Those of you who’ve been following along long enough know that at about the same time I walked away from my career as a professor and election analyst to go work on fixing the Democratic Party’s electioneering strategy I started intensively studying world history.
Despite 20 years of education ending in a terminal degree in Political Science, my knowledge of world history at best superficial.
Sure, I knew some specific historical events like the French Revolution, but lets just say I had some considerable gaps in my education when it comes to global history.
I didn’t set out to do so, but I learned a rather unexpected lesson from my research. We teach history as a series of discreet events, books onto themselves. But the truth is the history of humanity is itself one big, ongoing book. Seemingly discreet historical events are mere chapters of a larger, unfolding story that spans millennia.
What that means, of course, is that we’re all living history.
As a person who built their reputation on predicting the political future I hope you can appreciate the importance of my next statement:
I have no idea what in the hell is about to happen!!!
I can see the next 4 months with stark clarity.
Like the elections preceding it, 2024 will come down to about 100,000 votes in 6 or 7 swing states. Though horserace coverage will continue to breathlessly obsess over every new poll, quality or not, the truth is this race was a toss up 4 months ago, it’s a toss up now, and it’ll be a toss up in November.
So when I say I have no idea what is going to happen I don’t mean in terms of the election. I mean what happens after it.
The whole of the Republican Party is already deeply immersed in planting the antecedents for their Big Lie version 2.0. If they win we get a fascist autocracy through the implementation of Project 2025 which will allow them to give Trump total, personal control over the entire federal apparatus.
By purging out merit-based governmental employees (the civil service) Trump will solve the problem that forced him to have to leave office the first time: bureaucrats loyal to the Constitution, not loyal to Trump.
MAGA is solving this problem in advance by collecting thousands of applications from thousands of young “conservatives” either smart or crazy enough to say Trump won the 2020 election on their applications.
Using Schedule F, Trump will replace professional bureaucrats with MAGA loyalists willing to swear fealty to Trump.
Now, my favorite push back from folks who were also quite sure that Roe would never be overturned and outright scoffed when I predicted Trump would try to seize power after losing in 2020 is: “Trump can’t do ___, its unconstitutional!”
People seem to have a really hard time understanding that the law only protects you when people in power agree to be bound by it.
My research on the rise of 20th century totalitarianism made one thing really clear. Parchment protections cannot protect you against people hell bent on ignoring it!!!
All Donald Trump needs to seize ultimate power is to issue an order suspending the Constitution (BORDER INVASION!!!) and a supporting “cast” with enough power to help him do it (the Republican Party).
Trump has both.
This spring I used Project 1933 to show people how swiftly Hitler went from a weak chancellor with just two Nazis in his cabinet to a dictator a little more than 2 months after being sworn in.
In just those two months civil liberties were suspended, opposition parties were purged from the parliament and made illegal, and Dachau was opened and filled with Hitler’s political enemies.
If Trump gets to opportunity to enact Project 2025 the blowback from the rest of society is likely going to be tremendous.
Believe it or not, only about half of Americans even bother to vote in presidential elections. Even those who do vote likely can’t name their own member of the House of Representatives.
Needless to say, no matter how hard we pound the drum about what Trump has planned for America, millions of people will be absolutely shocked when it happens. It will be the first they’ve heard of it but already far too late to stop it.
Though I am certain Trump will make good on his dictator plans I am less certain as to how the rest of the system will respond.
Will people take to the streets only to be met with their own military deployed against them via the Insurrection Act?
Fact is I don’t know and that’s scary as hell.
As if that wasn’t bad enough let’s consider what might happen if he loses.
Again, the Big Lie 2.0 which is consistently amplified by America’s very own Lex Luther, Elon Musk, tells MAGA voters that Biden opened the borders to flood the country with illegals so we can get them all to vote for Biden and “steal” the election from Trump.
MAGA Republicans in positions of power intentionally help Trump pad the BIG Lie 2.0 every time they use the legitimacy of their positions by saying they will only accept the election results if they win.
So its clear that most of the people in positions of power in the Republican Party will join Trump’s howler monkey cries of another stolen election.
And here’s the part that scares the hell out of me.
What will Republicans do next?
We know what they did last time.
I’m reading Erik Larson’s new book, which you really MUST read, The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.
The book focuses specifically on the time period between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the day he assumed office which back then wasn’t until March.
Southerners were so high on propaganda about Lincoln and lies of his intention’s for slavery, war became inevitable. All it took was the lunatics in the South Carolina legislature to announce preemptive succession, provoking a stand off at Fort Sumpter the North never had a chance at defusing.
No, believing their way of life was not only not evil, but morally superior, Southerners lost all capacity for reason and instead demanded war. They were hungry for it.
I mention this because it is not much different than what we face right now.
More than 40 million Americans believe in an alternative reality in which Donald Trump never did anything wrong, Dr. Fauci should be in jail, and the entire FBI, CIA, and DOJ are in a vast, left wing conspiracy even while all three of those agencies are dominated by Republicans.
This despite ongoing federal prosecutions of several Democratic politicians and the President’s own son!
Its a mass psychosis and beating Trump in November is not likely to end it, not so long as the leadership of the Republican Party continues to lie to their own base. The probability MAGA will turn to political violence after a Trump loss is high.
Is Greg Abbott crazy enough to push a modern successionist movement? Anyone who tells you no doesn’t follow Greg Abbott.
Win or lose, America is going to go through some things.
Just remember, no matter what happens if Trump loses, it will pale in comparison to what will happen to us if he wins.
Vote like your life depends on it because it does.
Every American everywhere and every single Democrat in America who care about saving our democracy from Trump and his autocratic sycophants must read and use your book "Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game" AND the book "Stories are Weapons" Psychological Warfare and the American Mind" by Annalee Newitz.
I want to add: if you ever have a chance to see the flick “The Seventh Cross” starring Spencer Tracy, don’t pass it up! It comes around a few times each year on Turner Classics. I swear, I learned half my knowledge about WWII and F’n Nazis on TCM through the movies of the 1930s and 40s. So many of the actors & directors were early refugees of pre-WWII Nazis and the whole terrible business. THESE ARTISTS WERE INTENTIONALLY TRYING TO WARN US. Warner Bros. Studios stepped up, big time, and they pulled no punches. They knew how soft, isolated by geography & naive we were, and that our citizens were already under the spell of a powerful gaggle of Nazi infiltrators & sympathizers.
Anyway, when I saw The Seventh Cross it was the first time I understood that Hitler opened Dachau concentration camp as a test case, long before he honed in on the Jews in particular. Anyone who looked cross eyed at The Mad Mustachioed Wallpaperer, or made a crack overheard by one of his snitches was summarily disappeared & interred at Dachau - majority non-Jewish. Just assorted local normies who had started to wonder about the direction things were taking. The movie follows 7 of these innocent souls (only one Jew) who escape Dachau, and the variety of citizens they encounter along the way - from collaborators to go-along-get-alongers to the network of antifa heroes working the underground and risking everything to resist the Anschluss.