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The movie "IDIOCRACY" (2006) predicted what we're witnessing Election Year 2024: MAGA-think, Trump Bibles, the House GOP clown show, AIPAC Democrats, Texas 5th Circuit Court fascists; Project 2025, Vivek Ramaswami, RFK Jr, antivaxxers...AHHHH!!! MEGATRENDS provides a Survival Guide. In preparation, watch the movie "IDIOCRACY", the funniest scary movie of our time.

Even scarier for many US voters is the daily status quo we're living through in election year 2024. "I see a lot of ways in which our democracy has already deteriorated," said Susan Stokes, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies comparative democracies. "In the best-case scenario, it would take a while to come back."

These sentiments have shown up in many surveys. In an August Morning Consult/Bipartisan Policy Center poll, 82 percent of voters said they were worried about democracy in the U.S. Half of voters even said having a functioning democracy was a bigger immediate concern than having a strong economy in a YouGov/CBS News poll from January. Two in three Americans were concerned about a repeat of Jan. 6 in a December Navigator poll, and 85 percent were worried about political violence in the future.

But while significant shares of both Republicans and Democrats say they're worried about democracy, their specific concerns about why democracy is under threat reveal deep partisan cracks. In the Navigator poll, Democrats were especially worried that events similar to the Jan. 6 insurrection could happen again, with 87 percent saying they were somewhat or very concerned. The vast majority of Democrats in that poll, 94 percent, were worried about Republican members of Congress assisting or encouraging the organizers of the Jan. 6 attack and allowing "white supremacist factions" present during the attack to play a "dominant role" in deciding the direction of the Republican Party — as were more than 70 percent of independents. Both Democrats and independents saw the Republican Party as more prone to political violence than the Democratic Party, by 69 and 15 percentage points, respectively.

As a form of therapy, MEGATRENDS unearthed some incredibly intelligent history-bearing cartoons that critique the global origins of how we got to our present state of IDEOCRACY. Some are Cold War era Walt Disney cartoons that are stunningly insightful and chock full of perspective--the precursors of Bevus & Butthead, Americathon, and Idiocracy--that demonstrate how political artists, poets, political theatre, and cult Hollywood socialist script writers have always provided society with a look over the horizon that foresaw with illuminating and phantasmagoric clarity the preil of oligarchy and fascism we would encounter--and be positioned to pull together to guide history away from a dark future and toward a world of peace and cooperation as the eventual hallmark of the 21st century by midcentury and beyond.