(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . It Doesn't Matter if Trump Wins or Loses [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-01-10 We all know what will happen if Trump wins. He has promised to be dictator — but “only one day” (riiight) — and his platform consists entirely of revenge, money, personal power, and escaping all accountability for his crimes. If he loses, he and far too many in the GOP have pretty much openly stated they will not accept the outcome. That can mean anything from another attempt to storm the Capitol to violence against election officials to forcing a vote in the House — where each state gets one vote, meaning that whether or not the Democrats regain the House, more states are going to be Republican and will vote Trump into the White House. But I mean the title in a larger sense. We have reached a point where Trump no longer matters that much. Rachel Maddow made this point in a longer than usual ‘A’ block on Monday: Rachel Maddow Boldly Explains Why Republicans Are As Big A Problem As Trump. “It’s also a matter of how Republicans, how the party, how American Republican leaders have reacted to this violence from their own leader, how they’ve reacted to this anti-democratic turn in the leadership of their party,” she continued. “It is not just a Trump problem. It’s that Republicans like what Trump did. And they don’t mind the idea of him doing it again.” The GOP has been heading toward its current status for many years. A long time ago, the leadership realized they were never going to persuade a majority of voters to agree to their platform, so they started to plot how to win victories as a minority. (The Democrats helped by not seeing this, or if they did, by not fighting hard against it from the get-go.) Aside from the anti-democratic (small D) nature of this policy, it left the GOP vulnerable to the more extreme elements of the country. Most of these — the fanatical religious right, the conspiracy theorists and the tin-hat crowd, had been pushed to the margins by both parties. The GOP saw they could be useful. What they didn’t see is that the fringes wouldn’t be satisfied with just being “useful” or even with just having a seat at the table. Their modus operandi has always been to first get the camel’s nose inside the tent, then take over the tent, then knock down the tent and sit on the remains. I recall a saying from a few years back, to the effect that the religious right didn’t buy the GOP because the GOP agreed with them; they bought it because it was for sale. On top of all this, we are becoming a majority-minority country. No ethnic group is already in the majority in several states, and the trend is increasing. A majority-run democracy means that Whites, who have long controlled pretty much everything, now have to share. White supremacists don’t want to share with anyone, be it Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, even other Whites who worship the wrong version of Christianity or who think the wrong thoughts. As I said, the GOP was heading down this path. Enter Trump, who pushed his way into the driver’s seat and stomped on the accelerator. This is the other sense in which it no longer matters if Trump manages to win the White House; the car is already out of control and will remain out of control. Thomas Edsall in the New York Times posted this opinion piece today — A ‘National and Global Maelstrom’ Is Pulling Us Under — which makes this same point, mainly by surveying wide range of scholars who study these things. I recommend reading the whole thing, especially as not all of his interviewees are that pessimistic — though even the optimistic ones are struggling. But here is his closer: Perhaps the most trenchant comment I received was from Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who replied to my inquiry at the height of the controversy over the former Harvard president Claudine Gay: “I have thought for some time that America was suffering multiple elite-driven institutional breakdowns across the board, opening the door to a national and global maelstrom. But now I find myself so overwhelmingly distressed by it all, including the collapse of core values at my own university, that I cannot write coherently about it.” For decades, the Republican party has been chipping away at the institutions that protect our democracy, our freedoms, our way of life, our increasing diversity, our efforts to “provide for the general welfare” as promised in the Constitution. Trump took a sledgehammer to the cracks. Whether he personally wins or loses, the cracks will widen. 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