How are you preparing for the coming fascist authoritarian regime?

Politics & Elections
1

So we are approaching a midterm election two years after barely unseating a would be dictator from the presidency and the Democratic Party has made seemingly no effort to persuade the public that it can’t be allowed to happen again. Furthermore, Republican state politicians have taken step after step to ensure that they will never lose another election.

Trump just announced that should he become president again, he will pardon anyone who is convicted of participating in the attempted coup of January 6, 2021.

All the pieces are in place and the signs are that the Republicans will easily re-take Congress in November and continue to strengthen their position in the majority of states.

So, this is what we have to look forward to. The ascendancy of an explicitly white supremacist anti-feminist, anti-everything else hegemony, who will ensure that they cannot lose future elections.

The Supreme Court continues to strip citizens of any rights that aren’t in the interest of the ruling class.

Conservatism has one and only one ideological principle, to maintain the status quo hierarchy. By definition this means that you are ordering society to benefit a minority of people. You can’t sustain that through democracy.

You can win occasional elections by fooling people into voting against their interests but that can’t last forever. Eventually you have to “fix” the system so you can’t lose. And apparently by nurturing a fascist movement based on identity politics is one way to do it.

The parallels between how the Nazis came to power and American conservatism since WWII are astonishing. The Nazis just did it much faster.

So the anti-conservative coalition is continuing to fail to prevent this. So what are you preparing to do? How are you preparing to live the rest of your life under an authoritarian regime that will seek to re-impose the absolute power of a white, male-centered fundamentalist Christian, anti-science, anti-globalist, pro-aggression identity movement? A world in which anyone you walk by on the street may be armed and may start shootings for any reason or no reason? Where police are restored to their unquestioned role in suppressing dissent against the ruling class?

This will be a world where public schools will be overtly religious, where anyone deviating from the favoured white male cisgender heterosexual monotheist norm will be subject to oppression, even random murder on the streets justified by the Second Amendment?

What are you going to do? What should I do? What can I do?

This is happening on much of the rest of the “advanced” world too, so just moving to a different country probably wouldn’t help much, even for those few people who would have that ability.

2

Don’t doubt it but ‘Cite’?

My Wife and I live remote. I work from home. We don’t have kids. I’m 61 and will retire in a few years. I guess I will be keeping my head down, and vote. Sorry.

If I was 31 or 41 it would be a different answer. I am fairly well ‘weaponized’. I suppose I could give some to an underground movement.

3

Trump was impeached twice. That was public, even. The Jan 6 committee is doing what they can. All of the above required effort.
Remember Barr’s public whitewashing of the Mueller report, just in time to influence its message? Republicans are to blame here.

4

I’m planning to live in fear. Practicing for it now.

5

I honestly don’t know.

I truly fear for our society, such as it were. This isn’t pearl-clutching hyperbole, either; in several other threads, I’ve seen similar sentiments, mostly leading to “No matter what happens, this will be bad.”

It makes my heart hurt that I don’t trust America to do the right thing, anymore. We are no longer a beacon on the hill.

My wife and I have had some serious talk of moving abroad. That’s tragic.

6

It was noted in yesterday’s news cycle. Trump continues to bloviate.

7

Vote.

8

Voting is a wonderful tool. But the new fascist conservative regime will be severely restricting who can do it. It’s one of the things that fascists do.

9

“If I become president someday, if I decide to do it, I will be looking at them very, very seriously for pardons,” Trump said.
So, of course, more bullshit and possible promises from the Asshole.

And that link should have a warning. Trumps face in Hi-Def is the first thing you see.

10

Are you saying we should doubt him when he says he will do something he has gleefully done before?

11

Huh. I just looked at all of Trumps pardons. I didn’t pick through it. He never, ever, follows up on things he says he will do. Unless it makes him $. So under the bus they go.

Why didn’t he pardon all the insurrectionists before Biden was sworn in?

Or did I get whoooosssed.

12

What would be in it for him? If he had done so, it would have given a whole lot more weight to the allegations of him conspiring with them to overturn the election, and he still wouldn’t be president.

Making this promise probably will get him a number of votes in 2024, and I can see him following through on it, at least for some members of the insurrectionists, who he may then place into various government positions, as they have demonstrated their loyalty.

I don’t know for sure that he would, but what I really hope is that we don’t get a chance to find out.

13

Yup. No $ there either.

Accepting a pardon from the President (or Governor), is admission of guilt. I guess that doesn’t matter if it’s an appointed position and not an elected position. Not that his followers or the SCOTUS would give a damn.

Can Presidential appointees be convicted felons?

14

I’m old, retired, poor health, no realistic goals ahead of me. So I’m available for a suicide mission.

15

I don’t know of any laws against it. And if there are, part of the power of the pardon is that they would no longer be considered to be felons.

They would have to admit guilt, but they are only guilty of supporting this great and wonderful leader who was so unfairly treated.

Why would Trump choose another Bill Barr or John Eastman, who may be equivocal over their support for any illegal orders he may give, when he could install people who have already shown that they are willing to break the law for him?

16

I’m mentally preparing myself for a second American civil war. I’m actually hoping that after some violence and bloodshed and heartbreak (and potentially a lot of it), we’ll come out of it as more than one country. Let the red-state racist authoritarians have their Confederacy back, and hopefully a more just democracy can be built for the rest of us.

Don’t know if that’s gonna happen, but thinking about a potentially-brighter future is what’s helping me sleep better at night. Because I think the United States as its stood for the past 246 years is effectively over. I just don’t see how it gets repaired and saved from the racist authoritarians.

There’s just no scenario post-2024 that has us staying together as a nation in my mind. Trump indictment? Violence. Trump goes free? Violence. Trump wins in 2024? Violence. Biden wins? Violence. DeSantis wins? Violence.

Here’s some relaxing beach reading about a second American Civil War from Wikipedia on this Saturday afternoon.

Some especially interesting points:

Barbara F. Walter, a political scientist who sits on the Political Instability Task Force, claimed that quantitative and qualitative predictive modeling, used by the research project to forecast civil wars in foreign countries, showed that the United States is facing “conditions that make civil war likely.” Walter claimed the two most predictive factors of civil war include:

  1. If that country is an anocracy (also called semi- or partial democracy), a weak democracy, or an illiberal democracy.
  2. If at least one political party experiences ethnic factionalism and begins to organize on identity such as race, religion and ethnicity (as opposed to policy), and that party, perceiving an existential disadvantage in free elections, sought to implement minority rule through non-democratic means.

Walter claims both apply to the modern United States:

  1. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election downgraded the nation into the “middle-ground” between democracy and autocracy, citing research by the Center for Systematic Peace, a think-tank that researches political violence.[310]
  2. The homogeneity of voters who support the Republican Party, which is composed of 80-90 percent white Evangelicals,[193][194][195][196] and an attempt by that party to cement minority rule in a multicultural and multi-faith nation because the size of their voting base is no longer large enough to win elections (due in part to white decline).

Walter concludes that “every year we don’t reform our democracy and make it stronger… every year that we have one of our two major parties appealing to only one segment of our society: the white Christian population, [and] every year that those two factors continue to exist, our risk [of civil war] increases.”[51] Walter adds that “full liberal democracies don’t have civil wars,” claiming predictive modeling places the possibility of a civil war in countries similar to the United States at among the highest: an annual risk of 3.4%. Noting some might perceive that number as “small,” Walter states that the risk rate will increase annually if systematic problems remain unaddressed, likening the risk of civil war to the annual risk increase of lung cancer for every year a smoker doesn’t quit smoking.[314]

Walter summarizes her interpretation of the data by stating: “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America – the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or Ivory Coast or Venezuela – you would go down a checklist” and “what you would find is that the United States … has entered very dangerous territory.”[315] Walter compares the current political framework of the United States to partial democracies such as Ecuador, Somalia, or Haiti, and falls short of full democracies like Norway, Switzerland, or Iceland.[316] Journalist David J. Remnick agrees with Walter’s assessment, stating the grim suspension “between democracy and autocracy” creates an uncertain political future that “radically heightens the likelihood of episodic bloodletting in America, and even the risk of civil war.”[317]

Carl Bernstein also claims Trump has driven fear in Christians, stating: “Whatever you say about Trump, 45, damn near 50% of the people who vote, voted for him and – you look at the surveys – some 35% of people who voted for Trump believe Christianity is being taken away from them. The idea that the Trump base is some narrow group of white men with guns? Bullshit. This is a huge movement including misogynistic women, including racists of every kind, but also including all kinds of educated people in cities and suburbs. It’s also a movement against liberalism, against what the Democratic party in their view has come to represent. It’s about race, all kinds of forces, people’s idea of what the United States ought to be. This movement embraces autocracy, authoritarianism, a peculiarly American neo-fascism which Trump represents*.”* [52]

17

The far right, by rejecting the Jan. 6 investigation (among countless other reasons), has clearly demonstrated that it will not save liberal democracy and rule of law if it doesn’t get the election results it wants.

Scary shit indeed. We’re used to reading about this happening somewhere else.

18

But how does civil war break out in a country that has no clear demarcations? Sure there are red and blue states. But a lot of purple states as well. What, kill your neighbor because you think they support the ‘other’ side?

One side does have more weapons, but I think they are underestimating the other side.

19

I see any civil strife being urban vs rural. How that plays out in practice I can’t exactly say.

20

That’s what the vast majority of civil wars are.