Here are some cheerful words from regular commenter Matt in VA. If you don’t normally read the comments section, he’s a gay Millennial populist who cannot stand either the Democrats or the GOP:

Here’s what’s going to happen:

Kavanaugh will not be confirmed. Grassley (head of the judiciary committee) is foolish and incompetent; Flake, who wants an MSNBC gig as the Republican who criticizes Republicans (always lucrative), is dying to be able to do to the Supreme Court nominee what McCain did to the Obamacare repeal; Corker and Murkowski aren’t dependable; I wouldn’t be surprised if Ben Sasse has the same plans as Flake and ends up going the same way.

No other nominee will get put on the Supreme Court either, as the Republicans are going to lose the Senate in November. They will lose the House in one of the biggest wipeouts in modern times. Naive beliefs that they ought to still retain the Senate will be dashed when even Ted Cruz loses (and he is going to lose — I lived in Texas for a time and worked in government — Republicans are ABSOLUTELY in denial about how fast the state is changing. And Ted Cruz seems to have decided to run a It’s-Still-1996,-right?-style campaign). The Republicans will not even be able to get it together enough to get a new nominee seated during the lame duck, and then that’ll be that. Democrats will hold the Supreme Court seat open for the second half of Trump’s term, during which time, now that they hold Congress, expect to see impeachment and removal proceedings, though they won’t actually impeach or remove him because they want to be able to run against him in 2020.

Tons of powerful people in the conservative “intelligentsia” (I mean the Bill Kristols and all the Weekly Standard and National Review types, all the NeverTrumpers, etc., not to mention all the people who still have power, despite being obviously anti-Trump, because Trump foolishly appointed them to his government anyway) *want* not only to see Trump taken down but the Republican Party as a whole knocked down as low as possible as punishment for betraying them. They believe that when its members have been sufficiently punished for opting for Trump, the Respectable Conservatives can regain control and once more run things their way.

Basically, by the start of 2021, we’ll see a Democratic president elected in a massive landslide, with likely huge Senate and House majorities too, and a fifth seat on the Supreme Court that they will be able to immediately fill to secure a majority there. I think it will look something like how NeverTrumpers expected things to look after the Trump/Hillary election in 2016 — just four years later.

I say all this as someone who voted for Trump in 2016, and someone who despises the establishment Republican Party. One of my main reasons for supporting Trump was because I wanted someone to nuke the Republican Party as it currently stands (we do *not* need a political party that bends over backwards for multinational corporations that hate conservatives; we do *not* need two parties that both want immigration to be as high as possible; we do *not* need a party full of sanctimonious scolds who sell rubes “Conscience of a Conservative” books while actually exercising their power in a manner indistinguishable from corporate lobbyists.)

Well, we are going to get that promised destruction, I think. Trump *does* deserve a great deal of blame. He won the election on issues that really need to be addressed, but he then appointed tons of Bush-type Republicans to posts and has governed as if he were Jeb! That’s on him. But the blame, of course, also goes to the rest of the Republican Party, who still think that it’s 1983 and that people want tax cuts for billionaires, endless corporate bootlicking, military “strength” (that is, endless war) and “look, I moved the embassy to Jerusalem!”…

More people are dying every year of the opioid epidemic and other drug overdoses than died in Vietnam. The drug overdose deaths in 2017 were almost twice the number who died of AIDS in the peak year of the AIDS epidemic. Yet all we hear about are “the economy is so great” from Republicans and how incredibly difficult it is to be an upper-middle-class white woman (rapists at every turn!) from Democrats. (One line I particularly love is about how Christine Blasey Ford was so traumatized by Kavanaugh’s supposed attempted rape that she had to “flee across the country” — to Palo Alto, natch.)

The future for the entire US is pretty obviously California. Though I’m not sure what happens when the white Boomers who bought CA real estate before 1985 finally go. I think they may be the edifice that continues to hold up the state, who really “believe” in how things are going since, after all, *their* houses have gone up 10x in value, right? That means Things Are Working! Never mind the homeless encampments, dirty needles and so much hepatitis on the sidewalks that they have to drive special trucks around and spray chemicals on the concrete, the massive inequality, the industries that are either brutally exploitative and that no parent should want their daughter to get into (Hollywood) or are Building the Censorship of the 21st Century, At Home and Abroad (Silicon Valley), the politicians prioritizing letting people spread HIV without fear over affordable housing, the fact that real estate and rent are so expensive people never have kids… And the rest of the US won’t have California’s weather, either…

I should say — I have family in California. They like it. I’ve been quite a number of times, and certainly it’s not the end of the world. It just means massive inequality and the end of religious or social conservatism as an effective political force. But this is what Reaganism leads to — literally. Reagan came from California, was hugely popular in California, and look what he and his governing mentality did to California. Movement Conservatism, which basically is Reaganism, destroys itself in one to two generations. This should tell you something about how “conservative” it is. At least this disaster of a political program is passing out of the world and I get to see that…