I Take No Pleasure In Having Predicted The Future Of American Politics

There was a raw and dangerous energy ahead of the 2010 midterm elections. The sense was that Republicans were not just energized to take back Congress and stop every part of the president's agenda, but they were ready to end this little game of ours.

Enough was enough. Democrats had seized sizable House and Senate majorities and Obama had won Indiana and Iowa and North Carolina and motherfucking Florida. Republicans, in the aftermath of the most disastrous presidency in history, knew they had been reduced to a regional party, a party that could compete in hyper-conservative parts of the country but would have its ass kicked in so-called swing states. So they worked up the American public into believing the country was on the verge of all-out communism or Shariah law or whatever else scares white folks and they proceeded to dominate the midterms.

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It was in the states that Republicans implemented their game-over strategy. They immediately passed a bevy of voter suppression measures, created the craziest fucking gerrymanders anyone had ever seen, and locked themselves into power for what they hoped would be eternity. Republican judges helped the cause. Wisconsin was reduced to a Soviet satellite state: No self rule, no opposition party.

Republicans after the 2010 midterms meant business in a way no American political party had ever meant business. This democracy shit wasn't going to work out, they had decided. It was time to start the process of breaking the system. In this way, the Trump era began in January 2011.

Zoomers probably don't recall the right's seething anger in the aftermath of the 2008 election, in which a Democrat – a Black Democrat, at that – won in a landslide against a Republicans candidate (John McCain) who was awarded the party's nomination because he was so thoroughly ratfucked eight years earlier. This wasn't only unacceptable to the American right; it was intolerable. Measures had to be taken against this ever happening again, and Republicans on every level of government made plans to do just that.

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It was in this environment – two short years after the joy of 2008 – that I wrote a short story about the future of American politics. In those days I wrote a lot of short stories because I wasn't really online and had time on my hands and, as always, had something to say. The story centers on the 2036 election, and the first Democratic presidential candidate to break through with the public in decades. The candidate, a guy named Lawrence Fish, is accused by a former fantasy football rival of being a racist – a charge used by his Republican opponents in bad faith. That strategy backfires. Fish embraces Christianity to promote social justice. Racism and radical Christianity collide and Fish runs with it.

In my story, the Democratic Party primary is held in a public park. It is not televised or broadcast online because that isn't allowed. The primary is mostly a ceremonial event because the party has no megaphone, no influence, and no ultra-wealthy people willing to back it. In this fictional 2036 United States, the Republican Party runs the country the same way Putin runs Russia, sham elections and all. We have all the trappings of a representative democracy without any of the benefits. We have been reduced to playacting small-d democratic traditions because the message has been clear: There will be no actual competition for power anymore. You lost once (in 2010) and that means you've lost forever.

An excerpt from my story sounds an awful lot like a Stephen Miller fever dream:

The three Democratic frontrunners had been selected and vetted by the Republican National Committee for Jesus and Prosperity. The contest was still dubbed the Democratic primary for tradition’s sake. There was no real Democratic Party anymore, not since the government had shut down the Democratic National Committee for un-American behavior, the country’s few thousand remaining union members were given a three-square-mile reservation on the North Dakota-Canada border, and eighteen states in the South and Midwest had passed laws forbidding candidates to run as Democrats. You ran as a Republican in those states, or on the side of the ballot labeled Terrorist. For a decade, it had been illegal to even capitalize democrat or democratic.

At the time I truly did not believe we would ever again see a Democratic president, and in a way, we haven't, since the captured institution that is the Supreme Court is run by bad-faith jurists who see themselves as bulwarks against any and all progressive policy making. Sure, they say, you can go ahead of elect a president who has a D by their name, but it won't matter.

A part of this consolidation, as the short story mentions, is total control of the media. I could not have predicted, of course, that microblogging platforms would one day single handedly control the outcomes of elections across the world. I could not have guessed that the excesses and logic of capitalism – manifested in the existence of impossibly rich men – would turn social media in a diabolical democracy-killing machine. At the time social media was a place where you told 35 friends that you had eaten a cheeseburger for lunch and it was good. Maybe you posted about your co-rec softball team winning a double header. Maybe you alerted your friends that you had consumed alcohol. It was not a place where the world's richest man programs his robot with chat logs from fascist corners of the internet and rigs his algorithm to promote an openly fascist presidential candidate.

Today, a year and change after Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg pledged fealty to Trump and promised to use their all-powerful algorithms to promote his agenda and normalize his corruption and evil, regime opponents – namely Democrats – don't really have a place from which to speak to mass audiences. We can talk forever about "messaging," but messaging doesn't matter if no one hears it. Major networks are cowering or being taken over by regime allies, major social media sites are letting right-wing unreality run wild, and Democratic messaging is whatever Republicans say it is.

We're inching closer to the world of my short story, to the world of Lawrence Fish.

My short story isn't well written. There are a few plot holes. The dialogue is shit. The characters are mostly faceless and shallow. So it goes. The thrust of the story was that starting way back in 2010 – fifteen years ago, somehow – Republicans took a turn. They became radicalized in ways that I knew normie Democrats could not understand. They weren't just mad about losing; they were determined to never lose again. And so we see every Republican-controlled state in the nation today jamming their gerrymandered maps that might give the party just enough seats to hang on to a House majority in 2026 and beyond. Today Republicans are more honest about their aims, more willing to say their goal is to lock the opposition out of power permanently, in ways that can't be reversed.

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Just now, a decade and a half into this thing, American liberals are finally starting to understand they are up against a political party that would not be allowed to exist in any other developed nation. I don't think my 2010 short story is destined to be prophetic. I think there's a good chance it looks silly in the coming years, the ravings of an Obama-era millennial doomer who felt the wind shift in a decidedly autocratic direction and decided the country's fate had been sealed.

That same millennial doomer looks around today and sees regular Americans chasing away the president's secret police and Democrats engaging in unapologetic (real) populism and protesting by the millions against a lazy-ass movement that thinks it has already won. There's a lot of ballgame left before we find ourselves in the dystopia of Lawrence Fish.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.