critical, that of 2024 may be much the same. We have plenty of people who will not accept an election that goes any way other than their landslide, and expect the government of their choosing to eviscerate all American process inimical to their desires. So we have several possibilities from election to inauguration:
1. The 2024 election works to the benefit of a Republican Party that still holds Trump-like beliefs and serves the economic agenda of those who wish to return to the plutocratic ways of the 1920's at the earliest. I could imagine this clique establishing a "Bill of Rights for Capital" and a "Bill of Rights for (fundamentalist-evangelical) Christianity" For economics, America is to be "freed" from labor unions, regulations of all kinds, and media criticism. Social Security is abolished only to be replaced with mandatory contributions to life-insurance companies connected to the ruling elite. Most money ends up going into bureaucratic hustlers and to owners of the insurance companies. Welfare is to be abolished because there is nothing wrong with economic distress that working 80 hours a week can't solve. The "Bill of Rights" for the Religious Right outlaws abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and the teaching of evolution while imposing the pseudo-history that claims that anything else is contrary to the way things have always been. (In fact, Protestant Christian fundamentalism is roughly 100 years old, so it is much newer than even Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, and Christian Science which date from the Transcendental Awakening nearly two centuries ago. If people starve to death due to the New Economy, then such is God's Will!
The end of neoliberal domination of the economy has given us the worst inflation since the 1970's, and we still have the sort of economic inequality that ordinarily precedes an economic meltdown. There is no soft landing from what we experience now. Obviously Republicans need a nationwide landslide to get the political climate in which the antithesis of FDR can undo everything liberal since him that they so choose. Maybe there won't be a return to Jim Crow practice or chicanery to deny non-white people the vote, but government will clearly represent economic power instead of the People. This agenda does every legal trick to entrench itself until the next Crisis Era. (That will be the ravages of AGW to the extent that hundreds of millions die of the three Malthusian checks of war, famine, and plague).
2. Electoral chicanery takes place that leaves an ambiguous results. Perhaps the popular vote and the electoral vote based upon popular votes within the States suggest a bare Democratic win of the President with Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, but some mischievous State legislatures vote to negate such results. In effect the GOP wins through shady process that allows much to happen in the above scenario.
3. The second scenario leads to ambiguous results that the Armed Forces decide. The generalissimo establishes himself as President and rules without the aid of Congress. We have a Pinochet who rules until he no longer relishes power. Democracy is dead.
4. Democrats win, but a huge part of the American public thinks otherwise and tries to imitate the Capitol Putsch, only more effectively. It takes over the Capitol completely, with Congressional Representatives having to decide whether to comply or to be killed. This takes more people than the 2021 disgrace, and better organization. The electoral results are negated, and democracy is dead. Welcome to a right-wing mirror image of Lenin's Soviet Union.
5. See 4, but parts of America secede. Welcome to Civil War II.
6. We end up with the same old gridlock and solve nothing except to defer the great unsolved questions to later decades. This Crisis Era dies with a whimper instead of a bang.
7. Democrats win, and we come to our senses. Most of us recognize that there's nothing wrong with America that what is right with it can't solve. Millions of people decided that they might as well adapt to a new order that offers more opportunities in inexpensive education. We would need bigger spending and bigger taxes as America becomes a "social market economy". We become more like the Federal Republic of Germany (paradoxically established by Allied authorities to adopt the best characteristics of America, Britain, and France so that it would be too prosperous and well-educated to be vulnerable to another you-know-who). We are better able to establish an economic order that does not depend upon the car culture and mindless consumerism (hint to Eric -- that might partially negate AGW).
I have my own mental list of people who need to go to prison for their roles in the Capitol Putsch, and that is likely much like yours. I will give no clues.
If you thought the election of 2020 was critical to American history in ways in which none since 1860 was critical, that of 2024 may be much the same. We have plenty of people who will not accept an election that goes any way other than their landslide, and expect the government of their choosing to eviscerate all American process inimical to their desires. So we have several possibilities from election to inauguration:
1. The 2024 election works to the benefit of a Republican Party that still holds Trump-like beliefs and serves the economic agenda of those who wish to return to the plutocratic ways of the 1920's at the earliest. I could imagine this clique establishing a "Bill of Rights for Capital" and a "Bill of Rights for (fundamentalist-evangelical) Christianity" For economics, America is to be "freed" from labor unions, regulations of all kinds, and media criticism. Social Security is abolished only to be replaced with mandatory contributions to life-insurance companies connected to the ruling elite. Most money ends up going into bureaucratic hustlers and to owners of the insurance companies. Welfare is to be abolished because there is nothing wrong with economic distress that working 80 hours a week can't solve. The "Bill of Rights" for the Religious Right outlaws abortion, contraception, homosexuality, and the teaching of evolution while imposing the pseudo-history that claims that anything else is contrary to the way things have always been. (In fact, Protestant Christian fundamentalism is roughly 100 years old, so it is much newer than even Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism, and Christian Science which date from the Transcendental Awakening nearly two centuries ago. If people starve to death due to the New Economy, then such is God's Will!
The end of neoliberal domination of the economy has given us the worst inflation since the 1970's, and we still have the sort of economic inequality that ordinarily precedes an economic meltdown. There is no soft landing from what we experience now. Obviously Republicans need a nationwide landslide to get the political climate in which the antithesis of FDR can undo everything liberal since him that they so choose. Maybe there won't be a return to Jim Crow practice or chicanery to deny non-white people the vote, but government will clearly represent economic power instead of the People. This agenda does every legal trick to entrench itself until the next Crisis Era. (That will be the ravages of AGW to the extent that hundreds of millions die of the three Malthusian checks of war, famine, and plague).
2. Electoral chicanery takes place that leaves an ambiguous results. Perhaps the popular vote and the electoral vote based upon popular votes within the States suggest a bare Democratic win of the President with Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, but some mischievous State legislatures vote to negate such results. In effect the GOP wins through shady process that allows much to happen in the above scenario.
3. The second scenario leads to ambiguous results that the Armed Forces decide. The generalissimo establishes himself as President and rules without the aid of Congress. We have a Pinochet who rules until he no longer relishes power. Democracy is dead.
4. Democrats win, but a huge part of the American public thinks otherwise and tries to imitate the Capitol Putsch, only more effectively. It takes over the Capitol completely, with Congressional Representatives having to decide whether to comply or to be killed. This takes more people than the 2021 disgrace, and better organization. The electoral results are negated, and democracy is dead. Welcome to a right-wing mirror image of Lenin's Soviet Union.
5. See 4, but parts of America secede. Welcome to Civil War II.
6. We end up with the same old gridlock and solve nothing except to defer the great unsolved questions to later decades. This Crisis Era dies with a whimper instead of a bang.
7. Democrats win, and we come to our senses. Most of us recognize that there's nothing wrong with America that what is right with it can't solve. Millions of people decided that they might as well adapt to a new order that offers more opportunities in inexpensive education. We would need bigger spending and bigger taxes as America becomes a "social market economy". We become more like the Federal Republic of Germany (paradoxically established by Allied authorities to adopt the best characteristics of America, Britain, and France so that it would be too prosperous and well-educated to be vulnerable to another you-know-who). We are better able to establish an economic order that does not depend upon the car culture and mindless consumerism (hint to Eric -- that might partially negate AGW).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.