"I never thought it could get this bad!"

Yesterday on Bluesky, the great and the good looked a little bit like this:

Pundit after pundit was in apoplectic fear, crying out that no one could have predicted it was going to be as bad as "this". "This" being, of course, the slide into failed statehood we are experiencing.

Black folks and allies demurred that, in fact, they did predict this. That it was all in Project 2025. It was all in Trump's speeches. That his main aim in re-election, besides staying out of prison, was to take revenge on his "enemies"; his enemies being, of course, the entirety of the American people, and really the world. It was not a secret. It was not coded. 

And the great and the good then went on to castigate anyone who chastised them for not seeing what was clearly down the road. "Who saw USAID being destroyed?!" That it was rolled up should be of no surprise to anyone. What these people want is the destruction of the liberal democratic order. Things like USAID further that order. Science furthers that order. Welfare programs further that order. These were all on the chopping block were that man to be elected. It was obvious. The pit of fear which seized my stomach that night in November was due to me knowing that things would, in fact, be horrendous. As horrendous as I could imagine them being, I knew that my imagination was insufficient to game out the true parameters. None of what's happening surprises me. The scale may horrify me; but it's not out of left field.

The problem is that too many people called such fears "alarmism". They again had faith in "guardrails". Such faith should have left the barn once the Supreme Court gave that man immunity. That was the greatest breaking of a guardrail. Everything else proceeded from that. And its rulings this year have proven that the highest court in the land will join that man's political partisans in the Congress of doing nothing to exert its power as a co-equal branch, giving in fully to the Führerprinzip. Many of us were screaming until we were hoarse that the result of that man's win would be horror beyond imagining. And we were patted on the head and told that this greatest of all countries would never descend to such a state.

What is never spoken of enough is that for the entirety of its history this country has been equally divided between democrats and authoritarians. And for much of its history, the authoritarians have held sway in one way or another. Ask any Black person living in this country for most of its history whether it was authoritarian. You can guess the answer. Ask the native populations. Ask Asian immigrants in the 19th century. Or Latin immigrants in the 20th and 21st. We've been covered in dark clouds for all of our history, with brief breaks in which sunlight, for a time, holds. But it's a fool who depends on the sun being our normal status. There is a darkness in this country, in its back roads, in its desolate places, which draws men and women to it. And yes, it is a result of Whiteness, and all that entails. Whiteness which demands that what it stole by violence and kept by violence should belong to it in perpetuity. 

But now that Whiteness is no longer a surety of safety. And Whiteness ensured safety for people of differing political strata. Now that "antifa" is a "terrorist organization", Whiteness is of decreasing utility to white people of a liberal left bent. And Whiteness won't protect white people of a right-wing bent from losing jobs, losing healthcare, losing homes. Because the people whom they placed in power have no regard for them, not in the slightest. You're simply not as white as a rich, white man. "Dying of Whiteness," indeed.

Democracy is worth fighting for, and, I'd dare to say, dying for. The problem is that it cannot be only a minority of this country holding this position. And the fact that the largest voting bloc consists of non-voters is simply untenable, and will merely hasten our descent into madness. You have to smash your apathy and your ingrained notions. That way leads to the grave. If there was any time in which this country needed a secular, democratic Great Awakening, it is now. The consumerist model of citizenship has failed, as it was always destined to do. Be about your neighbors, not your grand causes. Because any Omnicause will be meaningless when this country is ravaged.