What it will take...

I have had a couple of interactions on one of the Never Trump spaces recently with people who were adamant that once Democrats retake the Presidency, that they should go on the warpath to undo all the shit that Trump and his minions have done.

Summing it up, it was fire everyone, reinstate all the things he destroyed (Dept. of Education, USAID, e. al.) pack the court, yada yada.

Basically, they are angry (and I get that) but they want the executive (aka the President) to use their oversized powers to reverse all the bad shit. Essentially to become a blue version of MAGA.

Man, did I get attacked when I said that makes us no better. I thought we were better than that. But it won't actually fix anything, it will lead to a whipsawing back and forth and make all of us more miserable.

But it did make me take stock of what it would take to get back to a pre-Trump world order, and frankly, it is not pretty.

Remember that the Biden administration was what we used to get regardless of what party held the White House, with some differences at the edges. And they tried to tone down the rhetoric and just got a lot of shit done (there are arguments that they should have been more aggressive, but I will counter that many people thought that post January 6th thought that Trump was done. How naive that was) assuming that the general population was back on a semi-sane train.

So, if we can't combat this with a blue variant of MAGA what will it take?

Naturally, I have thoughts...

There is no quick fix - get over it

A lot of people think that Trump was an outlier, and that most Republicans are what we grew up with. These are people who think wistfully back to how normal things were under Dubya. Forget the head scratching that sentiment is, they are indeed delusional.

No, the path to Trump began way back in the New Deal and FDR's administration. It gained traction in the 50's with the John Birch society, and the draft Goldwater efforts in 1959/60 that ultimately led to his candidacy (and wipeout) in 1964. From there it is a straight line through The Southern Strategy and Nixon, Reagan and the rise of the religious right, the insanity of the Contract with America and Gingrich, finally culminating in Trump I and II.

No, this insanity has been nearly 70 years in the making, and when Trump is gone, it will not revert to norms, this is who we are now as a nation.

Just one small part of it is the long game that the Religious Right played for the courts. It is more than just the Federalist Society (FedSoc) and a heavily lean to rad-trad Catholic jurists, but a coordinated campaign to build a solid right-leaning church-friendly judiciary. This can't be quickly undone. I mean for fuck's sake, Emil Bove (pronounced "motherfucker") at the third district court of appeals? This chucklefuck is just 44 years old:

That fucker is going to be on the bench for 30+ years. Fuck, that gets me bothered, but he is just one example of how fucked we are.

And don't @ me with "Dems will impeach him". That is not ever going to happen, as it requires a 2/3rds majority in the Senate to convict and remove this fuckwad. Effectively, impeachment is dead letter law. End of story.

No, Biden tried the snap back, and that led to Trump winning the popular vote (a strong plurality, and yes, a full third of the eligible voters didn't bother, but that is who we are).

This is where we are at, and any reversion to the mean is going to take a loooooooong time. Anybody who is arguing that their preferred candidate will get it done is deluding themselves.

It starts with the separation of church and state

The end goal of the packing of the courts with religious zealots (Evangelicals and Catholics) was to not just blur the line between church and state, but to completely obliterate it.

Reading the recent opinions in the SCOTUS brings this to light. Alito's disdain for the separation is front and center, and starting in the early 1990's the motion to encode in law a "Freedom of Religion" became a stampede. As I read in the recently reviewed tome "Wild Faith" this was huge in Evangelicals to allow them complete autonomy over their offspring, and their "Training up" of their children that more than borders on child abuse.

Fun fact: In 1989, the UN passed a treaty called United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (UNCRC) establishing what seems like common sense child protections. Only one country has not ratified or even attempted to adopt this. That is the US of A. And both Democrats and Republicans are complicit. (I thought there was a "protect the children" theme in the US, but I guess that means only parents can beat the fuck out of their spawn.)

Or the whipped up furor over things like web designers and bakers being forced to ply their wares to same-sex couples. Those have been effective weapons to jam religion into the wider society, and undo progress on human issues. And it is just getting started.

The judiciary as it currently is constructed is above the critical mass, and I fully expect a full rollback of key rights. Obergefell (same sex marriage) is next, then Lawrence (sodomy), and ultimately Griswald (birth control) and Loving (mixed race marriage) are within easy grasp, and you can tell that the satanic 6 on the SCOTUS are poised, nay itching, to take us back to the dark ages.

We are fucked here for probably 30 years.

World opinion and trust in the USA

Until January 20, 2017, the USA was a fairly predictable force. The biggest dog, the leader of the free world, yada yada yada.

But Trump I was a dunk in ice water. His lack of experience, devoid of political savviness, and his utter contempt for norms made everyone (well, except for Putin and Kim) shudder. And the coalition of red-hatted shitbags that propelled him to power brought enough firepower to cow all the "normie" elected Republicans.

Soon the sane bunch (it fuckin' pains me to my core to call former AZ Senator Jeff Flake a "normie") left the building, replaced by the truly deplorables. Hill-dog was 100% correct in that snippet (that was wildly taken out of context).

On the rise were Louis Gohmert, James Comer, and Jim Jordan. The rest of the Republicans told themselves that they could better control Trump if they remained in, so they went crazy to prevent more crazy (yeah, it doesn't make sense to me either)

Now that we have elected Trump a second time? Nobody on the globe will trust us, because we not only would vote Trump in once, but after a brief pause, we said "hold my beer" and elected him again.

The net-net is that as long as Republicans are willing to vote an asshole wrecking ball like Trump in, and to confirm all his craziest nominees (Bondi, Bove, Hegseth, Patel, ad nauseum) that the US can't be trusted. Toss in the TACO and the tariffs, all the other players on the global stage are writing the US out of their long-range planning, and preparing for the future without a trusted partner.

What will it take to reverse this? Honestly, I am not sure we ever get that mojo back. And the Democrats can't do this alone.

As long as any election might lead to this level of chaos (and make no mistake, MAGA is not an aberration, it is the Republican ethos now) there is little chance that we will gain anything like the former hegemony. That is just a stone-cold fact.

At a minimum, the Republicans would need to excise the MAGA cancer, and for multiple election cycles demonstrate a sanity that really hasn't been there for a long time.

That's the crux, even if they did cut out the tumor of MAGA, Q-anon, Gohmert-Gosar-Greene disease, it will take multiples of 4 years of normal-like behavior.

My prognosis

I just do not see that happening. The patient is in hospice. The disease is terminal.

I've had people argue that Germany and Japan came back from their fascist turn. My response to that was that it was because we (the US of A) kicked their asses, completely destroying them on the battlefield, and then rebuilding.

I do not see that happening here. There is literally nobody big enough to kick our ass, and alter our trajectory. The restoration has to come from within. And the prognosis is negative.

We are in for a long rough ride. Buckle up, resist, but be realistic in our chances. The fever continues to rise, and even should it break, it will be a long time to recover.