I keep hearing various media personalities I like say things along the lines of “If we even have another presidential election… <nervous laughter>”
Is this just the joke of the month or are people truly thinking it’s game over? I don’t live in the US so I’m not really familiar with how that would work
There’s too much money to be made by too many consultancies, advertising agencies, etc. The grift is too lucrative for too many influential people for the election industry to just vanish. I’d sooner bet on more extreme voter suppression and more outright corruption in the process than the process stopping.
The veneer of a public mandate is a load bearing element of the entire USAmerican national mythology. It is central to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, both of which are venerated by chuds. The capital city is named after the guy who elected to step down after his second term.
They are not getting rid of elections. There is no need to. With the record-breaking consolidation of national media, they will just be run as a shambolic spectacle. Nothing new, in other words. Democrat-aligned power brokers will be cut out of the process. For people like James Carville, it will be experienced as the end of democracy as we know it, but no change at all for the proletariat.
I’m not quite as confident about this. They certainly venerate the aesthetics of those documents, but I think the last ten years or so have shown that their allegiance to the content is conditional at best. We see this pretty clearly in the purely vibes based “originalism” of the conservative SCOTUS ghouls: it’s important that they couch their rulings in appeals to the Constitution, but they’re totally fine to just make shit up about what the framers “intended” in order to advance their agenda. I think as long as Trump could come up with a narrative in which him running for a third term (or cancelling elections) would make the “founding fathers” proud, most chuds would swallow it happily. Hell, the amendment about only two terms being allowed was only added in the 20th century–clearly not what the founders wanted!
The only substance those documents ever had were aesthetics. The founders themselves routinely violated them (the Sedition act and the Loisiana Purchase, for instance), contrived powers out of nowhere (Marbury v. Madison), only to arbitrarily decided those powers are meaningless whenever it suits them (by refusing to enforce rulings like Worcester v. Georgia). I don’t think anything the contemporary court had done is any more contrived than claiming the Sedition Act does not infringe the right to free speech in 1798. It has always been this stupid. It has always been a game of Calvinball for burger slave owners. This is the epitome of bourgeois democracy.
These documents are nothing more than totems, but they are (small r) republican flavored totems. The rough contours of republicanism still need to be observed. Things like “the first amendment” and “the second amendment” come from this thing which says we have elections every other year. Of course, the right doesn’t give a shit about free speech or equal rights to own firearms, but this framing is so deeply embedded in their worldview that I don’t think it is ever going away. If the powers that be decide to switch to some kind of hereditary autocracy or military junta or benevolent dictator for life or something, the right genuinely would fracture and grow a thousand-fold more incoherent. A lot of the right’s rhetorical power runs on inertia. On the white-washed fanciful history of the US received by over a hundred million people when they went to grade school. A lot of the military brass (though certainly not all) are true believers as well. The Liberals aren’t the only zealots of civic religion.
The two term thing specifically, they could get rid of that and easily justify it as a product of the 20th century. Running a sham election for a third term is a much smaller stretch than declaring a new republic. Micheal Bloomberg already did it in New York City.
Nothing Ever Happens gang vs. Trump is Juuuuuuust Narcissistic Enough to Try It gang