@HeavenlyPossum

There won't be free and fair elections in 2026 nor in 2028.

Even if there are, they will be subject to coercion, overt gerrymandering, voter suppression, sabotage of mail-in ballots, intimidation and doxing of polling workers, a slew of fake ID laws to restrict voter rights, selection of dates to prevent working people from voting, local and state tactics for manipulation and overturning, with goons on streets and army deployments, possibly, under the guise of "securing" the elections against "fraud".

Ballots will be tossed, results will be challenged in courts. They have been doing this for years, but now they have full control of federal agencies and most court circuits. They have practised, learned and perfected those tactics.

Trust me: my country lived through a dictatorship for 48 years, I've seen other countries go through the same and I'm reliving all the goal posts on your side of the pond. Once installed, dictatorships are extremely hard to remove. Putin is still there, Orban has been there for 5 mandates, Hitler and Mussolini only got their dues because there was a massive war on with two superpowers involved. Stalin died in his bed.

American Democrats are being mindbogglingly naïve.

You will have a dictatorship or you will have Civil War - or both. There's no in between.

@HeavenlyPossum
We don't even have to speculate how it will go *even if* Democrats not only take back the legislature, but also the presidency. We don't even have to look very far in the past.

We have been living in a protofascist state ever since 9/11 and that's the coldest possible take on the matter. *None* of this is going to be a hot take. Seriously, liberals are out here acting like goddamn 2000-era positions so center-left that they were hidden by the y-axis on the graph are now radical beyond all reason.

Anyway...

Civil liberties were significantly curtailed, particularly our right to privacy, and the scope and power of law enforcement were drastically increased. There have been two Democratic presidencies in the meanwhile and yet the tools that are being used to subjugate us have stayed in the box that whole time. The time, the means, and the public support to stop this was available.

Any disagreement on those points is *comprehensively* wrong. It's so wrong that this isn't even going to be close to how obscenely obvious it all is from even just a cursory glance at what has happened over the last 25 years.

There is no question that the response to 9/11 put us on a clearly identifiable road to fascism. This is when ICE was created - an organization that has *always* existed as a means to terrorize and intimidate racial minorities. Hell, even since the very beginning of the TSA there has been a running joke that "random" screenings always seem to happen to people with certain names or skin pigmentations. That was also the start of the "No Fly List." In a country as large as the US and has essentially no passenger rail infrastructure, this became a de facto way to strip away people's Constitutional right to freedom of movement. Yes, *technically,* people can still travel long distances and leave the country, but not being able to travel by plane makes it a logistical nightmare to do so.

It's also abundantly clear that this was done with fascist intent. All of these unquestionably fascist policies were rammed through Congress with explicitly fascist rhetoric. Everything was about protecting the homeland, punishing our enemies with extreme violence, needing to bypass jury trials en masse to imprison enemies of the state, suspending civil liberties so we can spy on dangerous "criminals" and "terrorists," strengthening our military and police, cracking down on the border to stop dangerous immigrants, and on and on and on.

And what happened next? It was all so much and so obviously horrible that the next election was *dominated* by a candidate promising hope and change - an end to the Bush years and everything that came with it. This idea was so popular that Obama not only won the presidency in a landslide, but Democrats also cemented a House majority and a filibuster-proof Senate *super*majority. There was a 2- year period where Democrats could have made significant progress on their mandate to not just undo those fascist policies, but also hold the previous administration legally accountable for the countless crimes they committed, including numerous war crimes.

In complete fairness, I'll never say that *nothing* was done in those years. There were some wins - Obama and the Democratic legislature undid some severe policies. However, their lack of effort in making significant change was so evident that Democrats lost the House and, with it, the ability to unilaterally determine the legislative agenda.

It was not the impossible task that so many liberal apologists try to make it seem, either. A considerable bulk of what needed to be repealed also happened over roughly two years and there was at least as much momentum to undo that as there was to enact it.

What the Republicans had and the Democrats lacked was the *willingness* to make change. Those apologists are right that comprehensive reform required more than two years, but it's also very likely that a concerted, visible effort would have maintained enough public faith in the party that they would have kept their House majority.

Worse, Obama outright d repeatedly said that they wouldn't even try to pursue criminal charges for the indisputable and *extremely* serious crimes that Bush and his cronies committed. This sentiment, that we had to let everyone get away with all of the devastatingly destructive crimes they committed so we could "look forward instead of backward," was so disappointing, so unpopular, that it alone probably cost Democrats dearly in the 2010 midterms and that's just the electoral consequence. How many of those criminals have played key roles in the march to fascism since? How much of a blow could we have delivered to the burgeoning Tea Party movement and slowed the Republican Party's shift that direction?

Let's also not forget that Democrats had a real opportunity to swing the balance of the Supreme Court. They could have had a 5-4 *majority,* but they barely even put up a fight when Republicans bogged the confirmation process down with an unprecedented amount of procedural bullshit. Again, the only thing it would have taken to break that deadlock is even a modicum of backbone. I don't even need to talk about how disastrous a conservative majority in the Supreme Court has been.

If Democrats had no willingness to defeat fascism in 2008, when they had everything going for them and the public energy to do so was the highest it's been since that point, why the fuck would anyone think that they would even try now? Given *all* of this, why in the fuck would anyone think that just getting back to where we were in 2016 would solve anything?

And liberals wonder why leftists are so fucking frustrated with them all the time...

@HeavenlyPossum

When Trump's Depression hits, probably just as Bird Flu hits (it's a when, not if), just as our healthcare system collapses, just as food and housing costs skyrocket, I do not doubt that "elections" to remove our political class will be something they fervently wish were still a thing.