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Three Paths

One of my least favorite sportscasters of all time routinely spewed all sorts of claims about what was going to happen in the game, then inevitably told us how it worked out like he said.  Of course, if your prediction is that team A is going win, lose, or there will be a draw, you are never wrong; but your predictions don't carry a lot of weight.  For my own part, I made a lot of predictions about Trump just as he took office like:  Trump's a destroyer and all he can do is tear stuff apart, Trump thinks lying is his magic power because he knows it disorients other people, Trump is inherently dishonest because he thinks that his edge in business, and Putin has something on Trump, probably related to debts, so he is going to sell us out.  (Mostly I think this turned out to be true) 

At the moment, I do not feel I can make an accurate prediction about what is going to happening, but I think there are three possible paths with respect to our democracy.  We reached a historical moment where a sitting President (Trump) used the power of his position and the help of multiple broadcasting networks to attempt to overthrow a duly elected new President (Biden).  We were fortunate to avoid having the Vice President and various other members of Congress assassinated.   Rather than recoil in horror about the situation, the majority of Republicans (at least in polling) and their elected officials have aligned with the President.  

As broader background, I will repeat an anecdote and recap various things I have read or heard on the news recently.

"CEOs are like mob bosses"

Over the last decade I have been close or part of the sale of a couple of companies.  In each cases, the CEO was switched out in short order and all the management was replaced with "friends" of the new CEO.  Some of these people were qualified and some were disastrously unqualified.  I was talking with another senior officer at another company and he dropped the prophetic line that "CEOs are like mob bosses, the always bring in their friends to have their back."

Trump mostly dumped anyone who was not a yes man at the national level and kept his family close.  At the state level, Trump purged many state GOPs of the old school Republicans and replaced them Trumpists.  This is why Wyoming and Arizona and trying to cancel their own elected officials.  The GOP of just four years ago has literally been taken over and replaced with friends of Trump.

This is probably not the full mind of all traditional GOP voters, but a large majority are already pre-disposed to Fox/Trump/Evangelical Nationalist view points at this point.  

What this means is that the old GOP is either dead forever or not coming back for a very long time.  The GOP is not a big tent party any more and it has gravitated towards a violent race-oriented nationalism.  Of course, if you have been fed a diet of grievances, and the demonization of Democrats, other races, other countries, other religions, and government in general; it is much easier to listen to the hate than it is to think about getting along with your neighbors.

If I had to make a prediction about this, it would be that the GOP will continued to shed some portion of voters over to independents and find it very hard to grow any more.  In particular, the college educated suburban voters who were alright with things so long as they were not a target themselves and it was not too blatant could let it slip.  Those people drove Biden to victory even though Trump turned out new GOP voters.  The GOP has so highly delineated itself they will not be able to turn around.  Not sure what this means to Liz Cheney in the short term.  Still - Trump turned out a big surge in GOP voters - it was just smaller than the big surge in Democratic voters.  I just do not believe these people will turn out if Trump is not on the ticket (like GA giving us to Democratic Senators).

A not so difficult prediction is that the GOP will continue to focus on further anti-democratic methods like voter suppression techniques such as restricting who can vote, how you can vote, and implementing more severe gerrymandering.   (Though hard to see how you could gerrymander states like NC more severely).  Without the original gerrymander of the Senate through the Electoral College and gerrymandering in general, the Democratic would have easily controlled the House, Senate, and the Presidency in this last election and would have more power at the state level.

Anti-democratic tendencies have been built into the GOP strategy for years now, because they had turned inward for so long.  Trumpism will not make this better.

Confronting Cult Members only Strengthens their Beliefs

A number of posts have been written about the difficulty on reaching individuals such as diehard QAnon believers.  Individuals so strongly identify with their group that being confronted about their beliefs they will only close down even more.  If you doubt them, then you are simply part of the broader conspiracy against them.  Or something like that.

If you hope for them to get better, your best approach may be able to get them to relate to you on human terms, outside of anything in their main belief set where they cannot tolerate disagreement.  One of the best things, if it is possible, is to remove or limit their ability to hear more reinforcing information.  Without constant feeding, people are able to return to a standard set of reference (e.g. facts, friends, and family) and move away from the cult/conspiracy beliefs.  So, there is no quick fix for the state of the GOP, and, they have to be treated like snowflakes to avoid triggering their violent leanings.  Reinstating the voter protections, anti-gerrymandering rules, and getting social media magnets to purge the worst is probably what we can do.

If you doubt that the rightwing has a strong cult-like presence, you need not look further than their extreme intolerance of anybody that has a different view point.  Just watch Liz Cheney getting treated like an apostate because she is a Republican questioning Trump's behavior, the sometimes violent (verbal or physical) response to having to wear a mask in stores, the burning desire of so many to "own the libs."  Irony will never be dead when a Republican talks about "cancel culture" at the same time the call other Republicans RINOs or seek to cancel a fair election.

In short, the GOP has very many strong cult like characteristics.  I realize this is not all Republicans, the majority of them still believe the last Presidential election was corrupt.  It was fair and you know that because even with all the power the Presidency, the Trumps lawyers literally never brought forth any evidence in court.  The reason was that lying in court gets you in legal trouble.  Another reason to think that a systematic corruption of the voting machinery across the many different states and voting is monumentally difficult, especially when all states have lots of rules and mechanisms to ensure the vote is counted.  One systematic attempt at voter fraud I know of in this era took place in NC and naturally involved a Republican and it did not go well.  That kind of voter fraud is hard. 

There are other ways to sway the vote, like robocalls and giving out false voting information which are hard to trace.  The best way to do steal an election is through gerrymandering and voter suppression.

QAnon is a Fascist Organization 

Fascism is a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.  Mirriam-Webster.

QAnon is focused on implementation of a Trump lead autocracy that posited the violent overthrow of the left.  I would not profess to the know all of the details because it seems to bind together racial and religious stereotypes.  It is pretty easy to see what white nationalists and Christian nationalist groups are looking to recruit from the QAnon ranks, they actually may have a more coherent world view. 

Trump hardly seems to have started QAnon, but he was more than willing to fan the flames and eventually like the fuse on January 6th.  Trump spent four years trying to implement himself as a dictator and a large number of Republicans seem totally OK with that.   

Control of the narrative is crucial fascist governments.  QAnon and the broader rightwing news industry have effectively been able to dictate a narrative to the right.

Three Paths  

Barring a single prediction, there seem like three paths:

Fascism Wins:  Democracy takes willing participants.  It does not require a majority to overthrow a democracy.  It is possible that enough people will simply give up on democracy and for them to have enough power.

Paralysis Wins:  There is enough division in the country that it is does not coalesce one side or the other.  In this path, the United States will continue to weaken as international force and will remain a tale of two countries.  It will also be weakened economically.   I do not think this is sustainable forever, so it would like go one way of the other.

Progressivism Wins:  Democrats, engaged independents, and some Republicans respond to COVID and other issues by competently leading the nation and using government to rebuild the country.  This leads to a marginalization of Trumpism which slowly fades.

If I had to bet, it would be half paralysis and half progressivism, but it might well be any of these.

[12 Feb 2021] I made some editorial fixes to this.  I think the country would mostly like to be center right and the reason I do not see us going there is that the so-called RINOs that represent that area have been too marginalized by the GOP.   Independents and conservative democrats will not organizing themselves in group capable to seizing that political space.