This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/Who-were-the-big-winners-and-losers-in-the-2024-presidential-election-3“

The biggest losers are the MAGAts.

They don’t see it yet.

By the second year of his term, they’ll start to wonder what’s going on.

By the time the next election rolls around, they’ll begin seeing it’s no longer “business as usual.”

They will begin to realize that he meant what he said when he said no one would have to worry about elections any longer.

That’s when the fear will creep into them… the last of them because many will have already undergone harsh awakenings when discovering that prices have skyrocketed while employment protections have vanished. They will freak out when they find out they cannot count on retirement as they struggle with minimal incomes to survive on bare minimums. The entire nation will plunge into a recession that could very well become a depression due to environmental and regulatory mismanagement that will make the Bush housing crisis and the “Great Recession” pale by comparison.

Drug prices will skyrocket, as will medical bankruptcies. Millions will lose their healthcare as employers will cut back on employee expenses, and nothing will prevent them from converting the entire working class into a slavery system worse than it is now. The economy will radically shrink through their isolationist approach to international politics, and whoever remains will fight their neighbours for scraps.

That’s not the worst thing for them to lose, though.

No.

The worst and most profound loss they will experience is the compassion of their fellow citizens who warned them.

When they begin crying foul, they’ll find no sympathy.

There will be no quarter for them. No sympathetic shoulder will await them when they realize they’ve hit rock bottom.

They will finally get the disdain they’ve consistently demonstrated toward their fellow citizens for decades.

They will find their hatreds finally reciprocated in the harshest of terms with a simple “we told you so.”

They will find doors of sympathy slamming shut on them because they won’t be the only ones suffering from their hateful motivations. The entire nation will learn to hate MAGAts on such a visceral level that an escalation of antagonism will become the norm for the following unpredictable number of years — possibly the entire next century.

They’re going to learn how the fabricated hatred they’ve been displaying toward their fellow citizens is nothing like genuinely earned hatred.

When they finally realize the profundity of what they have lost, it will be experienced as a prolonged moment of debilitating horror that transfixes them. They will mourn the loss of a nation they professed to love. They will be overcome by paralyzing guilt accompanying the realization that they killed it by their ignorant and envious “stick-it-to-the-libs” attitudes, their hateful projections, and their self-fulfilling prophecies of doom they feared were to be caused by their fellow citizens.

They will have only themselves to blame. They will become this century’s brownshirts in the aftermath of the destruction they wrought against their people, neighbours, and fellow citizens. The entire world will regard them like drug addicts who have hit rock bottom and can’t be trusted ever again.

When they finally achieve their moment of harrowing clarity, it will be too late to turn back the clock and regain the stature of world power they enjoyed. The entire world will have marginalized the nation while permanently considering it a threat to global peace and security instead of its protector.

They will discover such a profound degree of shame accompanying a sense of loneliness and being lost and adrift in a massive ocean surrounded by the enemies they made of their fellow citizens that many will turn to suicide… and worse, no one will care if that’s what they choose for themselves. Many will feel the same relief they did when Rush Limbaugh finally stopped polluting this Earth with his hateful noise.

It will take all of the rest of this century for Americans to recover their dignity.