“We’re just one election away from full-blown socialism,” a man recently said to me during a short conversation. This sentiment has become increasingly common lately, even, notably, among the previously apolitical. Yet something is overlooked:

In keeping with President Reagan’s observation, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” being one election away from tyranny means that not enough people noticed and took action when we were one generation away — or two or three.

Also perhaps overlooked is that being one election away from tyranny now means we’ll be one election away after the next election — whatever happens November 3. The point is that politics being downstream from culture (and, really, from morality, faith and philosophy), this isn’t merely a “moment.” It’s not a fashion. It won’t just pass. And we need be prepared for things to come.

I’ve often cited late Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, who in 1980s interviews warned of “demoralization” — an undermining of a nation’s morality that makes it ripe for leftist revolution — in America. As a young man in my late teens or early twenties at the time, I didn’t know about Bezmenov (no Internet back then). But I’d recently become more intensely “politically” aware and quickly realized, and began telling people, that the West and the U.S. were in decline and gravitating toward tyranny. Oh, I did realize the republic’s demise was decades away.

Now I suspect it’s years away.

General Michael Flynn, whom, it’s clear, was targeted by the Creep State for being a good man, just warned that if we don’t act, two percent of the people are about to control the other 98 percent. But I’m here to tell you: Long term, voting won't save us.

Oh, for sure, get out and vote in November as if your life depends on it (because in a way, it does). But as was the case in 2016, a Trump victory and partial GOP control of Congress only amount to a “stay of execution.” The clock is ticking.

Moreover, President Trump’s re-election, like his election, would have to defy the odds. Along with traditional media bias — which a college professor determined aids Democrat candidates by 8 to 10 points every election (an underestimation, I believe) — there’s now social media/Big Tech bias. According to liberal psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein’s research, this factor can shift up to 15 million votes toward one party or the other (not an overestimation, I believe). This is enough to turn any modern election.

Add to this vote fraud and vote harvesting — the latter of which flipped conservative Orange County, Calif., from GOP to Democrat control in 2018 — and left-wing mail-in voting scams, and the picture is clear: Even if Trump wins, the chances of him having two simpatico Houses are slim. And if Trump triumphs but the Democrats hold the House and seize the Senate, there’s a good chance he’ll be deposed.

Really, though, focusing on this, the micro, is to not see the forest for the trees. An excellent high-profile commentator said a while back that this all (the current unrest, intensifying cancel culture, etc.) seemed to happen so suddenly. But only the spark, the George Floyd situation, and the fire were sudden, and something else could have triggered the blaze as well. The kindling, however, and the many-layered sea of morally dead and intellectually dry wood had long been burgeoning.

And the spark only catalyzed the firestorm because we’d reached a point of critical mass.

This is why what we began talking about in the ‘80s, political correctness, has metastasized into “cancel culture.” It’s why two people in two recent days — one a cop, the other an acquaintance — told me what’s plain: They, and everyone else, are afraid to speak their minds, fearing career and reputational destruction. It’s why social media censorship is intensifying by the month. An iron muzzle has descended upon America, and what can’t be spoken against can’t be effectively combated.

As I warned in 2012, there no longer is a culture war. “What is occurring now is a pacification effort.” Its progress is why corporate America, including the now-absorbed Chick-fil-A and NASCAR, has turned decidedly to the dark side (shifted “left”). It’s why prominent people, including Republicans such as Indiana senator Mike Braun, are bowing before terrorist group Black Lives Matter. It’s why mobs are enabled and good people hobbled for defending themselves from the mobs. It’s why we’re seeing a complete cultural collapse — portending a political collapse.

This is partially due to a new “woke” generation having entered the corporate sphere and others of influence. But what did you expect? The apocryphal saying (no, it’s not Lincoln’s) informs, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” Did you really think the Left could completely control academia for generations and that, somehow, it all would “stay in college”?

Leftists have also controlled entertainment, which could even be more significant. A (perhaps loose) paraphrase of ancient Greek philosopher Plato warns, “When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them.”

Now, though, we have television and the Internet, whose effects I’ve examined, which dwarf music’s influence. Then there’s the aforementioned media (conventional and social). This culture-shaping media/academia/entertainment triad has long been leftist-controlled, the result of the long Gramscian “march through the institutions,” the rotten fruits of all our squandered yesterdays.

Being a culture-shaper also ultimately means, again, being a politics-shaper (and civilization-shaper), and this brings us to conservative rationalization. Even if we could somehow seize control of the media/academia/entertainment axis, sorry, it takes generations to thus reshape society, and the time for that was 60 years ago. That ship has sailed (and sunk).

Then there’s our 1965-born immigration policy, which, I’ve estimated, gives Democrats 300,000 new voters yearly, three million a decade. And when the Democrats assume full control, they’ll legalize the illegal aliens among us and open the floodgates further (goodbye, wall), giving themselves perhaps tens of millions of new voters in short order.

So Democrat presidential sock puppet Joe Biden, echoing the man whose name he couldn’t recall a while back (because echoes are all he has left), not long ago said we had to “fundamentally” change America. But that fundamental change has already occurred. Does the 2020 U.S. even remotely resemble its few-generations-back former self?

So the question isn’t what’s coming, but this: Will you be ready? When leftists take full political control federally, they’ll mercilessly impose their agenda as they always do. If you have no idea what that agenda is, you’re likely not reading this. But do know that it will be effected no-holds-barred.

For not only is there the critical-mass factor, but Machiavellian leftists have convinced their useful idiots, projecting all the way, that conservatives constitute a hateful, “racist,” fascistic, White Supremacist™ threat to civilization. They thus have an ideal pretext for iron-fistedly crushing opponents. When “Nazis” threaten your civilization, after all, you’re faced with desperate times requiring desperate measures, right, comrade?

So how do we proceed? This isn’t a defeatist screed. I’m not saying keep a cyanide capsule handy. But knowing tomorrow’s strategy requires knowing tomorrow’s battlefield. So what can be done when, after this election or the next, the federal government becomes a complete leftist Leviathan wholly unmoored from constitutional constraints?

I’ve long advocated nullification — meaning, in this case, the ignoring of unconstitutional federal and judicial dictates — something Thomas Jefferson called the “rightful remedy” for all federal overreach. This should have been embraced long ago (e.g., in response to the Obergefell opinion), but will become more conservative states’ only recourse in the not-too-distant future. Note, too, that we’d just be doing what leftists do with their “sanctuary” cities and their defiance of federal drug laws.

In this vein, you can’t win a contest being a “connedservative” who insists on fighting by Queensberry rules while your adversary operates no-holds-barred. Remember that, more and more, we’re living in post-constitutional and post-rule-of-law America. We’re now increasingly subject to the rule of men and, in the coming conflict, it’s only a matter of which men will win.

America is irremediably divided — if a marriage, she would’ve dissolved long ago — and the above resistance would, of course, make that division more official. This brings me to what I believe will be our fate.

After having my ‘80s insights, I concluded that we’d just continue descending into autocracy, as burgeoning laws, regulations and mandates gradually extinguished freedom, placing us in the iron grip of a central government Behemoth. But I long ago changed that view: I now believe our country will dissolve, as the USSR did before us.

Assuming this happens, the question is: Will at least one emerging land be a new shining city on a hill?

That’s up to us. And we’d better be ready for things to come, now — because it’s later than you think, and inside-the-box thinking won’t cut it in an outside-the-box future.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab or Parler (preferably) or Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of Pixabay and Needpix public domain images.