2024, and then, it slowly begins to get easier

[solarbird]

This was supposed to be the peak year. The year they were most likely to take power, and lock it in.

For the fundamentalist / fascist movement, I mean. This is the year I charted out back in the early 2000s, the apogee of the era I started writing about as a kid in like 1990 as a possibility which could still be avoided.

It’s still a strong moment for them, I want to be really clear about that. Russian propagandists are talking about this year being 1943, and they’re right – they’re just looking at the wrong side, because they can’t win without Republican and Euro-fascist support, and this is the make-or-break year for a lot of that movement.

Particularly in the United States.

Yes, that has meaning for Europe too. They say in matters like this, if America sneezes, the world gets a cold – but when America shakes the illness off, then, well – the clock is, as they say, ticking.

If they lose 2024, which will happen and if we fight, and I remind you: we did it before and we can do it again – every year afterwards gets more difficult for them. They’ll still be in striking distance in 2026, but it’ll be harder and the big prize won’t be on the table. They might manage a rally in 2028 – that was in my charts, back then – but now it’ll look be a last gasp, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.

(My original plot for that last gasp was 2030.)

I know, all this sounds kind of ludicrous, doesn’t it? But it’s all true and I think it’s time I say it: all this was very, very clear to an observer if one just looked at what was happening around you with an outsider’s eye, and refused to discount the terrible because it was just too scary.

That’s why I spent the 1990s and 2000s trying to avoid it entirely, and if I couldn’t prevent it, at least weaken it. (I have so much more material to upload from the archives; it just takes so damn long to clean it up and get it posted.) But to describe that past… just as Steve Bannon was out there trying to make this misogynist racist authoritarian surge happen, going around deep behind the scenes, promulgating his “nationalism” that dared not say its name, working to shift trends and curves at their beginnings – when it’s easiest… I was out there doing exactly the same things. Just in the other direction.

(The one pleasure I give my ego is thinking of myself as his opposite number, like James Bond’s opposite number in Goldfinger, the unspecified but presumably Chinese Communist agent who recognised him and so got him put under that big laser. “No, Mister Bond, I expect you to die!” I’m a less financially well off opposite number, obviously – fascism sells, to the right clients, and he always found them. But at the same time, I kept a good amount of money – millions of dollars – away from his side for a rather long time, back when curves were very small. And all that compounded (dis)interest – monetary as as as political – nicely failed to add up. Which, to be clear, is good for our side.)

So here we are in 2024, the year that was supposed to be their best year, their best shot at the prize. And it’s still maybe their best shot, but I don’t think so. It’s certainly not the shot they were going to have. It’s not as good, it’s not as clear. The calendar has been advanced, probably by two years, maybe even four. Maybe it turns out their best shot was 2020, now, and they’ve already missed it. We’ll see.

What happened?

Donald Trump happened, of course.

I didn’t think the core of this movement – the fundamentalist evangelicals and their descendants – would go for someone like Donald. I didn’t think they’d be so completely ready to throw away everything they ever pretended to believe about righteousness and religion and god, all for a carnival-barking real-estate hustler and conman, a cretin of a man so very bad at his official “job” of real estate development that he not only did worse than an S&P 500 index fund, he found a way to lose money running casinos.

Holy shit, how do you lose money running a casino?

(Theories about doing so to launder money set aside, of course.)

I thought they’d go for someone very much like Mike Johnson, not Donald Trump. Note that this – 2024 – absolutely is Mike Johnson’s year. He’s when and where he wants to be and with more direct power than any of their theocratic forebears. He’s “young” (er), and most of all he’s got the fundamentalist cred and messiah complex you’d fully expect for their leader at this point in time and he can tell them that in ways they not only understand but adore. He’s lined up, locked, and loaded.

But no. They tipped their hand and went for Donald Fucking Trump, and they did it four years too early, when they didn’t have the strength – and the full descent yet into authoritarianism – to take that power all at once.

Understand this: to a normal person, to a sane person, Donald Trump is disgusting. He’s decrepit, a grotesquerie in motion, a grasping, weaselling, lying shamble of a man, dripping in corruption, rage, and hate. His primary power is giving people permission to be their very, very worst, not just because his continued survival creates a sense of shared impunity, but also because deep down – really deep down – they know they can never actually be as awful as he is. They’ll always be just that little bit better, and so, he gives them both room to be monsters and the space not to call themselves what they are.

“No one can go as low as [Trump],” Kushner said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

To them it’s exhilarating and liberating and I was fool enough to think they’d never go for someone like that – but I thank the gods they did. Why?

Because it tipped their hand.

He’s shown normie America who and what this movement really is. While the media are still reflexively trying to revert back to horse-race coverage and sportsball approaches to politics, they kind of can’t, not completely, and enough of them are awake that they aren’t taking Mike Johnson at the kind of face value he wants to be taken. He needs that, and he knows it, and it’s been taken from him because some of the press – I hope enough – have recognised him for who he is, too. And that would not have happened if Trump hadn’t come first and smacked everyone out of their robotic complacency.

I mean, just look at how they took Trump in 2016. Apply that to “fresh-faced young Mike,” the “family man” with “a deep sense of faith and morality” guiding his “politics of reform” – and the leader of the “next generation of Conservatives.”

Instead, just enough of them recognise him for the cultist lunatic he is that there’s actually a very real chance of making reality stick. Which, again – that’s so very, very good. For us.

The curves of peak money and peak reactionism and peak demographics have already started failing this movement, at least, in the US. It’s showing up in the press, but not just the press. Some of it’s being forced by the realities of climate change. Some of it’s being triggered by abortion rights. Some people are waking up to the realities of the situation. Some people are just tired of the drama after eight long years.

And some people, well.

Trump’s voters, most of them… the bulk of them, the critical mass that makes his movement relevant…

…they’re old. And when they bought into the COVID conspiracy theories, that had the effect one might expect.

Even they’ve recognised this. They’ve just found other things to blame. “Why are so many more Republicans dying from COVID than Democrats? It must be a CONSPIRACY of BIG PHARMA, not the horse meds we’ve been taking.” Surely, you know the drill.

People looking over results carefully have identified more than one election pretty clearly swung by MAGA deciding to infect itself to death in 2022. Nothing statewide, but districts. That number doesn’t get better in 2024, and it starts getting a lot worse in 2026.

None of this means it’s time to rest, of course. Only in the last couple of years have a lot of people finally snapped to attention and recognised there’s even a fight. The fascists can still win if we – all of us – don’t do everything we can, whatever that is, because one simply cannot stop and say “eh, that’s good enough” and not expect them to run you down. They can’t just take victory, it’s out of their hands, they are not the masters of their own destiny. But they could still be given it, if we don’t continue to fight back.

That means winning elections, that means trying to break your red-state relatives away from MAGAtry, that means if you’re in a “safe” district sending money to competitive races – the sooner, the better – and all of that. It means breaking the spell, and getting better at learning how to win. It means taking money and income away from fascists and fascism promoters, and sometimes that means sacrificing something, be it Substack or Twitter or whatever else it takes – do it, and do it because it needs to be done.

They will still win some battles, even if we win more. That’s to be expected. Nothing is ever so clean and straight a line, at least, nothing that matters.

But overall, momentum… at long last, that’s on our side now. I know, I know, Beau over at the Fifth Column thinks it gets harder for another few years, and I take his point, particularly for those who have only in this late hour realised what’s happening and have just begun to fight. But – particularly for those of us who have been fighting this war far longer than most – I really do think this coming year is their peak. At least, in the US. It won’t get much easier right away… but it’ll start.

So in a way, the Russian propagandists are right. It is 1943, and the tide has started to turn. But it’s against them, and against the global authoritarian movement they’ve helped build.

Russia itself can still get worse; China, too, can keep getting worse.

But the US, and then, afterwards, Europe?

I write to you today at the turning of the tide.

It’s time to chase these Nazi motherfuckers the hell off our beach.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.