2020. Look to 2020. The country will be a shambles by then, but with luck, organization, and leadership an opposition can win in 2020. We can try things in 2018, but by 2020 I hope we are ready. – me, 2017
I think this Congress and the one proceeding it are in the process of replicating the mistake of the 40th Congress, which impeached but did not remove Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor. President Andrew Johnson went on to pardon most of the Confederate traitors, who became the first Klan, unleashing a wave of racist terrorism in the south. The stage was then set for the Compromise of 1877, which allowed the South to implement its system of segregation.
Donald Trump may well be impeached and forbidden from holding further office, but this will not prevent his children, especially Ivanka Trump, who is contemplating a Senate run in Florida, from holding office in the future.
We must also consider the further harm that the Taney, er, Roberts court will do in the coming decade. In some ways we are entering a period analogous to the end of the Reconstruction, and we must fight to maintain the gains we have won in the past 60 years and to prevent another ignominious loss to racism and authoritarianism. I think we may also be, finally, looking at the realignment I have long been predicting, where the Republican Party shuffles off to Buffalo, or perhaps returns to Gamma Quadrant, while the left of the Democrats tears away to form a new party. ("Join the People's Progressive Libertarian Party! We bring peace, prosperity, and weed!")
The Twenties promise to be a tumultuous decade. But then, what decade in US history has not been?
(2021-01-13 The omitted phrase "end of the" inserted before "Reconstruction," making the historical analogy correct. Ooof!)
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