WHAT IF TRUMP WON’T ACCEPT 2020 DEFEAT?

The Republican party has engaged in rampant sabotage of the democratic system: fundamentally reshaping the judiciary, shifting the ideological center of the Supreme Court rightward through dubious appointments, and engaging in a sustained campaign of voter suppression including the tampering of ballots, the stripping of powers for incoming Democratic legislatures, and recently, gaining a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court which allows gerrymandering to take place of the explicit purpose of favoring one party. This, of course, effectively allows for racially-motivated redistricting. And now, in Oregon. American fascists have managed to use the threat of lethal force to unilaterally kill popular legislation proposed by a supermajority of elected representatives, underwritten by a majority of the citizenry.

This is the groundwork for a nightmarish conclusion to 2020, whether or not Trump wins a second term. Trump himself has expressed a coy fondness for international authoritarians who can disappear journalists and overturn election results, free from the shackles of public consent. His followers revere those reactionary death squads who ran roughshod over a population opposed to their hateful politics, killing and brutalizing their enemies with the support of heavily-armed police. His supporters in the state are gradually entrenching their power to the point that one party is significantly more powerful than the other, despite widespread public opposition to their agenda. It is imperative that liberationists of all stripes recognize the situation we are in: while lawless thugs terrorize political prisoners in concentration camps at the border, the government is teetering on the precipice of a chain-reaction breakdown.

The major threat of fascism comes from its appeasement. Each time fascist elements are capitulated to in good faith, each time they swear their latest transgression or violent outburst is the last, each time the public defends them from their critics on the grounds of civility or fairness, the fascist learns that they are exempt from the rules of society, and they rush to take advantage of the privilege afforded to them. They will accept nothing less than absolute totalitarian control; a nation in which whites are held superior in the written and unwritten law alike, where women are kept in bondage through the denial of their autonomy, where heteronormativity is a prerequisite for full citizenship, where Christian theocracy is common law, where Fortress America is somehow both in command of the international community and simultaneously divorced from it as an isolationist ethnostate.

This is not hyperbole, but the actual rationale being expressed by the Republican platform and its legislative decisions. We have already seen the mad twinkling of this vision in the eyes of Trumpists; we now live with the terrible knowledge that millions of Americans were always feigning their polite “cultural conservative” objections, always waiting for the chance to carry out an ethnic cleansing campaign, to watch starved babies die in the arms of their mothers for daring to pollute American soil with their presence. If 2020 becomes a year in which fascist violence and political arson escalates, or worse, is paired with an electoral victory, there is no telling what nightmare will be born from the failure of our society to stand firm and proclaim, “no farther.”