If Lauren Boebert, congresswoman from Colorado and recent evictee from a theater while protesting “Do you know who I am?” (the video suggests an angry and entitled sex worker), can get re-elected to Congress, and if criminal cult leader Donald Trump can get re-elected as president, then the apocalypse is just up the street. A new poll had Trump at 47% and Biden at 46%. Sure—margin of error. Yet how is it possible that half the country prefers– most of that half even panting for–the moral equivalent of Mussolini? Why isn’t it Trump 6% and Biden 94%? One sociologist has somehow arrived at the figure that in any general population, roughly 30% have “authoritarian tendencies,” while another poll, based on four questions, finds that 65% of Republicans do. But half the country? Here in America?
I read a lot of good people, including John McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt along with a half dozen of The Atlantic writers, such as former Republican Tom Nichols. They brilliantly warn of the dangers Trump poses. But what, in fact and in some detail, would a second Trump term look like? What would Trump’s promised “retribution” look like?
What new and damaging laws (especially but by no means exclusively in voting and protecting minority rule) would be passed? What specific “guard rails” would be bulldozed? Would all federal employees have to serve at the will of the President? What specific acts of corruption at the top and throughout both federal and state governments would take place? Would state legislatures allow themselves to substitute their own preferred electors to the Electoral College if those legislatures did not like the results of their state’s voters? How corrupt, or at least far-right, would the judiciary become with Trump’s firings and appointments? Would impeachment of appointed and elected officials for their liberal views–not for their demonstrable misconduct–become a wave, like the current attempted impeachment of elected Wisconsin and North Carolina supreme court justices whose views are not congenial with conservative party lines and who, in the case of the Wisconsin justice, has not even yet ruled on her first case? Would liberals on the Supreme Court be impeached? Would the two-term limit for presidents, imposed by the 22nd amendment in 1951, be revoked, or even simply ignored?
Or what about these: Would the rights of minorities, including LBGTQ people, shrivel? Will the active duty military be called in to shoot White House protesters in the legs as President Trump asked of General Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the killing of George Floyd? What new tax cuts for the wealthy would be passed? After having promised to erase the national debt in eight years but in fact creating 25% of the current total in a single term, how much would the national deficits and debt increase after four more years of the former president? Would Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare be “repealed and replaced” by “something great”? How would our institutions be undermined as good people resign or are fired and replaced by sycophants and extreme right-wingers with little actual respect for democratic values despite their professed and hypocritical advocacy of them? Would some “enemies of the people” (a Stalin phrase that Trump has used) simply be imprisoned or even actually “disappear”? Would Trump continue to dangerously hint that some people who have criticized or stood up to him should get the death penalty as he did with General Milley? How much would a critical or simply objective free press be muzzled, and a right-wing press be governmentally enabled and subsidized? Would inconvenient science, such as human-caused climate change or another pandemic, succumb to political fetters? (Bleach injections, anyone?) Would the party of Lincoln devolve further from its current authoritarian embrace to outright fascism?
Internationally, how much would the already fairly weak fight against the global threat of human-caused climate change be set back? How much would the balance of democratic power and influence shift away from the U.S. and over to more democratic but militarily weaker nations in Europe and Asia? How much would autocratic and dictatorial countries, especially Russia and China, profit and advance? Would China, for example, decide that it is time to take Taiwan by force, given America’s weakness or even complicity? Is Ukraine’s struggle against a communist invader—the same one that the GOP once vilified—a lost cause without American support? What other actions might Putin take with his friend in the White House? Would our military be hollowed out of its best officers and twisted into an arm of the political far right? Do we really want the extremely volatile Donald Trump–remember the ketchup on the wall?–to have his finger on the nuclear button?
How much more would truth itself be corrupted and turned on its head as Trump morphs among his adorers into a semi-divine, faultless leader, in the manner of Kim Jung Un? And finally, after a mere hundred and some-odd years as the world’s leading industrial, scientific, military, and maybe even cultural nation, would the re-election of Donald John Trump cause our country to drift into irrecoverable decline as a democratic nation, leader, and world power?
History does not follow some inexorable laws and linear path—notwithstanding Karl Marx’s vision that it does. History is not like astronomy, say, where an eclipse is predictable to the minute hundreds of years in advance. So I’m not saying that this conjured dystopian future, this thought experiment, is probable. But it is more than possible that we may find out whether the past will be prologue. We have a choice, and the world is watching. History will judge us.
John Rachal's Blog
Will the Past be Prologue?
September 19, 2023 at 5:20 pm (Political Commentary)
If Lauren Boebert, congresswoman from Colorado and recent evictee from a theater while protesting “Do you know who I am?” (the video suggests an angry and entitled sex worker), can get re-elected to Congress, and if criminal cult leader Donald Trump can get re-elected as president, then the apocalypse is just up the street. A new poll had Trump at 47% and Biden at 46%. Sure—margin of error. Yet how is it possible that half the country prefers– most of that half even panting for–the moral equivalent of Mussolini? Why isn’t it Trump 6% and Biden 94%? One sociologist has somehow arrived at the figure that in any general population, roughly 30% have “authoritarian tendencies,” while another poll, based on four questions, finds that 65% of Republicans do. But half the country? Here in America?
I read a lot of good people, including John McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt along with a half dozen of The Atlantic writers, such as former Republican Tom Nichols. They brilliantly warn of the dangers Trump poses. But what, in fact and in some detail, would a second Trump term look like? What would Trump’s promised “retribution” look like?
What new and damaging laws (especially but by no means exclusively in voting and protecting minority rule) would be passed? What specific “guard rails” would be bulldozed? Would all federal employees have to serve at the will of the President? What specific acts of corruption at the top and throughout both federal and state governments would take place? Would state legislatures allow themselves to substitute their own preferred electors to the Electoral College if those legislatures did not like the results of their state’s voters? How corrupt, or at least far-right, would the judiciary become with Trump’s firings and appointments? Would impeachment of appointed and elected officials for their liberal views–not for their demonstrable misconduct–become a wave, like the current attempted impeachment of elected Wisconsin and North Carolina supreme court justices whose views are not congenial with conservative party lines and who, in the case of the Wisconsin justice, has not even yet ruled on her first case? Would liberals on the Supreme Court be impeached? Would the two-term limit for presidents, imposed by the 22nd amendment in 1951, be revoked, or even simply ignored?
Or what about these: Would the rights of minorities, including LBGTQ people, shrivel? Will the active duty military be called in to shoot White House protesters in the legs as President Trump asked of General Milley, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the killing of George Floyd? What new tax cuts for the wealthy would be passed? After having promised to erase the national debt in eight years but in fact creating 25% of the current total in a single term, how much would the national deficits and debt increase after four more years of the former president? Would Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare be “repealed and replaced” by “something great”? How would our institutions be undermined as good people resign or are fired and replaced by sycophants and extreme right-wingers with little actual respect for democratic values despite their professed and hypocritical advocacy of them? Would some “enemies of the people” (a Stalin phrase that Trump has used) simply be imprisoned or even actually “disappear”? Would Trump continue to dangerously hint that some people who have criticized or stood up to him should get the death penalty as he did with General Milley? How much would a critical or simply objective free press be muzzled, and a right-wing press be governmentally enabled and subsidized? Would inconvenient science, such as human-caused climate change or another pandemic, succumb to political fetters? (Bleach injections, anyone?) Would the party of Lincoln devolve further from its current authoritarian embrace to outright fascism?
Internationally, how much would the already fairly weak fight against the global threat of human-caused climate change be set back? How much would the balance of democratic power and influence shift away from the U.S. and over to more democratic but militarily weaker nations in Europe and Asia? How much would autocratic and dictatorial countries, especially Russia and China, profit and advance? Would China, for example, decide that it is time to take Taiwan by force, given America’s weakness or even complicity? Is Ukraine’s struggle against a communist invader—the same one that the GOP once vilified—a lost cause without American support? What other actions might Putin take with his friend in the White House? Would our military be hollowed out of its best officers and twisted into an arm of the political far right? Do we really want the extremely volatile Donald Trump–remember the ketchup on the wall?–to have his finger on the nuclear button?
How much more would truth itself be corrupted and turned on its head as Trump morphs among his adorers into a semi-divine, faultless leader, in the manner of Kim Jung Un? And finally, after a mere hundred and some-odd years as the world’s leading industrial, scientific, military, and maybe even cultural nation, would the re-election of Donald John Trump cause our country to drift into irrecoverable decline as a democratic nation, leader, and world power?
History does not follow some inexorable laws and linear path—notwithstanding Karl Marx’s vision that it does. History is not like astronomy, say, where an eclipse is predictable to the minute hundreds of years in advance. So I’m not saying that this conjured dystopian future, this thought experiment, is probable. But it is more than possible that we may find out whether the past will be prologue. We have a choice, and the world is watching. History will judge us.
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