An Oligarchy En Route to Anocracy. Dictatorship Could Be the End Point.

But oligarchies are transitional periods.

Eventually, one of two things happens.

"People protest, what's left of union movements stand up, and progressive political parties begin to get a significant toehold on the national debate," Thom Hartmann explained. This can open a door to democracy reconstituting and the money-changers being driven from the temple.

Or...

The kleptocratic government can clamp down on their opposition, labeling protestors and democracy-advocating politicians as terrorists and "the enemy within", using the power of the state (guns and jails) to suppress popular pro-democracy movements.

This is exactly what has happened in Russia.

S peak up and go directly to jail, if you're not killed outright like Alexi Navalny was. It's also the path Viktor Orba'n, the man many Republicans claim is their role model, has taken in Hungary.

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Much of where these next few years are going to take us is unknown, but one thing that isn't is that we are going to hit bottom.

What "bottom" will look like is anyone's guess.

It might be the mass deportations the next president is promising and the republican party promoted at its convention this summer.

It might be "de-naturalizing" naturalized American citizens.

It might be declaring an indefinite "national emergency" that would permit the next administration to invoke the Insurrection Act to crack down on protests, peaceful or otherwise.

It might be another pandemic since bird flu cases are increasing and the next Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) head could be anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr., who just five years ago-- before COVID--called the agency's vaccine division "a fascist enterprise", accused it of "knowingly hurting children," and compared child vaccination programs to "the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church".

It might be a "Reichstag fire"-style terrorist attack-- perceived or otherwise-- that provides the administration with a pretext to go to war to earn Trump and JD Vance just the right amount of pseudo-patriotism to ram through anything.

It might be a compliant republican-majority Congress that rolls over for anything the "dead leader" wants. (That was the 2020 RNC platform, after all.)

It might be locking up journalists, political "dissidents", the intelligentsia, like dictatorships time out of mind have always done.

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