Thread by @SethAbramson

(THREAD) There’s no right-wing intelligentsia—the contemporary American right is a kleptocratic cult of internet trolls. But it’s scary to realize that as Trumpism tries to squeeze out *a few* intellectuals—like Curtis Yarvin—they’re neomonarchists openly trying to end democracy.

1/ It can be hard for Americans to understand the stakes of the 2022 elections, which should never again be called the “midterms”—they’re the “2022 national elections”—because U.S. media is exclusively focused on horse races. There’s almost no discussion of the real implications.

2/ So here are the implications: January 6, 2021 saw a premeditated, coordinated, paramilitary attack on the US government aimed at obstructing the peaceful transfer of power long enough to allow neomonarchists to end our democracy. It *wasn’t* “the insurrection” in its entirety.

3/ There are four phenomena defining American life right now—long-term “events” that are *persistent* whether or not that persistence fits neatly into the news cycle. In other words, media will have difficulty covering them because they are longer than Americans’ attention spans.

4/ But if you want to track the possibility—and it’s a very real one—that America’s democratic experiment collapses in a catastrophic way in the next 5 to 10 years, a way that destabilizes Earth and changes forever your life as you knew it, you have to track these four phenomena:

5/ The four phenomena defining American life right now are easy to remember, as they all begin with “I”:

1⃣ Insurrection
2⃣ Infection
3⃣ Invasion
4⃣ Inflation

You know less about U.S. politics if you follow horse races on cable news than if you understand these four phenomena.

6/ I’d even go farther and say, as a journalist and journalism professor, that all working journalists in the United States—corporate or nonprofit, full-time or part-time, independent or institutional—need to “get right” with their relationship with at least *one* of these terms.

7/ We may well be in the final decade of the United States as it has existed since the 18th century, so if you are a journalist, you have a *task* that goes beyond what it was (whatever your beat) ten years ago: you have to help the public reckon with what is happening to us now.

8/ The insurrection is ongoing. Its aims are clear. Its leaders are known. Its methods are public. Its implications unmistakable. Its demands: 1) an end to free and fair elections; 2) radical isolation from the world; 3) universal moral ambivalence; 4) a unitary executive branch.

9/ If you’re an American and you think “January 6 = The Insurrection,” you are—I say not unkindly—a fool. If you’re a journalist and you believe this, you should lose your job.

The Insurrection is a movement that lies beyond partisan policies. It is—simply—a plot to end America.

10/ Most importantly, the insurrectionists *aren’t hiding what they’re doing*. Their one or two intellectuals—or ex-software developers passing themselves off as intellectuals, like Yarvin—have been very clear about the need to end America’s democratic experiment in short order.

11/ When you read the writing of these people, you understand why the Right—including evangelicals—supports Putin. It sees Putin as doing in Russia what it wants done here, and it sees what Putin is doing to Ukraine as what should be done to any Americans who won’t toe that line.

12/ Remember, The Invasion is more than a land grab: it’s emblematic of Putin’s belief that the Russian Empire was a whole that was forcibly divided by *leftists*. He’s open about wanting to extirpate Ukrainian nationalism—Ukraine as a nation-state—because he thinks it’s a fraud.

13/ When conservatives rail against Critical Race Theory, they’re attacking the idea that a nation can exist with discrete subcommunities with different senses of the nation as a whole. They’re demanding a unified narrative—theirs—the same way Putin has an idea of what Russia is.

14/ The Insurrection will always support radical violent nationalists who want to exterminate internal subcommunities (either literally or culturally). That’s why the American right is obsessed not just with Putin but Orban in Hungary, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and even Modi in India.

15/ So whatever your view of President Biden, his diagnosis of global geopolitics writ large is dead on: it’s a tilt between democracy and autocracy, between diversity and ethno-nationalism, between freedom and authoritarianism. One the Insurrection and Invasion are both part of.

16/ All this is occurring against the backdrop of a global public health crisis that’s killed millions and millions and *in America alone* has left many millions with long-term health problems. And the Infection problem is not going away—because the pandemic is a long-term event.

17/ As Americans we’re trained—partly by corporate media, which needs eyeballs on a daily basis or it dies—to focus on individual political battles rather than the Big Picture. In fact, the very idea that when we go to the polls it’s the Big Picture we’re voting on feels foreign.

18/ But in fact, it’s not either/or—it’s really a matter of framing. At this point, every policy or temperamental or nakedly partisan dispute that defines an individual political race is just a manifestation of what is happening in the world for the four “I” phenomena noted here.

19/ Gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter ID laws, fake recounts, fake electors, the revelation that almost all voter fraud occurs on the right—*all* of these arise out of the singular goal of the Insurrection to end free and fair elections *and* establish a unitary executive.

20/ And because right now 99%+ of Republicans at the local, state, and federal levels have committed themselves to the Insurrection and its current (but not forever) leader—Trump—every time America has a national election, the Insurrection is what’s ultimately on the ballot.

21/ So what’s the point, anymore, in covering the horse race of an individual electoral tilt? The narrative is essentially the same, again, on every ballot: either you’re voting for the Insurrection (the end of American democracy) or you’re voting for something—anything—but that.

22/ But by the same token, because the Insurrection *categorically* supports the premise of the Invasion—if not every single war crime (though many insurrectionists actually do)—if you vote for the Insurrection you are voting for Putin’s now-developing “land bridge” to Moldova.

23/ Because the Invasion—like the Insurrection—is a long-term play. Russia tried to make Moldova a vassal state before; did the same with Georgia, which the Kremlin has just started framing as a belligerent fighting in Ukraine; did so with Belarus; and wants influence on Hungary.

24/ There can be no capitulation to Putin in Ukraine not because anyone wants war, but because Ukraine isn’t the end. Just as Putin’s invasion of Georgia and creation of Belarus as a vassal state allowed these spaces to become staging areas, Ukraine is a staging area for Moldova.

25/ So when you see major-media news stories indicating that Putin intends to make his most aggressive play ever to interfere in U.S. elections in 2022 and 2024, it’s because he wants—and in fact *needs*—the Insurrection to be the political power in the United States *long-term*.

26/ Trump announced in Las Vegas in July 2015—on camera—that Putin could take Ukrainian land without punishment, which is what Putin is trying to do now and why he wants Trump in the Oval. But the philosophy—such as it is—behind the Insurrection means Putin can have Moldova, too.

27/ And in the view of the Insurrection, Putin can not only have Ukraine and Moldova but also Belarus (formally) and Georgia (via another invasion), too. And for that matter, *all* the other former Soviet republics—including some now in NATO. Which is why Trump wants to end NATO.

28/ Putin’s ethno-nationalism is the “American Dream”...as seen through the eyes of the Insurrection. To the Insurrection, Putin is simply living his best life (which includes raping women en masse and murdering babies) and doing for Russia what *someone* needs to do for America.

29/ You know what else the Insurrection and Invasion have in common? Their commitment to autocratic Big Feels just so happens to spread *infection*. so much so that it gives the insurrectionists an opportunity to politicize a public good—public health—in a way they can weaponize.

30/ Why would anyone think the politicization of the pandemic was principled? It was *always* a matter of politics: someone and something—i.e., the Insurrection—saw this public health crisis as exactly the sort of event in the public square that could help crystallize its vision.

31/ One of the two leading Insurrection candidates for 2024—DeSantis—is not only using COVID-19 to ascend (killing thousands in the process), but is *also* working to advance the “theory of the unitary executive” by *nakedly* using his power to destroy a political enemy: Disney.

32/ Of the #4I forces shaping American life right now, inflation is the most difficult to discuss because it may be the most transient—and its influence oddly both the most evident *and* the most obscure. Still, many voters will vote in the 2022 national elections on this basis.

33/ Look at it this way: can the Insurrection run on destroying our democracy? No. Can it run on its handling of the pandemic? Not really, as it really just wants to ignore it—which idea some on the far right embrace, but not many others. But *inflation*(!)... ah, *there* you go.

34/ The very invasion that the insurrectionists support is what’s causing inflation, but media doesn’t have the sophistication—or the Democrats the messaging apparatus—to effectively disseminate that fact. But that it’s a fact underlines the ties between all of the #4I phenomena.

35/ So while inflation is the most squirrely of all these topics to discuss—not least because so many things can cause inflation that are microeconomic rather than Big Picture—if the Insurrection wins the 2022 national elections, it will be *primarily* because of inflation fears.

CONCLUSION/ If the Insurrection wins in 2022, it’s the start of America’s Last Years—and a victory for Putin that ensures his war in Europe will expand, worldwide infections worsen, and inflation deepen. It will create a global death spiral.

Even as media focuses on horse races.