I predict that by Nov. 1, 2026, before the next off-year election, America will have drifted into solidly authoritarian status.
The peak of American civil liberties arguably was the time after same-sex marriage was made a right in 2015. An apex period for civil liberties ended in June 2022 when the radicalized USSC killed off a national right to an abortion. Of course throughout that time, the USSC was eroding voting rights, so the apex period was not fully stable.
By 11/1/26 pressure will be applied to quiet major critics of Trump and authoritarianism generally. Newspapers and comedians will have softened their tone. Federal funding for NPR and PBS will either be shut off, or they will be turned into authoritarian propaganda outlets. The Voice of America will be turned into an authoritarian propaganda outlet.
The Environmental Protection Agency will be gutted and neutered by then. International climate agreements will be terminated. All new federal judges will be radical right authoritarians. Federal lawsuits against Trump will be dropped. State lawsuits probably will too. The treasonous 1/6 insurrectionists will be pardoned.
Four forms of authoritarianism are now contending for P&W (power and wealth) with not much standing in their way. The first, is the drive for a unitary president, i.e., a dictator. A lot of powerful Americans want a unitary president. Also contending for P&W are Christian theocracy, unregulated capitalist plutocracy and single party rule. Deeply embedded in all four of those is kleptocracy, which is closely associated with authoritarianism.
By 11/1/26, the flow of power and wealth to those 4 variants of authoritarianism will be noticeable. For example, the we can expect the Trump and his GOP to conduct an American variant of the democracy-killing campaign that Viktor Orban used to kill Hungarian democracy in two years. The Dems may not be able to regain federal power for a long time. The Dem party itself might fracture. How well the competing four get along with each other is unclear to me. They overlap quite a lot making analysis of that basically impossible.
We can reasonably expect that ethics rules will fall mostly or completely away and government operations will be heavily shrouded in secrecy. The GOP and/or the USSC might even completely get rid of freedom of information laws to try to prevent evidence of authoritarian corruption, incompetence, oppression and bigotry from ever becoming public. Trump has made it clear that he will gut the deep state, leaving only corrupt, incompetent loyalists left to run government operations.
For most low income Americans, the economic pain will start to seriously hurt. They are screwed. The middle class will also start to feel the bite of P&W flowing from them to the elites. Worker and consumer protections will significantly decrease as power flows to corporations.
If the Repubs maintain control of the House, I expect the Senate to get rid of the filibuster. That would give Repubs in congress free reign to pass whatever laws they want with no serious opposition from Dems. The only requirement there would be unity within the GOP, something that Trump is more than capable of imposing on them.
There will be hideous genocide in Gaza, Lebanon and the Ukraine. The Ukraine will fall to Putin and his brutal vengeance. The slaughter will be savage. All global democracies will be under increasingly intense pressure to go authoritarian. The last stand for global democracy will be Europe's democracies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and little or nothing else.
The Dems demise? Illegal immigration, a bad economy (inflation) and scary demography/social changes were probably the biggest issues in this election that killed the Dems off. But I do wonder about how much of the fear, anger and resentments that drove voter to Trump are real and how much the product of dark free speech (lies, slanders, crackpot conspiracies, deceit, irrational emotional manipulation, etc.). My guess? About 20% real and ~80% dark free speech mirage.
I could go on and on and on like this, but those exemplify the kinds of reactions and predictions that are running through my mind at present. I do believe that by 11/1/26, all of these predictions will turn out be be at least significantly true, i.e., ~40-80% true if one could quantify it. In essence, by then we will have witnessed the death of American democracy, imposition of major limits on civil liberties, lots of bigotry and oppression of target groups (the LGBQT community is royally hosed), staggering corruption in government, commerce and Christianity, and the rule of law converted into the rule of the thug, with elites who tow the authoritarian line staying above the law, while the rest of us are screwed.
We have well and truly screwed the pooch this time.
I do hope my predictions prove to be wrong. That would be wonderful.
I do not know if it is still safe for me to post criticisms like I do, or if it is still safe for people to comment here. That is something I am just starting to think about. At the moment, I think it will be safe because I am too small a pipsqueak to bother with. But there is some uncertainty in that.
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