This post first appeared at Government Cheese – Chronicling the collapse of democracy

It hasn’t sunk in yet but yesterday’s vote to allow Republican election-rigging and keep the filibuster marks the end of democracy. From here on out the fight is over. Republican efforts to rig the next elections will now accelerate. They know they have a free hand to do what they want. The public will tune out, understanding that nothing can change.

Billionaires and corporations funded and engineered the effort to keep the filibuster. Their thinking is that they’re at the top of a system rigged in their favor, and the filibuster keeps anything from changing. The filibuster has maintained their position at the top of the pyramid, blocking all efforts by the people to use government to change the rigged system. All Republicans were part of this pay-for-play operation, of course, but so were many Senate Democrats under Obama, and now Manchin and Sinema.

The corporations and billionaires think the current system of paying politicians to keep the money flowing to them has been locked in.

The libertarians and Christian right engineered the effort to gain control of the Supreme Court so they could gut campaign finance and voting rights. They think there will now be “elections” that they win. They’ve convinced their audience that Democrat votes are always illegitimate. They think they’ve locked in ideological right-wing Christian control of the US.

What Really Comes Next

But that’s not what will happen. That’s not what ever happens when a system allows itself to be taken control of. Corruption leads to control by the most corrupt and that leads to control by the most ruthless.

The corporations and billionaires and right-wing and Christian leaders who brought us to this point don’t understand what they’ve done to themselves.

What happens next is one strong, ruthless leader will seize control at the expense of everything and everyone else in his way. The model is already established. The next contest will be over which corrupt white male becomes the next Putin or Xi. For life, just like them.

Now it’s about who gets to take and keep control of the country’s huge military and economy. It’s about who becomes the business partner of every business in the country.

It Will Dawn On Them

It will eventually dawn on the Republican party that the next contest is not who will be the next president, but who will be the next permanent autocrat. That is the stakes now.

Trump knows this. But when this becomes more widely understood Trump will be driven out because Trump is not particularly viable in this role.

Of course businesses aren’t going to understand this and catch up. That hasn’t happened before in history. It’s always the autocratic strongman thug who ends up in charge in these instances.

What will happen next is that the ruling leader makes business partners out of the billionaires and companies, and assistants out of the ideologues.

Corporations won’t lobby them, they’ll pay them. Right-wing and Christians leaders won’t tell them what to do, they’ll be told what to do.

They think they just won. They don’t understand that they just got themselves a new business partner, who gets 75% of everything.

Update: Title Origin: In Egypt, under dictator Mubarak, businesses had a picture of Mubarak on the wall. They’d say, “that’s my business partner.” It meant they had to pay a percentage to Mubarak’s henchmen.

His family was worth around $70 billion when he was deposed.