Brief Political Comment About Republican Authoritarianism

 You can ask literally any close friend I've had for the last 20 years. I have been warning about the break in our system. It is so easy in our current system for Republicans to exploit it to the point that there is a one-party government with a cosmetic appearance of democracy. Republicans have been trying to do it since 1994, and with no dictatorship as an enemy, the plurality of Americans forget how horrible it can be, including the left-wing. The Republicans have the means to hijack the political system, and the only people in place to do anything about it, relatively moderate right-of-center or left-of-center meritocrats, are much too complacent to realize it. If you're a centrist, that generally means the system has worked for you, and you just generally assume the system will continue to work, the norms will stay norms, and progress will continue from generation to generation. But that's never how anything works, and for one person to take their success for granted, somebody else has to fail, and the person enduring failure will inevitably swear revenge.

Believe it or not, there are worse things than dictatorship. In the 19th century, the German and Austrian emperors secured rights for their citizens far better than democracies like America and England ever did. But nobody trusts the current Republican party to do it, and nobody can ever trust a party to handle global warming whose plurality denies it even exists.

What's scarier than dictatorship, what might be scarier even than global warming, is the wars that can result from dictatorship. Not the low level civil terror where a Republican nut with a gun shoots up a Whole Foods. The real thing: irreconcilable war between two countries with massive armies and weapons supplies. The world population is only growing, and resources will grow scarcer and scarcer as the planet gets hotter. If global warming hits as badly as it seems, war over resources is inevitable: total, irreconcilable war, no one spared, death all around, immigrants seen as fifth columns to be put in camps and potentially to death, whatever urban dwellers don't drown in rising sea level might be killed in civillian bombing, and whoever's left might just die from worse heat than ever before.

The current Republican party wouldn't care: it would be less people to compete for power against, less mouths to feed, less jobs to find, and the first cities to be bombed are the liberal enclaves who'd fight against their policies most strenuously. They'd reason, not incorrectly, that their base of support is all those places with low population density which would be mostly spared the worst. But eventually, they're not safe either. If food and oil and electricity run out, so do whole countries. The future of history is never particularly bright, and for every move of progress there is an equivalent regression. That's just the way of the world.

It's not likely that these are problems to be solved. But they can be survived. Even if the worst happens, and it's still quite possible it won't, some of us will still be here. The world moves on, history starts a new cycle, we regroup, life finds a new way, we move forward, and we live our lives anew.

Amen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/01/republican-plot-steal-2024-election/