Four Years Minimum. What's Next?

My allotted day of sappy nonsense and waxing poetic about clinging onto hope is over. With a relatively clear head, I set out now to make a pragmatic prediction of the next few years. I run the risk of sounding a bit pessimistic with my pragmatism, but I will do my best to qualify statements as best I can, and try to inspire at least an ounce of optimism in these dark times.

Starting off with the simple stuff, let’s consider the state of the economy under a second Trump presidency. Trump has promised to pass high tariffs on all foreign imports, a policy that runs the risk of being incredibly destructive. America isn’t a manufacturing economy, and it hasn’t been one for decades. America’s economy centers mostly around service work. Having high tariffs on all foreign imports will make pretty much everything in the country more expensive. The simple counterpoint is that people can just buy locally manufactured goods.

And here we reach the second problem with these proposed tariffs. If they go through, and business drops for those importers, they will either stop selling goods in America, period, or they’ll just start selling less stuff to us. The cost won’t be worth the returns. That will leave the manufacturers in America with next to no competition for their goods, and when a company has little to no competition, they can raise their prices as much as they like, because there’s nobody around to undercut them in the market. Either way, things are most likely going to get expensive. Imported goods will be more expensive because the companies making them will raise prices to cover the cost of tariffs, and domestic goods will be more expensive because companies will be able to get away with higher prices.

This all depends on if those tariffs get passed at all. These tariffs would be pretty bad for the economy, so it’s possible that they may not get passed at all. The problem is that capital interest doesn’t care that much about the quality of the economy, they only care about power, and having a destitute working class will give the owning class a hell of a lot of power. Will these tariffs pass? Maybe, maybe not. I can’t say for certain, but I can assure you that if they get passed, then shit will get a lot more expensive. 

Climate change is another simple point of discussion, but that’s mostly because I don’t see much variance in the outcome of things on that front. Climate change is gonna get worse, and there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Climate change is already as bad as it is because of the capital class, and there isn’t a single Republican politician in the country who gives a shit about stopping it. The whims of the capital class and the Republican Party will inevitably make things worse, and there isn’t really any changing that, so all I can say in this regard is to buckle up and get ready for some wild ecological happenings.

Let’s move on to the obvious topic, the one that has dominated Republican rhetoric ever since 2015: immigration. Donald Trump has promised to deport all undocumented immigrants in the United States, a population that was measured as roughly eleven million in 2022. In the past two years that number has likely grown, but since we don’t have any exact number, I’ll continue to use that eleven million figure.

So, eleven million people are to be deported, right? Well, that’s not really the end of the story. You have to remember that many of these immigrants also have families. They may have partners who are legal or natural-born citizens, or even children who are natural-born citizens. If you deport all eleven million of those immigrants, then you’ll be breaking up a lot of families, cutting partners off from one another, and leaving children without their parents.

How do Republicans address this? Well, best case scenario, they shrug their shoulders and say “who cares?” Worst case scenario, they deport the families together, regardless of birthright citizenship. 

So the question is this: how bad will the anti-Latino hate get in this country? Is it possible for things to get Holocaust level bad? The answer is that the mere act of deporting eleven million people is already Holocaust level bad. Let me stress this again: eleven *million* people. The total number of people killed in the Holocaust was twelve million, spread across dozens of different minority groups. The deportation of eleven million hispanic people would single handedly be the greatest ethnic cleansing in history. Obviously it wouldn’t be quite as bad as the Holocaust since these people would simply be deported instead of killed, but that’s assuming they’re only deported.

Something a lot of people don’t really know about is that the Holocaust in Nazi Germany started as deportations. The Germans didn’t up and decide “let’s kill six million people just for shit and giggles,” it started with rhetoric of deportation and physically removing “undesirables” from their borders. It became a mass slaughter once the government decided it would be more economically viable to just kill them instead of dealing with all the logistical effort of sending them all to a country that would take them. Killing them was cheaper and easier.

I don’t think there will be a mass killing of all undocumented immigrants in America, but when the deportations of eleven million people start, potentially more if the party decides to throw those immigrants’ families or even documented Hispanic immigrants into the mix, things are gonna start getting expensive. Once those logistical difficulties start to rear their ugly head, the government is gonna be looking for cheaper alternatives. The final nail in the coffin of logistics is the idea of removing eleven million workers from an economy. Think about how hard it was for the economy to recover from COVID-19 deaths. Over a million people died, a million jobs now vacant and in need of filling, and that was tough for the economy to recover from. It wasn’t disastrous, but it was difficult. You wanna talk about disastrous, though? Try removing eleven million jobs, most of which are jobs that, frankly, most Americans don’t even wanna work in.

I know I’m engaging in a bit of stereotyping, but there’s a bit of truth in this stereotype. Think about the kind of job that undocumented immigrants typically work. Here in the southeast, it’s usually farmwork. Undocumented immigrants often work as farmhands. In non-agricultural areas, these immigrants are often construction workers, road workers, landscapers, the common theme between them is hard, manual labor, often requiring them to stand in the sun all day, overheating and sunburning. How many white, natural-born, American citizens do you know who are just DYING to get a job as an underpaid sewer cleaner? I’ll tell you, it ain’t much. 

As undesirable as those jobs may be, they’re absolutely essential to a functioning society, which is why they should be paid so much more to be done. Instead, they’re passed on to migrants who are willing to work hard jobs for low pay. Get rid of those eleven million jobs, and you have a crisis on your hands, because the capital class certainly isn’t gonna raise wages for them.

How do we square the difference? The only solution I can imagine the Republicans taking, aside from just straight up not doing these deportations, is essentially using undocumented immigrants for slave labor. They won’t establish death camps, I just don’t think there’s any political will to do that, but labor camps are definitely on the table. Whether that will happen in the next four years or not, I can’t say. I don’t think it’s super likely to happen, but it’s at least on the table.

As for other minority rights– rights to gay marriage, transgender healthcare, abortion, stuff like that– I think that mostly depends on which state you’re in. All of these rights are on the chopping block right now, and the real question is whether or not the federal government will be able to take a hatchet to them without the blue states stopping them. We may be able to benefit from the division of federal and state government, because the idea of a federal abortion ban could be viewed as a bit too extreme. After all, Republicans have only ever campaigned, explicitly at least, for having abortion be a state issue. We know the Republicans want a federal abortion ban, but it’s entirely possible the division between state and federal power might stop that from coming to fruition. With Republicans controlling all three branches of government, that might end up only being a speedbump, but it’s a speedbump we can put at least a modicum of our hope on. It’s almost certain that all the red states are going to be either entirely banning abortion, or at the very least making it nearly impossible to access. Blue states like New York, California, and especially places like Vermont and Rhode Island, will no doubt end up being sorts of safe havens for minority rights. There’s no telling how long that will last, but it’s at least a possibility.

I think that covers the biggest rights that are on the table, so let’s move on to the future of the political parties. I feel like starting on a slightly less negative note, so let’s take a look at the future of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats can go one of two ways in the wake of the 2024 election. There’s the good outcome, and there’s the likely outcome. The good outcome is that Democrats finally learn the right message from this election, that lesson being that the age of American Liberalism is dead and buried, and is unlikely to recover. Nobody has faith in the liberal institutions anymore, with even many Democrat voters feeling like their party has to have some kind of paradigm shift. Assuming we even have an election in 2028, the only way a Democratic victory can come to pass is if Democrats finally accept that the age of Liberalism is at an end, and that we now live in the age of populism. Populist rhetoric is what made Trump and the Republicans at large strong. Though they aren’t populist in policy, they are populist in rhetoric. Democrats have the chance to not only be populist in both.

If the Democratic Party swung to the left, adopting a sort of democratic socialist bent on policy instead of a staunchly neoliberal one, there’s a good chance they can galvanize the American people to action, and motivate them to vote *for* them, instead of *against* their opponents. Democrats have spent nearly a decade banking on the hope that voters hate Republicans enough to choose the Democrats, and that strategy simply isn’t going to work anymore. People have clearly had enough of Liberalism.

Bernie Sanders, in an official statement on the outcome of the 2024 election, laid at the feet of Democrats a very scathing critique. Sanders has spent the better part of the past few years remaining mellow, criticizing the Democratic Party where he can, but ultimately staying passive towards them in what I’m almost certain was driven by a desire to maintain public faith in the Democrats as to prevent the Republican Party’s fascism from taking root. Of course, that seems to be all for naught, and now the Republicans have achieved total victory over their political opponents. Furthermore, Sanders just won his fourth, and likely last, term in the Senate. Democrats lost terribly, and Sanders doesn’t have to worry about maintaining optics to win another term in office. Considering the fact that he’s 83, he may not even live long enough to see the end of this current term. Hell, if things get bad enough, he may be killed for being a political dissident before he gets the chance to die of old age.

In the face of these circumstances, Sanders ripped into the Democrats in his official statement, calling them out on how they abandoned the working class years ago, and stating the obvious truth that this loss is not solely to blame on Republicans and their voters, because the inability of Democrats to understand the will of the people severely hampered their chances of victory. 

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

And here we must discuss the likely outcome for the Democratic party, which is to continue their failing strategy of shifting further to the right in order to pick up votes from the supposed “median voter.” The problem is that there isn’t a median voter, at least not in the way Democrats conceive of it. To be fair, it isn’t just Democrats that make this misconception, as political scientists, sociologists, and news media also make it, but that’s beside the point. 

Many people hear the term “median voter” and equivocate it to “centrist voters,” but a vast majority of people aren’t centrists. I would go so far as to say centrists don’t actually exist, at least not in any ideological way. Anytime you see someone label themselves as a centrist, I’d estimate five percent of those people just aren’t very politically knowledgeable or interested, and the other 95% of them are full on right-wingers who adopt the term “centrist” to make themselves seem more rational.

The Democrats, though, refuse to accept this idea. They fully buy into the idea that if they just keep going to the right, they’ll eventually win. Over the past few years, Democrats have gotten much more reactionary on issues like immigration, to the point where the current Democratic stance on immigration is comparable to that of the 2016 Republican party, and look where that got them. All it won them was the honor of being the first Democrat to lose the popular vote to a Republican since 2004. As pessimistic as it is, I think Bernie Sanders is right. Democrats are unlikely to learn the real lesson here, and instead they’ll just keep moving further and further to the right. What issue they’ll choose to become more reactionary over remains to be seen. Maybe they’ll advocate banning trans people from sports, or banning gender affirming care under the age of eighteen. Maybe they’ll move to restrict gay marriage rights. Maybe they’ll somehow become even more zionist than they already are. Whatever issue it is they choose doesn’t matter, because they’ll slide to the right regardless.

As for Republicans, there are two outcomes: the good one, and the bad one. I’m not sure which is more likely, but there is definitely a worse scenario, which is the complete and utter deconstruction of American democracy. With control over all three branches of government for a minimum of two years, they’re gonna have a time of nearly unchecked power. Almost all the checks and balances of our government are owned by them, and they probably won’t let that go to waste. In two years, there’s a lot of work they can do. They can slash public funding on education, healthcare, food and drug safety, and disease control, all things that they have explicitly stated they plan on doing. They can also spend their two years of unchecked power cutting dead weight, so to say. If an institution puts up resistance, then they can abolish it. If a department head refuses to bend the knee, they can be fired. 

Most importantly, I feel, they have a solid two years minimum to change voting laws. The next election is in 2026, which has the potential to be a turning point if the people start to have doubts over the fascist government they elected and start voting for Democratic Senators and Representatives. The solution to this problem is to disenfranchise voters. Redraw districts to weaken your opposition, weaken or outright take away the voting rights of certain groups, the possibilities are numerous and varyingly disastrous. In this worst case scenario, a 2028 presidential election simply does not happen, and they maintain total control over the government as an oligarchy rather than as a democratic institution. 

So, what’s the good outcome, in terms of the Republican party’s future? Well, the good outcome is simply that they fail to achieve their fascistic takeover through one, or even multiple, of any number of ways. The first possibility that jumps to mind is that they become complacent. They just achieved the greatest victory possible. The Republican party spent the past few years carefully setting up justifications for them to illegally take power, putting the dominoes in place that they hoped would result in a successful coup of the Harris administration. In the end, that setup was for nothing, because not only did they win the electoral college, they won the goddamn popular vote.

So, it’s possible that they may become complacent in their victory. The less extreme among them, particularly Trump, may become so satisfied with their total victory that they kick up their feet and relax a bit, basking in the glow of their cultural and political victory. Perhaps they grow too complacent to successfully prevent the possibility of a blue wave in 2026. If Democrats manage to get a foothold in the Senate and/or the House of Representatives, then they could potentially forestall any explicit fascist takeover, keeping the ratchet of government in place just long enough for a 2028 election to come around, and hopefully oust the Republicans from the Presidency. It’s a temporary victory, but a victory nonetheless.

It’s also possible that the bureaucratic institutions of this country successfully hold their ground, and stay their footing, preventing any complete fascist takeover. This is what I consider to be the most probable reason for a Republican Party takeover to fail. A major advantage we have that other nations that fell to fascism didn’t is how segmented our government is. That segmentation oftentimes makes the government inefficient and slow, but it does carry the benefit of being hard to fully dismantle from the top down. This is especially true of institutions like the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI, all of which are fairly self-sustaining and self-regulating, pretty firmly liberal or neoliberal, and care more about ensuring national security than gaining autocratic power or bending their knee to whoever happens to be president at the time. I’d be willing to bet good money that the Pentagon already has contingencies for the chance that Republicans go full on Hitler and try to establish a dictatorship. It’s possible that the moment the Republican Party attempts to establish oligarchic rule, the Pentagon and the CIA may just straight up [REDACTED] the entire party. 

Another scenario, though admittedly also the least likely of the possibilities I can imagine, is that the Republican Party loses the support of their voters, and without that traction ends up falling to the wayside as their supporters realize the evil they have propped up. I mentioned earlier that I don’t think there’s any political will to set up death camps, and that isn't just among Republican politicians. I have a very low amount of faith in the Republican voter base, especially following this most recent election, but I do genuinely believe that these people don’t actually want to see gays and jews and trans people and racial minorities put into gas chambers. It’s possible that if the Republican Party overestimates the fascistic tendencies of their base, and steps a bit too far to the right, then their voters may finally have the revelation that they’ve been supporting an outright fascist movement. The hope is that, in their feelings of betrayal, they either cease all support of their politicians, ending their election viability, or start to straight up fight against them. Better late than never, I guess. 

To try and summarize as best I can, things are going to suck ass for a while. No matter how things end up, the next four years will inevitably be really bad. The main factor that we have to consider is *how* bad things will be. The economy is probably going to get worse, but it’s possible that the capital interests that lord over the Republican Party may keep the economy from completely shitting the bed. Hispanic people will face an incredibly tough time over the next four years, but that badness could range from only deporting undocumented immigrants, to deporting hispanic immigrants in their entirety, to potentially putting them all in WWII era internment camps. Things will be bad for all minorities, but how bad things will be is going to depend on whether or not blue states will be successful safe havens for marginalized peoples. The Democratic Party is always going to suck because of institutionalism and incompetency, but how much they suck depends on whether or not they pursue their failing strategy of shifting right for the ghost of their ill-conceived median voter. Republicans will inevitably shift rightward, since there is nowhere for the fascist to go but to become more fascistic, but their success may vary. They may suffer from the success of their overwhelming victory, our institutions may end up being strong and resistant enough to push back against or outright stop a potential fascist regime, and though the party may shift right, past a certain point their base may not shift right with them.

I’ll leave you with some words of wisdom. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.