Decade of the Shining City Pt. 4 - Keeping it Personal: 2041-2045

Don't Pal Around with Terrorists

Marty Junior takes the information he gleaned from the home surveillance of the Reactionary Party candidate to his superiors. Not his direct supervisor, but as far up the chain of command as he can confidently reach, to an Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security. This woman reviews the data and agrees that the kind of double dealing their elected official engaged in compromises the security of the homeland, and green-lights an operation by Marty’s office to expose the elected official. But first, we need to take a quick digression into the land of endless surveillance and drones. 

The Shining City and their affiliated insurgents learned long ago to avoid electronics, as they’re all compromised by the state. Stationary platforms and fixed installations are constantly sabotaged, often by 10 and 12 year old boys with rocks. No community will give up its kids to the state, so unless the kids get caught red-handed, the damaged equipment must be replaced, often at not-insignificant cost. Even more nefarious, some contractors install the equipment, but do lazy jobs of it, leaving the state blind in huge swathes of US cities. And the Upper Midwest is a hotspot of armed insurgency, so the sabotage is even more widespread. 

Frustration with the surveillance problems leads Marty to an inevitable conclusion; surveillance needs to go airborne. While drones have been in use since at least the early 2010s, they’ve never been able to operate uninterrupted due to power constraints. Yes, loitering UAVs can operate up to 30 hours, but smaller drones can, even in the 2040s, only operate on one battery charge that lasts between 30 and 90 minutes. What has changed in between is the quality of optics. Even small drones can now reliably recognize faces at further distances, even in poor-visibility situations, like the blanket of smoke from Canadian wildfires.

I'm sure they'll only target bad guys.

     Marty’s office monitors the elected official for a number of weeks, until he hears the words he’s waited for; “Meet me at 1:30.”  A trusted subordinate launches ten drones, each armed with a grenade and linked to a facial recognition database. The drones follow the official’s SUV through Detroit for half an hour. The vehicle enters the lowest floor of a defunct parking garage. The drones loiter for a bit, until locating a group of six young men, all suspected of affiliation with insurgent groups. The young men enter the parking garage from different directions. After waiting a few minutes, the drones swarm the group and detonate their grenades. None of the young men survive. Neither does the elected office and his driver.

The one reporter brave enough to ask for comment on the official’s death gets fed a (mostly true) story, that the representative was meeting with insurgents and was therefore a valid target. The message to the public is simple: “don’t pal around with terrorists.” The message going around the inner circles of power is a bit less nuanced: “no one is safe.” Marty receives a promotion to the level of Assistant Secretary, and the woman who green-lit the operation moves up to the rank of Deputy Secretary. If he’s bothered that the insurgents and the elected official probably wouldn’t have been convicted in a court of law, based on the circumstantial evidence Marty presented, just as when we met him, Marty loses no sleep over it. After all, he’s one of the good guys. 

"We Live in a Country Where Children Have to Die to Save Their Mothers"

The background is a bit too nice for a single mom 
living in a slum, but this was the best the Internet
could do with the prompt given.

Jillian couldn’t get out of bed for months after Vern’s death. The handful of nurses that stuck with her after the closure of the clinic began to drift away. While they want to help her get over the death of her son, they need to feed themselves and their families too. And none are trained to help a parent handle the grief over the death of their child. Autumn, her now 5-year-old daughter, scrounges what she can from friends and distant relations to keep the two of them fed. Eventually, the eviction agents arrive, and their things, along with the mother and daughter, end up on the street.

Eviction does come with something of a silver lining. It snaps Jillian out of her grief. With winter quickly approaching, the low-hanging clouds blowing in off Lake Erie take on a distinct battleship gray as before the blanket the city in feet of snow. The family makes it into Ashtabula’s only homeless shelter, which can offer little more than a paper-thin wall between people and the elements. Autumn develops a serious cough, and cannot keep down the meager food Jillian’s work as the clinic’s resident doctor brings in. Perhaps its pity or inspiration, but one of the transients of the clinic knows, ways, to get the antibiotic Autumn needs. Taking matters into his own hands, the man gets a handful of pills to Jillian and her daughter. The cough eases and the girl’s health improves.

This single act of thievery, and kindness, inspires Jillian to restart her medical practice. Over the coming years, she and Autumn live in the shelter and administer what medical care they can, to the impoverished and the homeless. This brings her minor local celebrity as some kind of local saint. The story makes it onto the curated, state-controlled internet, and comes to her older brother’s attention. 

Marty visits Ashtabula to take stock of his sister and niece. They appear underweight and poorly groomed to him. He offers to take them in, promising good food and a clean, warm place to live. Jillian wants desperately to take him up on the offer, but she sees something in his eyes that chills her more than the gray snow falling outside. Jillian politely refuses his help, and Marty sweetens the deal, offering to have her criminal record expunged and allowing her to return to legal medical practice. When she continues to refuse, he threatens to have her jailed for medical malpractice and Autumn removed from her care.

The next day, a pair of Marty’s agents show up to remove Autumn from the shelter. Jillian will not relinquish her daughter to her now-estranged brother, and a scuffle ensues. The people of the shelter put themselves between the doctor and her daughter, and the government goons. Guns get drawn, and Autumn, now 11, understands what must be done. She agrees to leave with the agents so that her mother will not be harmed. Through all-to-familiar tears, Jillian says goodbye to a second child in five years. That night, some concerned friends from the shelter hustle Jillian out the back door as Homeland Security Agents shut the place down and begin arresting anyone with so much as a suspicion of a criminal record. 

Los Estados Unidos Quieren Tú

Nationalism: Getting young
men to kill each other since
at least 1848...

Bobby sets to work in Veracruz building a new life for himself. He doesn’t live among the diaspora from the USA, instead moving in to a shack in the dockworkers neighborhood. While the peso fluctuates wildly with each twisting turn of the Revolution, those employed loading and off-loading ships always manage to keep themselves fed. Within a few years, Bobby finds himself senior man on a dockworker’s crew, stakeholder in the dockyard’s collective ownership cooperative, and perhaps most surprising, happily married to a local girl named Margarita, with a baby on the way. 

That’s right. By 2041, a 32 year old gringo with no history of staying too long any one place finds himself something of a pillar of the community. And with this stability, an old urge kicks in. Maybe it’s wanderlust, or imposter syndrome, but when the call goes out for volunteers to join the liberation of the north, Bobby signs his name. He justifies it to Margarita and the baby by saying he’ll be far behind the lines working logistics. And this is his chance to strike back against the empire that drove him from his homeland. Margarita threatens to leave him, but he swears to a number saints that he will return as soon as the war is over. 

While not exactly being lied to, he does serve in a support role which is technically non-combat, Bobby soon discovers the asymmetric warfare which defines the Mexican invasion of South Texas. On multiple occasions, his logistics unit finds itself under attack, typically from US airstrikes. While he never suffers direct injury, Bobby does rescue five other men from burning vehicles, earning the Cruz de Vida, an honorary title bestowed for, well, saving the lives of fellow soldiers. There’s a different distinction for saving the lives of civilians. Revolutions love to bestow honors on those who fight for them, and La Joventud is no different in that regard.

Bobby returns to Veracruz in the summer of 2042 to a much-relieved Margarita and little Roberto. The dockyard re-hires him, and the community welcomes him back. Now that he’s fought back and won, the taste becomes intoxicating. Bobby looks north across the Gulf, and wants another victory.

You Only Do Two Days

Allison tries to conceal her terror and glee, finding that both emotions can cohabitate in the same person, at the same moment. While the authorities snatched her off the street on suspicion of a crime, the crime in question has nothing to do with the bombing the Debt Collectors carried out. Instead, they think she engaged in a series of burglaries in one of the posh condo buildings downtown. Though she had nothing to do with these crimes, Allison soon discovers that innocence will not keep her out of prison. Her head is shaved and she is shoved into a general holding cell with dozens of other men and women of Memphis’s underclass.

Since 2036, she bounced from county prison to state penitentiary to a slave labor camp in the Smoky Mountains. Officially, the facility is named the West Creek Labor Rehabilitation Facility, but no one there lives under any illusions about the camp's true purpose. Fortunately for her, on the first day of detention back in ’36, a fellow inmate recognized her as the girl he’d talked to about an onerous set of payday loans. While she insisted that she didn’t know what he was talking about, the rest of the inmates got the message. Allison never found herself on the receiving end of any inmate on inmate crime. Even the guards largely left her alone, to pass year after year in state custody.

None of the inmates of the slave labor camp knew anything about the Demonstration Party’s landslide wins in 2042, which included winning control of the governor’s mansion in Tennessee. After several years of prodding by human rights activists, the governor visits the West Creek camp on a ‘fact-finding’ mission. Once there, he seems genuinely shocked at the conditions. When he finds out many of the inmates were never even convicted of a crime, he demands the facility release all prisoners held without trial, on their own recognizance. The warden of the facility drags his feet, until the new governor threatens to throw the warden in with the inmates. On June 21st, 2045, Allison walks free from prison after seven long years. When she gets back to Memphis, and people ask her how long she was in, she tells them she did just two days, the day you go in, and the day you get out. 

This, but with less concrete and more canvas tents.

Decade of the Shining City Pt. 3 - The Bigger Picture: 2041-2045

The Shining City Fades

All good things must come to an end. That is doubly true of fights for independence, fights against repression and authoritarianism; the struggle for freedom never stops, but sometimes, it gets put on hold. The twin problems with a legal economy in seeming perpetual contraction, and a population of citizens losing numbers due to out-migration, premature deaths and a collapse of the brith rate made a state built on perpetual expansion untenable. By the start of the 2040s, the US federal government, and the oligarchs who backed it, threw in the towel on state-sponsored repression. Instead, they turned to the tried-and-true tactic of pitting citizens against each other. And they went to the easiest, most obvious fissures in the US: ethnicity and race. 

If studying power and race in US history taught me anything, it's that pitting citizens against each other proves fairly effective, fairly often. Of course, this phenomenon isn't unique to the USA. The Federal government paid private security forces, think of Blackwater, to arm small groups of committed reactionaries, gave them information and logistical support, and pointed them at small groups on whom problems could easily be blamed. The first group they targeted were Muslim-Americans, preferably ones with recent family ancestry outside the US. Getting Americans to turn on these people worked. Perhaps it was the collapse of Greater Israel and the influx of Jewish refugees, or maybe the ongoing boat people insurgencies raging across southern Europe, but whatever the reason, paramilitaries attacked Muslim populations across the Great Lakes and Eastern Seaboard states with gusto. State propagandists worked overtime (though they didn’t get paid time and a half) to associate the Muslim population with anti-oligarchy unrest. 

Hey look! I found 'divide and conquer' propaganda from last year
 with a 0.2 second google search. But I'm sure their intentions are pure...
Something something, people you don't like hate America, for reasons.

This tactic didn’t work as well in the Mountain West, as the population included far fewer non-whites, and the libertarian ethos of the local populations didn’t lend itself to easy racial division. So the Federal government turned to blaming Native American tribes for the unrest. While many locals didn’t buy the government line, enough turned a blind eye to neighbors taking money from security forces in exchange for information. At that point, local resistance largely collapsed. That’s not to say that a Federal agents left the big cities without serious armed escort, just in case, but the active, organized resistance turned down a bit. Everyone from Couer D'Alene to the Colorado River just sort of pretended the last few years had been completely uneventful, as long as the Feds didn't ruffle too many feathers.

The costs of the Shining City movement would fill a whole book on their own. And the costs were high, to put it mildly. While official government records never kept totals, about 1.1 million US citizens died of ‘violent crime’ in the years between 2036 and 2040. Again, official stats don’t tabulate all those injured during the insurgencies, but even conservative numbers put the total at about 4 million. The violence and destruction cost the US economy about $1 trillion a year over the same period, shrinking annual GDP to $20 trillion by 2040. For comparison, the US economy in 2024 produced an annual GDP of $28 trillion. And these top-line numbers don’t quantify the loss of municipal services like working sewer and water systems, electrical grid failures, and lost years of education by young Americans. Another notable figure, collected by the CDC, showed a precipitous drop in the birthrate. Again using 2024 as a baseline, the US total fertility rate (TFR) dropped from 1.66 children per woman to 1.01 by 2040. A decade of economic stagnation, civil conflict against authoritarian corporate rule, and a general malaise of helplessness in a world of 24-hour surveillance and soulless consumerism collapsed family formation rates and even undermined the collective instinct to produce another generation. The overall population of the USA declined from 331 million in 2020 to 320 million by the time the 2040 census finished.

Where's the babies?

These divide and conquer tactics failed in the Desert Southwest and on West Coast, and for a variety of reasons. One reason was the decades-long drought destroying agriculture and settled life in places like the Colorado River valley and Southern California. This, coupled with the failure of much modern infrastructure in the face of high prices and resource costs, to reduce the populations of the region between 15% along the Rio Grande, to almost 90% in Arizona and Nevada. Most of these population losses came from out-migration rather than early deaths, but, so it meant that who remained were committed to protecting their ancestral lands, and committed to protecting each other. And while these groups couldn’t always stand up to direct intervention by militarized Federal police, they could look south, across the border, at a state that wasn’t failing. 

In this context, a number of native tribes, mutual aid societies and paramilitary forces decided they would appeal to La Joventud. In March 2041, they sent delegates to Mexico City, asking for Arizona, New Mexico, and the southern Counties of Texas to be admitted to the United States of Mexico. This move triggered a diplomatic crisis between the USA and EUM (Estados Unidos de Mexico). The US position was obvious; secession wasn’t going to happen. The Mexican position seemed a contradiction: they would recognize these delegates as official representatives and begin talks for admitting all three states to the EUM, but they would not interfere with US sovereignty. 

Speaking of things we just pretend didn't happen, Mexico used to be a lot bigger.
I wonder what happened in 1848?

Is Guadalupe-Hidalgo Someone’s Cousin?

In 1848, after suffering a series of defeats at the hands of the US Army, representatives of the Mexican government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. This document ended the Mexican-American War, and ceded the northern third of Mexico to the United States. With the stroke of a pen, Mexico lost control of excellent farmland and vast mineral wealth, as well as the populations living north of the Rio Grande and the line drawn through the Sonoran desert to separate Arizona, New Mexico and California from Mexico City. Had this move come a decade or two earlier, the government in Mexico City might have dismissed the delegates sent by the restive populations of the US Southwest. But because the Joventud movement was revisiting, and correcting, the mistakes, as they saw them, of the Revolution of 1910, talk in the halls of power quickly turned from whether or not to receive the delegates, to asking if the 1848 treaty needed revisiting as well.

On the 5th of May, 2041, the EUM government announced it would accept the delegates petition for statehood, and begin discussions with the USA on how to transfer power from Washington DC to Mexico City. This announcement was met with consternation in the US capitol, but once the shock wore off, the Federal government began moving what they viewed as more reliable, high-tech assets like drones and fighter planes, to Texas. As mentioned in Bobby’s section last week, the Federal government had already begun drafting former political prisoners and troublemakers, and tossing them in with voluntary recruits to the regular military. This step had been taken in anticipation of needing a large army of occupation in the restive regions. But with the success of the paramilitary diversions, the Federal government found itself with e large land army that didn’t have a whole to do. A nice little war in the Southwest looked like a win-win proposition; no need to test the resolve of conscripts that might defect to the insurgency, and an opportunity to install a friendly government in Mexico City, one that might restart oil exports to the USA. 

The EUM also looked at the coming war with something approaching glee. The Mexican military had just wrapped up three years of grueling fighting against the western narcos. Not only was the revolutionary army well-trained and experienced, it was ideologically committed to the fight and in possession of about 100,000 prisoners of war. Furthermore, the Mexican Army had gotten quite adept at asymmetric warfare, and had no intention to fight the US on territory of their choosing. Mexico couldn’t field or afford a high-tech air force, so they would use satellite disruption and shoulder-fired missiles to take out advanced weapons platforms like the F-35, F-47 and semi-autonomous killer drones. On land, the Mexican Army refined a system of camouflaging logistics convoys and assault columns to evade detection by remote surveillance drones fighting the narcos, often by integrating their movements into civilian traffic patterns. The tactic resulted in civilian deaths, but it also allowed them to hit the cartels seemingly at will. 

While the US government spluttered outrage in any international venue that might have them, the Mexican government pre-positioned military assets inside US territory, disguised as routine commerce crossing the southern border. While this may seem incredible, that the US government would allow such an obvious violation of its sovereignty, one must remember a number of factors worked against the US in the lead up to the 10 Month War. First, the aforementioned depopulation left behind mostly people who weren’t interested in continue oversight by DC. Second, the decade of repression and the violence of the Shining City Movement left a great many people pushed out of the formal economy and more than willing to hide weapons and supplies for the Mexican Army. Third, the special operations missions carried out by the US government against the cartels in the early 2030s left the regular Mexican military with both a clear roadmap of how the US military operated, and the inter-service rivalries and vulnerabilities it would exploit in the coming conflict. 

The Ten Month War

On September 16th, ostensibly in observance of Independence Day, the revolutionary government of the EUM requests and requires all citizens of the republic shut off their household appliances and light candles and hold street festivals. This is done both to give the celebrations a very 1810 aesthetic, but also to allow deployment of the Chupacabra Weapon System. In late 2039, fearing capture, Professor Schmidt passed the technology underlying the Suitcase EMP to the EUM. While he ended up evading capture, the technology allowed Mexico to build a better iteration of the suitcase EMP, which could be mounted on a UAV. In the days before kicking off the war, the EUM launched a host of UAVs disguised as high-altitude weather balloons. With the orbits timed just right, the UAVs deployed, targeting communications nodes across the expected theater of operations. Unlike the low-power suitcase variety, these weapons destroyed the electronics inside their targets. With all electronics in northern Mexico shut off at the time, under the cover of Independence Day celebrations, facilities on the Mexican side of the border suffer no collateral damage. 

When communications and electricity comes back on at midnight, Mexico has, briefly, complete communication superiority. Specific orders are transmitted across the border, and soldiers disguised as civilians launch attacks on both military facilities as well as capturing civilian infrastructure. With attacks behind them, a communications blackout, and more than a few conscripts not wanting to fight for the US, military resistance along the border crumbles and fragments within two days. Regular Mexican Army units cross into every border state, often to the cheers, or at least quiet approval, of local populations. But wars aren’t won in two days, and the regular US military strikes back. Aircraft from across Texas and Oklahoma fly south, intent on targeting any column of vehicles that looks even remotely military. But the Mexican government recovered and recharged many of the Chupacabras they deployed, and launched them again. From high altitude platforms, the Chupacabras targeted passing manned aircraft with EMP blasts, disabling targeting systems, and in many cases, the avionics of the attack aircraft. It takes the US military nearly a week to recognize the weather balloons as weapons platforms. At that point, they manage to shoot most of them down, but as is often the goal of asymmetric warfare, the cost of the countermeasures far outweighs the cost of the threat. And with no clear air superiority, and soldiers often unwilling to leave prepared defenses and attack the enemy, the US military finds itself in an unusual position: they do not know how to quickly prosecute this war. 

Who needs fighter jets that cost $100 million a pop
when kamikaze drones cost $2 grand? 

Adding to the information blackout on the battlefield, along with the Mexican Army came a million refugees who’d fled the US in the years after the General Strike. These people both aided Mexico in sabotaging US information infrastructure and conducted cyber-attacks, and helped set up new government structures in areas liberated by the Mexican Army. And since more than a few of them came from these border regions, local populations didn’t view them as occupiers. Indeed, many greeted both the Mexican Army and the US refugees as liberators. And as US counter-attacks increased, the refugees threw themselves into building defenses and even manning the trenches, launching drones, and generally aiding the soldiers of the EUM in any way they could. The front lines stabilized by the winter of 2041, running along the Colorado River in Texas, then across the Permian Basin to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in northern New Mexico, to the Grand Canyon in Northern Arizona, then down through the Central Valley in California. Both sides settled in for what looked to be a drawn out war of attrition, when gray snow began to fall on both sides. Unlike the previous winter, which was cold due to the methane burn-offs in the Arctic, but not out of line with pre-2000 winters, this one will be one for the record books. 

The Winter of ’41 (and ’42)

The Canadian successor states have had a relatively stable run up til the Winter of ’41. And yes, they will capitalize it in the near future because the experience becomes pivotal to the future identities of the Last Best West (their marketing term, not mine). Yes, the collapse of the political order was disruptive and challenging, but compared to the repression and exploitation in the United States, and the revolutionary violence required of the Joventud movement to restore order in Mexico, the people of Canada didn’t suffer near as much. 

The methane explosions of the previous year certainly caused a host of problems, from falling ash disrupting air travel and acidifying open bodies of water, only about 5% of the tundra burned. The amount of square miles burned across the Arctic Ocean in Siberia was greater, but as a percentage, the losses were about the same. The high temperatures of the summer of 2040 didn’t reach the highs of 2039, but the damage beneath the permafrost persisted. When the summer of 2041 heated up, the tundra bubbled, boiled, then boiled over. Massive veins of methane locked in the frozen earth heated, expanded, and burned the northern third of the Arctic to the ground. Indeed, some footage, shot by remote drones funded by the Europeans and Japanese, appeared to show the ground itself on fire.

It wouldn't be a dystopian scenario without a lot
of air pollution, would it?

Thick black ash cloaked the polar region, but stayed north largely due to the jet stream. As the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun, the jet stream moved south, weakened, and then almost failed. The frigid clouds reached as far south as Mexico City and New Delhi. The layer of ash ruined sensitive electronics, shut down air travel globally, and ruined a great many crops right at harvest time. The ash and smoke also killed millions. Anyone with respiratory illnesses, and many with respiratory systems weakened by age or not yet developed, got sick, developed pneumonia, and a great many, died. Statisticians would later link the Winters of '41 and ’42 to a tripling of the average death rate around the world. Roughly 320 million people went to early graves over the course of 2042 and 2043. That number probably undercounts the number who died early from respiratory complications of the Years of Black Ash. This event pushed the global population back below 8 billion, a number it likely reached in 2023.

The effects in Canada were particularly pronounced. Fall harvests failed, both due to mechanical issues and plummeting, erratic temperatures. The elderly, the very young, and the infirm died in such numbers that mass graves became a common sight. In many documented cases, grandparents would be buried alongside newborn grandchildren. Of the 45 million people living in former Canada, almost 10 million, about 1 in 4, died in 18 months. By the summer of 2044, almost no one in former Canada was older than 65.

Modern problems require 19th century solutions!

The impact was not evenly distributed, either. With older, more urban populations in Ontario, Quebec and the United Maritimes, the death rate reached 35%, depopulating large swathes of these new states and completely destabilizing them. Even in the Athabasca Union, the death rate ran 25%. Only Pacific Columbia experienced the lowest death rate, at about 20%. The stress and trauma of watching the sun vanish for weeks at a time, while neighbors drowned in the fluids in the lungs, mentally broke some people driving them to wander into the forest in the hopes of dying, while others recoiled in such horror they literally shut themselves in their houses and never set foot outside again. But among a not-insignificant portion of the population, the reaction to this tragedy mirrored the reactions of their (mostly) European ancestors to the Black Death. Doomsday cults, evangelical movements, and public hedonism exploded in popularity across the population. Mass hysteria became the order of the day, and only the most remote hermits or those who buried themselves in work in the oil fields and the farms, avoided it. Families splintered, communities turned on each other, and violence became so common, that only mounties in full tradition red garb and riding in large units on what might be described as war horses, could restore any amount of order. 

Sigh. The AI images make a comeback...

On the positive side of the ledger, future historians would find evidence that the Athabasca Union, Pacific Columbia and Ontario had been on the brink of war over control of exports of the tar sands. The Winter of ’41 ended these chances, both by killing the leaders planning on war, and triggering internal chaos. With the failure of mechanized farming, many who kept their wits offered their hands to local farmers to bring in the meager crops and keep alive farms which might have otherwise failed due to economic pressures of the break up of the Canadian federal government. Indeed, the two most iconic symbols to come out of these dark days were not self-flagellants or ominous doctors in plague masks, but of a figure wearing a cloth over their mouth and nose, wielding a hand scythe, bringing in what crops they could. and the mountie, bravely riding forward to salvage what they could of a civilized nation. As much as these two winters were a time of darkness and freezing, out of them came communities committed to nurturing the land and committed to peace between the 5 new nations. This resolve would prove pivotal over the next 60 years.

The Treaty of Austin

The impact of the frigid winters of the early 2040s on the continent cannot go overstated. The air pollution grinds many aspects of industrial life to a halt, none more important than the damage done to the air conditioning systems of the massive server farms that keep US DollarCoin encrypted. As fans and motors fail, servers overheat and, in a few instances, literally catch fire. The value of the DollarCoin collapses, pushing the price of international imports to the US sky high, first doubling, then tripling. With the combination of brain drain and trashing of the US education system, more and more high-tech goods must be imported from Western Europe, Japan, India and Brazil. Thus, the collapse of imports both erases the edge US corporations and their government subsidiary has over foreign rivals like the EUM and the Canadian successor states, as well as the edges they hold over their own citizens.

Somewhere on that bridge, a very chagrined US Secretary of State 
is signing a treaty, while the EUM Secretary of State tries very hard not to smirk. 

And there’s nothing rich backers hate more than losing a competitive edge. Well, that and losing money. This disgruntlement with the government reaches a head when the US military cannot defeat the EUM forces within a few weeks, and the situation devolves into a stalemate. While the USA still possessed a larger economy, population, and military, the demand for immediate gratification both by the population and the powerful, demands a quick end to the war. A significant faction of the billionaire class, a few dozen people, decide the time has come for the Reactionary Party to face a real challenge. They begin funding the minority Demonstration Party again, and even arraign for a peace talks to begin between the US government and the EUM. The two parties sign the Treaty of Austin in May, 2042.

Before covering electoral politics, we should go over the terms of the treaty, which are surprisingly few. The US agrees to recognize EUM control of Texas south of the Colorado River, the entirety of New Mexico and Colorado, and agrees to the demilitarization and mutual administration of California. That’s it. No reparations, no renegotiation of trade or legal agreements. A simple land swap. The thorniest issues surrounding California and water rights along the (western) Colorado River get kicked to conference, to be held after the next US presidential election. 

The week after the signing of the treaty, the Demonstration Party announces it will field candidates to challenge Reactionary candidates for every seat and district in the upcoming midterm elections. Despite the gerrymandering, reduced voter rolls and restrictive voting laws cannot save the Reactionary Party in November 2042, nor 2044. By the inauguration, the Demonstration Party holds the White House, both houses of Congress, and a majority of state governors mansions. The oligarchs who bankrolled the whole operation pat themselves on the back, certain that this change in electoral window dressing won’t effect their power or wealth. After all, they’ve traded one set of lap dogs for another. 

In the EUM, the Treaty of Austin is greeted with muted approval. The war effort pushed the government to the limit of popular support, and drove down the value of the peso to lows not seen since the late 2020s. Once again, the population remains skeptical the new government can make the peace last. As the decade rolls on and the US seems unable or unwilling to retake the lost territory, the value of the peso stabilizes. The government moves forward building a canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, compete with the perpetually under repair Panama Canal. Most important, open elections and a more open rule of law replaces revolutionary expedience and quick justice. By 2045, the Mexican economy has stabilized at about a third the size of the US economy, but roughly matching the US on a per-capita basis. The same foreign commentators who swore up and down the revolution would fail, now write breathless articles proclaiming the arrival of the Mexican Century. We will see if that pans out, but next we will check in with our four protagonists.