Decade of the Shining City Pt. 1 - The Bigger Picture: 2036-2040

Before We Get Started

It has been a few weeks since I last posted. Some of that has to do with personal schedule, but some of it has to do with a changing focus of what I’ve been writing. First, we got started line editing (the process of making sure each line of a book makes sense, both stylistically and with other lines of the book) Inequality by Design:How a Rigged Economy Fractures America, and What We Can Do About It, the upcoming non-fiction book co authored by myself and Dr. Ryan Mattson. As a result, my time available to muse about the direction of the future became somewhat constrained. Second, in discussing it with Ryan, he and I agreed that posts in support of the book ought to stop around 2060, which is the same cut off we use in the book when sketching out scenarios of the near-term future of the United States. To that end, I will put the larger project of sketching out the course of the coming century. And in the spirit of being a candle in the darkness, I will point the project to a more hopeful, detailed sketch of the future. I will follow the current self-imposed format of taking the future in five-year chunks and sussing out a more hopeful scenario, as well as illustrating the impact such a more positive path would have on our four characters.

An internet search really came through with this one.

Another point I’d like to briefly discuss is the term “Shining City” which I’ve slapped on the terrorist umbrella movement with opposes the oligarchic government of the near future United States. The name derives from a sermon titles “A Model of Christian Charity” given by one John Winthrop (probably), en route to Massachusetts from England in late 1630. Setting aside the scholarship around whether Winthrop wrote the sermon, or even gave it, the sermon is often attributed to him, and took on a near mythic status as an early founding document of American exceptionalism. In the original text, the soon-to-be-founded Boston, Massachusetts was NOT referred to as a “shining city on a hill.” Here’s the original text:

“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”

No, the task of turning the founding of a hotbed of American liberalism into a quasi-religious moment of divine providence fell to one Ronald Regan. History certainly has a sense of humor. 

Image is for context, not endorsement...

More to the point, I chose this re-invention of the city on a hill, both because history moves in funny ways, and because I would guess that an electrical engineering professor fired from his position at a state university in the American Midwest might look back on the 1980s as a golden age. An era when America balanced government power with private industry. An era when America hadn’t lost its moral standing both to its citizens and around the world. And, most likely, this was an era when a 50-something professor would probably have lived through, though as a child or teenager. For our fictitious Professor Schmidt, America in the 1980s might have been full of Saturday morning cartoons and trick or treating. Or maybe fireworks, the Fourth of July, and teenage, exploration, shall we say… 

Any way you slice it, America of the 1980s might not have been the place of de-industrialization and the rapid decline of the working class. It wouldn’t have included an AIDs epidemic seemingly ignored by the government because it affected the three Hs: Haitians, homosexuals and heroin addicts. or US-backed anti-communist dictatorships that were, to put it charitably, as bad as the disease they purported to cure. For a man who grew up unaware of the shortcomings, such an America would have been a place to be proud of, a time to emulate, and one decidedly at odds with the cascade of authoritarian ‘reforms’ which by the 2030s have shredded the Bill of Rights and shackled Americans to machines which serve only one master: capital.

And here, the topic turns back to Winthrop’s speech. In it, he highlights the need for the new colony to put at the center of both individual and collective endeavors, four values: exceptionalism - that the people on the ships sailing towards Boston have been chosen by God to be an example to the rest of the world, charity - both to the poor but ALSO to the community as a whole, communalism - that members of a Puritan community have different things to offer both each other and the community as a whole, and unity - both in the purpose of serving God, but also in women as a binding force in the community. Frankly, the sermon offers a little something for everyone, as we will see quite disparate groups participate in the Shining City movement. I’ll let you go back over those groups and see if you can guess which parts of the sermon appeal to whom. But I’ve gone on long enough about what some English guy might have written four hundred years ago. Let’s get back to the story. 

A Shining City on a Hill

In the years since the Midterm Massacre, the Shining City Movement dropped out of collective discourse. This is perhaps not surprising, considering the victims of the attacks were largely limited to oligarchs and their pet politicians. There were two high-profile gun battles as Federal agents tracked down leads and closed in on targets. And a certain streaming service made a bio-pic about one of the militants who died in a shootout with Federal agents on a ranch in rural eastern Kentucky. But despite the lack of media attention, the Shining City Movement did not go away.

Instead they went underground, building suitcase EMPs and making clandestine contacts throughout the shadowy network of former political prisoners and petty criminals who have been released in the weeks after the General Strike. Because they suck to a strict discipline of face-to-face contact and no internet-dependent technology, Shining City largely avoided official electronic surveillance. And because they rarely engaged in any open criminal activity, they rarely came in contact with law enforcement. Thanks to the development of a face recognition-thwarting powder known technically as pixel dust distillate 37, or colloquially as pixie dust, even known members of Shining City kept off official radars.

#freedom

In addition to methods of evading surveillance, Shining City members were encouraged to start or join mutual aid societies to help the poor and working classes, and newly impoverished middle classes, survive in the face of perpetually higher prices and perpetually lower wages. But Professor Schmidt, who designed the suitcase EMPs and who stood behind the Shining City Movement, was not going away. With the start of the 2036 political season, it became painfully obvious to anyone paying any amount of attention that the Reactionary Party was not going to allow the ‘free and fair’ elections. They employed all the traditional methods: throwing hundreds of thousands of people off voter rolls, closing precincts that might favor the Demonstration Party,. banning vote-by-mail, restricting or eliminating early voting, and old-fashioned intimidation. This, combined with the Demonstration Party’s absolute inability to offer any sort of coherent campaign or platform that might improve the lives of many people, promised to drive voter turnout to all new lows.

Being a distributive organization, Shining City chose to simply give affiliated groups a date to launch their attacks and left the specific planning and even the targets of said attacks up to those groups. It should be made clear that these groups were not ideologically united in any way, shape or form. Some groups, mostly in the mountain west, were largely libertarian in ideology. In the big cities of the formerly industrial Midwest, the groups were often left-ish in background, or the remnants of once-strong unions. On the East and West Coast, the affiliated organizations were openly left-wing in their economic outlook, some even including unreconstructed communists. In the Deep South, affiliated groups like the Memphis Debt Collectors were often populist and anti-oligarchic but completely heterodox in politics. Indeed, with the example of the Memphis Debt Collectors, the three core members completely eschewed electoral politics and chose simply to target those who used debt to victimize, abuse and exploit the underclasses. Other Deep South organizations were evangelical Christians who saw the Reactionary Party both as morally bankrupt, and at odds with the teachings of New Testament Jesus. 

So when the date came in late March 2036, 36 cities and an additional 112 counties saw terror attacks of various kinds which targeted high value economic infrastructure, militarized police stations, and most commonly, politicians at fundraisers. Some of the attacks failed spectacularly; one misguided group attempted to blow up the Grand Coulee Dam, while others were scattershot, gruesome affairs including car bombings of strip malls where payday lenders operated, as in several suburbs in Texas. But a good many of the attacks were very specifically targeted either at high-ranking law-enforcement officials, big money donors or politicians. We will touch on the Memphis Debt Collectors actions that kicked off the decade of the Shining City in Allison’s section next week.

This string of attacks had both a desired and undesired effect on the general population of the United States. On what might be considered the positive side, the attacks sparked real popular protest in the streets, and real attempts by citizens to take back local and state governments from the oligarchs. A great many people felt that at last somebody was doing something about the police state which had replaced America's representative democracy. On the downside, more indiscriminate attacks led both to vicious law enforcement reprisals, as well as a feeling among some people that the Shining City Movement had gone too far or was too indiscriminate.

Perhaps most crucially, the Shining City Movement failed to take two key steps in achieving the goal of overthrowing the existing order. First, no one in the established political realm, whether Reactionary or Demonstration affiliated, could bring themselves to endorse or even to openly acknowledge that the anger which drove the Shining Cities Movement sprung from legitimate grievance. In the long run, this failure to achieve political legitimacy hamstrung the ability of Shining City to actually topple or even seriously challenge the existing order. Second, and perhaps most crucially, the Shining City Movement failed to build an alternative power structure which could replace the failed state that was the federal government and their corporate backers. Yes, they made half-hearted attempts at boosting mutual-aid societies and co-opting the rank and file of unions and churches, but all these efforts gave individual affiliates a place to hide. At no point could Shining City point to a set of new institutions and say ‘trust these groups, they can replace the broken institutions of kleptocracy.’ All successful revolutions, from Russia to the Americas, take this crucial step. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In the short run, cities and counties across the United States experienced everything from low-grade insurgency to open warfare. This trend was particularly pronounced in the Mountain West and in the Upper Midwest. For several years in the wake of the Shining City attacks, states around the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains were functionally ungovernable. Even areas of the Great Plains, Deep South and East Coast which saw less sustained anti-government violence, in many places federal troops or security forces could not safely operate for fear of IEDs and guerrilla attacks.

This is what Detroit looks like now. Imagine it
after four years of car bombings and shootouts...

Unfortunately for the Shining City movement, by 2040 a lack of coordinated action and a lack of viable alternative, allowed the federal government to push back, divide and conquer the openly insurgent regions. This hollow victory for the Federal government was not quite as triumphant as official websites would have had the population believe. In some places like the Mountain West, formal government control was never really reestablished. In the large industrial cities both of the Upper Midwest and Texas, employers often had to accept that unpopular policies, cuts in wages or elimination of benefits, would lead both to work slow downs and in some cases, direct physical violence against the ownership class. Perhaps most troubling, in the Deep South, the divide and conquer tactics of the Federal government went back to the old Jim Crow playbook. Gangs of white paramilitaries were given easy access to surveillance assets and in some cases official government backing and were allowed to commit any number of atrocities against communities of color and any whites associated with insurgency. 

By 2040 American cities took on a distinctive post-insurgency look and feel. At the core would be a tiny central business district housing AI servers which managed large corporations. The central business districts were populated by high paid software engineers and corporate executives and were, in most cases, physically walled off from the surrounding inner ring slums. The slums extended out into suburbs built in the 1980s, 90s and 2010s, which would be packed full of failing infrastructure and multiple families living in single homes. Beyond this would be the ex-urban ring where those who served the central business district, but couldn’t afford to live in it, would often congregate around cheaply built apartments and ride in buses, sometimes protected by police escort, to work in the central business district every day. 

For those who gave up on urban life, which was a not insignificant portion of the population, many chose to move to smaller cities or even out into rural areas in search of food, health or some form of stability outside of the spiraling violence of the urban cores. Unfortunately, a great many of these people ended up only employable as day laborers on farms when automated vehicles could not properly harvest crops. In the decades to come, these people would form a de facto peasantry that more resembled indentured servants or sharecroppers than citizens of a free nation living in what was supposed to be a high-tech 21st Century. By 2040, the oligarchy appeared triumphant.

La Joventud Está Loca

In 2036, the situation in Mexico is precarious for everyone. In the Yucatán, the drought and famine continues, made worse by police and military units who are no longer loyal to the central government setting themselves up as local warlords. Or at least they try. In many cases they are very quickly overthrown, overrun and run out of town by the population of the Yucatán itself. In the west, the cartels have seized control of the number of states but with their diminished cash flow from the United States and the defection of many military officers to the side of the revolutionaries, it remains to be seen if they will be able to stay in power. 

The Joventud Movement wastes no time overthrowing the established order. As mentioned previously, their view of the 1910 revolution is that Mexico did not go far enough and they do not intend to repeat that mistake. Large businesses are seized by the government and broken up then turned over to worker-run cooperatives. Large land holdings are seized and broken up, and turned over to the two thirds of farmers with small landholdings (25 acres or less). Restarting production of Mexico's Cantarele oil field in the Gulf is even made a priority of the new government; government-run Pemex is broken up and turned into smaller worker-run co-ops. While this last move does not immediately lead to more oil production, it also does not lead to a catastrophic continued loss of production as predicted by foreign observers. 

While they're revisiting
the shortcomings of 1910,
I hope they bring back the
mustaches and headgear...

All this radical change absolutely destroys the value of the peso on international currency markets. But thanks to agricultural exports and a stabilization of oil production, Mexico is still able to trade for many high-tech goods it cannot produce itself. Additionally these seizures, while opposed by the reactionary government in the United States do not lead to a shut down in cross-border trade. As a result Mexico's middle manufacturing capabilities continue to bring in foreign reserves and the economic situation stabilizes.

In this climate of instability a decade earlier the cartels might have been able to sponsor an overthrow of the federal government themselves. But with their diminished cash flow and their attempts to move into, if not legitimate, then at least open governance leaves them in a more precarious situation than the central government itself. With many of their fighters loyal only to money and that money drying up zealous supporters of the Joventud government and the revolutionary spirit that takes hold in the military allows the United States of Mexico to re-conquer the breakaway states in a matter of years. 

    By 2040 western Mexico is largely under the control of Mexico City. And while it cannot permanently stamp out the cartels, the revolutionary government decides to go one step further to try and permanently break the power of the cartels. In 2039 the president of Mexico signs a bill legalizing the production, distribution and sale of all “intoxicating products.” This would seem to create an opening for the cartels, but the revolutionary government is quite zealous and quite insistent that anyone partaking in this new legal drug trade cannot have a criminal background and in the spirit of broader economic reform must be a worker owned cooperative. We will cover the longer-term impacts of this move next week.

As mentioned last week many Mexican citizens take a wait-and-see approach to the new government. Foreign observers are genuinely baffled that the government manages to stay in power through 2040. What they fail to grasp is that Mexico's geography lends itself to being an international power and the people of Mexico themselves are tired of living in the shadow of their northern neighbor. The revolutionary government does not attempt to reinsert itself in the Yucatán and even accept the union of Belize, the Yucatán states in Guatemala, which formed the Los Tres Paises Unidos, or what locals simply call “El Trio.” In response to the destruction of a few key locks in the Panama Canal by the Shining City, the revolutionary government even declares that it will use convict labor to build a new canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which will be both a joint project between the new government and El Trio. 

Give Me a Home, Where the Polar Bears Roam

The situation in the northern third of the continent gets even more complicated over the second half of the 2030s. The various successor governments in Canada have a number of problems without easy solutions. In the east, age pyramids mean that the populations of both Ontario and Quebec as well as the maritime provinces are rapidly aging. For the plains and mountain provinces, the age pyramid is less dire, but the ability to transport goods such as agricultural and petroleum products depends on coastal ports to which they no longer have access. This leads Pacific Columbia and the Athabasca Union to support insurgent groups in the Mountain West and the West Coast United States. The goal here is two-fold: regime security and access to the Pacific. This initially seems counterintuitive as Vancouver is a port city and should allow easy trade with east Asia. But in the years of instability that proceeded to break up of Canada and the saber rattling of the reactionary government in the United States, it became clear to the British Colombians that they could not rely on safe access to the Pacific.

With this thing next door, can you blame
them for not feeling safe in their own waters?

So when the Shining City movement launches their attacks in 2036, agents from the two Canadian successor states slipped across the border and began providing any sort of support they could to the rebels. This goes a long way to explain why the Mountain West insurgencies managed to keep federal control at arms length. Yes the mountain's physical geography helped, but so did a great deal of Canadian assistance. With federal military forces perpetually operating on high alert within the United States itself the Reactionary Party eventually realize that it could not enforce its will on the successor states.

By 2039 both the Athabasca Union and Pacific Columbia seem to have reached a degree of stability when the hottest summer on record in the Arctic shattered the previous 2033 records. This hottest summer triggers what many climate scientists feared: the eruption of methane frozen under the permafrost. All summer Canada north of the arctic circle quite literally explodes. Massive wildfires destroyed millions of acres of coniferous forest and tundra. These explosions of methane are matched by similar releases in Siberia on the other side of the Arctic. In what counterintuitively seems like a horrible disaster humanity, actually dodges a much larger bullet. The methane releases catch fire. Instead of potentially triggering a runaway greenhouse effect, the fires rage all summer and fall. In the winter of 2039-2040, snow and rain turn gray across the Northern Hemisphere, and temperatures plunge to record lows not seen since the 1970s. This isn’t actually that cold, compared to historical measures, but for many born since 2000, it is literally the coldest winter they’ve ever lived through. Next week, we will catch up with our four protagonists, and see how they ride out, or even shape, the events of the late 2030s. 

As the Tear Gas Clears Pt. 2 - Keeping It Personal

Marty Junior

Marty puts himself first in line to shake the governor’s hand at the recognition ceremony hosted in Ann Arbor. Michigan’s governor recognizes the key role played by the Office of Remote Surveillance in putting down the strikes, and elevates the agency to the level of department. Marty's boss’s boss becomes  the Secretary of Surveillance. The ripple effect of promotions, and the governor’s handshake, earns Marty a plum day-shift supervisor spot. Marty rejoices at the prospect of spending nights and weekends with Tina, Trey, and newborn Tonya. 

Ann Arbor, Michigan
As noted, the tear gas has cleared.

The family settles into a comfortable, and what they hope will be, stable life. Trey needs the stability, as he is diagnosed with developmental delays, which were likely inherited from the male side of the family. His grandfather had to cope with dyslexia, and though Marty Junior never got a formal diagnosis, he joked that his love of numbers and logic problems stemmed from borderline autism. Domestic life takes priority over profession for Marty Junior and family, as the upheavals around the General Strike fade in the rear view mirror.

Until Detroit hosts a mega donor event in the summer of 2030. Marty is off-duty the evening of the Midterm Massacre. Detroit is the scene of the botched attack that devolves into a hostage situation, so Marty and his day shift team get called in. They manage to track down the extended family of a Shining City fighter who allowed a brief lapse in ‘no technology’ discipline. State Police round up the extended family, which is brought in and threatened with execution if Shining City won’t lay down their arms. The fighter in question agrees to surrender, but the rest of the group refuses. The governor demands a show of force, so police storm the venue. The ensuing gun battle leaves 127 dead, including the extended family of the fighter who attempts to surrender.

With this successful detective work, Marty gets promoted to Deputy Director for the Upper Peninsula in 2031. While the wife and kids bemoan moving to Marquette, they soon fall back into a comfortable routine, albeit with few of the educational services Trey needs. Marty complains to Tina that he should have received a more prestigious post, but she reminds him to play the long game. They don’t know it, but out of the populated areas of the state actually serves Marty’s career. He receives little of the blame for the intelligence failures of 2036.

Jillian

Jillian gets less sleep than she did during residency in the wake of the General Strike. Their son, Vern, named for the Vernal Equinox on which he was born, is a needy boy wracked by separation anxiety and night terrors. During middle-of-the-night changing of soiled bedsheet, she must remind herself how terrified the boy was he would never see his dad again, or that the men in blue suits would come back for him. 

Ashtabula, Ohio
You can almost see Canada from here!

And Jillian loses sleep every time Chris gets out of bed. Due to the torture during his imprisonment, Chris falls into a crippling addiction to legal painkillers. Jillian always writes him fresh scripts and clings to hope that he will clean up. But social welfare and drug treatment programs are not funded by the government and are ruinously expensive for all but the most well-off. If anyone who keeps track of the paperwork notices the trend, she’s never called into question over it. 

Chris’s shoddy bookkeeping drives the clinic closer to net loss every year, which affects the family’s bottom line, as well as providing another source of depression for Chris, which positively reinforces his addiction. Of course, this net loss is only on the books. Many of Jillian's patients must make payment through barter rather than formal crediting and debiting. Fortunately for Jillian and the staff, in the wake of the General Strike, they voted to turn the clinic into an employee-owned co-operative. When a patient must offer barter to pay for medical services, someone on the staff likely needs whatever goods or skills the patient has to offer. 

Jillian gives birth to a second child, daughter Autumn in 2032, during a year and a half streak of sobriety for Chris. On warm summer afternoons, the family walks along the shores of Lake Erie. Jillian looks north with no small degree of longing. She attended medical school in Montreal, and speaks fluent Québecois French. The couple figures they could move north and fit right in. But with the disillusion of the Canadian state, legal crossing becomes ever more difficult. For a couple still clinging to the belief that they operate in a world of just rules and laws, illegal immigration remains out of the question. 

Bobby

Arriving in Tennessee with a fistful of dollars and no real prospects doesn’t much bother Bobby. Growing up, his father worked 12 hour shifts as a manager at a burger joint. His pay went to ever-increasing contributions to an HSA that never quite covered the bills for treating his worsening diabetes. As a result, Bobby spiraled away from his nuclear family, couch surfing and finding kindred spirits amongst other high school slackers. As the train rolls to a stop in a changing yard on the north side of Memphis, Bobby feels good about his chances.

Frisco Yard, Memphis, Tenn.
This picture is over 50 years old. 
Train yards don't change much.

Bobby finds employment at a fried-fish restaurant in the midst of hiring staff to fill holes left by the strike. Bobby took seriously his grandpa’s admonition to learn to cook, because cooks never starve, and lands a job on the line. The rest of the staff treat him like a plague rat, until a young hostess, Jeannie, figures out that he was in the city for the Battle of Louisville. That Bobby sat in jail as the bullets and drone-grenades flew doesn’t matter to her so much as the residual scent of tear gas and delousing powder.

When Bobby receives his first paycheck, he’s shocked that his wages receive the same deduction for lost potential profit as everyone else. Bobby initially reacts sourly, but a common refrain from the Louisville strike keeps ringing in his head; “they withhold something from all of us.” Bringing it up to other staff leads to stony silence at first, until Bobby makes clear that he wants a solution for the whole crew, not an exemption for himself. They know management won’t change the policy, and striking is now illegal. Perhaps rashly, perhaps because of their budding romance, Jeannie asks if Bobby would carry the message for the staff to the debt collectors.

In a dark alley behind a boarded up tire factory, Bobby meets a young woman. She asks a few questions, gives simple instructions, then ends the meeting after five minutes. Bobby returns to work, on the look out for the information the debt collector requested. He discovers that that the owner of the restaurant faces financial pressure from his principal creditor, a wealthy owner of multiple franchises in the Memphis area. Bobby scribbles this info on a scrap of paper and leaves it in a small tube on the back of a bench in a bus stop shelter.

A few weeks later, headlines scream about a suspicious explosion that leveled the house of a local financier. The police arrive at the restaurant and arrest seven members of the staff, including Jeannie. While they have no specific evidence, they hold them without charges. Four of those arrested return to work a few days later, but the other three including Jeannie, are held an extra five days. With a split lip and swollen black eyes, she can barely keep eye contact as she breaks up with Bobby and tells him he needs to leave town. Reluctantly, Bobby packs his bag again and rides the rails south, this time winding up in New Orleans. 

Allison

Allison walks from her crash pad to the restaurant with confidence. People in the neighborhood giver her friendly, almost knowing smiles along the way. At work, the new owner discontinues wage garnishments over lost profits, and even shares some of the profit directly with the staff. Rumors swirl around the Firestone Park neighborhood that anyone with a predatory creditor ought to visit the fried-chicken place on Millington Road. If you leave an empty pack of cigarettes, with a name and address tucked inside, at the booth next to the kitchen entrance, you might get a paper note tacked to your door with a time and location to talk to one of the Memphis Debt Collectors.  

Abandon Firestone Plant, Memphis, TN
Looks like a great place to build an IED...

Federal laws passed by the Reactionary Party remove ever more categories of debt from the list of what can be discharged through bankruptcy, including medical bills, home and even auto loans. The trickle of empty cigarette packs, sometimes appearing only once every few months, becomes a weekly occurrence. Soon, Allison, and her two accomplices have more work than they can handle. They take a quiet break from threatening and murdering creditors in the wake of the bust of Jeannie and her coworkers. This decision comes at a fortunate time, as the police raid the restaurant a few days later. Thanks to a scheduling error, which turned out to be quite intentional on the part of the restaurant’s new manager and owner, neither Allison nor her accomplices were at work that day. 

The staff of the restaurant continue to secretly feed Allison and her two accomplices, and the three begin squatting in an abandoned warehouse, before acquiring a defunct RV on an abandoned lot on the north end of the city. One night in late 2035 Alison answers the door of the RV and finds herself face-to-face with a man who simply introduces himself as “the Professor.”

The man gives them an address and promises that in two weeks time, for one night only, there will be a suitcase EMP in the dumpster out back. If the group takes the device, he will assume they are ready to turn the country back into a shining city on a hill. With that, the Professor disappears into the drizzle and fog of a February night in the Mississippi delta. Two weeks later, with shaking hands, Allison pulls a heavy brown suitcase out of a dumpster. Back at the RV, the trio inspect the device and decide to dig up their stash of ‘faulty’ batteries and ‘expired’ blasting caps, to take one last shot at toppling the oligarchy.

As the Tear Gas Clears Pt. 1 - The Bigger Picture

Before We Begin

As often happens, both life and the creative process can muddle up what one is trying to do. In my case, kids getting sick and other projects, constrained time I could dedicate to the blog. Also, as I worked through the first five years, I’ve come to realize that telling the stories of the four characters is as important as the broad tends and the snark directed at the dumbpocalypse the ruling classes built for us. As a result, I’m going to further break down the narrative. In addition to switching from ten year to five year chunks, I plan to write one post outlining the broad trends and the monumental sweep of history we are likely to get, and another about our four protagonists as they navigate the near future. And we should be clear that, while all four will make decisions that you, dear reader, might make differently. These four are, like everyone else, the protagonists of their own stories. Also, given the upcoming line editing process of the book Dr. Ryan Mattson and I are writing Inequality by Design: A People's Guide to Overhauling Our Rigged Economy, I will have less time to dedicate to the blog. I’m also considering ending the narrative with the initial 50-year time horizon I’d outlined, and coming back to the second half of the Long 21st Century after publication of the book, which is still on track for a July 2025 release. Mark your calendars. 

The Second Half of a Decade of Poor Choices

That puts in mildly...

The failure of the 2028 General Strike leads to a number of aftershock events, some of which will take on a lives of their own. In the immediate aftermath, the country holds nearly 20,000 funerals to bury strikers and security personnel. The failure of the strike and ensuing crackdown also triggers a wave of political refugees crossing both northern and southern borders. 300,000 US citizens claim political asylum in Canada between 2029 and 2032. Another 750,000 end up in Mexico, mostly in the northern states along the Rio Grande. About 50,000 flee to farther destinations in western Europe or southeast Asia over 2029. Lucky for them, they arrive just in time for the Pan-Eurasian War. Drawing from mostly higher-educated, higher paying professions, these refugees don’t do much of the fighting. They do contribute mightily to the technical and engineering efforts of the European Union and Japanese Commonwealth.

The new European Union.

I'm sure it won't end poorly this time...

In addition to the refugees, more than 3 million US citizens count among those injured, arrested, or both, as a result of the General Strike. This exacerbates the overcrowding of private prisons (where most protestors end up), and swamps an increasingly threadbare healthcare system. Most dismally, the protestors are villainized by politicians and portrayed as economic terrorists in the media. The Reactionary Party seizes on this characterization; they regain control of Congress and hold the Presidency in the November 2028 election. 

But there are knock-on effects which have less obvious, though equally important, effects. Arresting or hospitalizing three million workers triggers a recession, drives ever-more smaller businesses into bankruptcy, and strengthens the economic power of the US oligarchy. The overcrowded prisons force governors to engage in chaotic, mass releases as local and regional economies tip into recession. The mass release of both political and common criminals creates shadowy, and at first informal, networks. These people have axes to grind with the established order, and now have experience with what to, and not to do, to fight it. And these networks extend across international borders.

Speaking of International Borders…

This picture isn't from the southern US border...

In Canada, the 300,000 US refugees are unwelcome. The Canadian federal government has enough problems on their hands without having to feed and house a bunch of rowdy, derisively labeled Yanks and Dodgers. Most of the refugees are working age, and as they receive little-to-no aid from the Canadian government, they have to work to survive. This  ends up giving a boost to the Canadian economy. But unlike pliant American workers who dutifully get back to work, the Yanks and Dodgers are also very much committed to keeping Canada from falling to the same corporate-oligarchic forces which now appear firmly ensconced in power to the south. 

With the opportunity to start from scratch, many found co-ops or work places with strong unions. The Yanks and Dodgers push back hard against the bosses of Canadian firms, who then put pressure on the Federal government to deport the new arrivals. This crackdown pushes the refugees to throw their support and energy behind the confederal factions, as their rhetoric is more populist and anti-authoritarian.  They join ongoing protests that bring the Toronto metro area to a standstill. The isolated federal government in Ottawa sees employees quit in droves and tax receipts from the provinces dry up. By 2034, Canada has effectively broken into 5 successor states: Pacific Columbia, the Athabasca Union, Ontario, Quebec, and the United Maritime Provinces. 

Canada: NASCAR Edition
(Side Note: I tried to get AI to generate something better and the results made me wonder if ChatGPT knows what Canada is...)

        In northeast Mexico, many of the 750,000 US refugees find common cause with the budding Joventud movement, offering their experience with staging low-tech, stand-up strikes that avoid on-line censors and policing. And what is the Joventud movement? It is made up of younger Mexicans fed up with decades of cartel violence and what they see as a Federal government which operates as a US subsidiary. When these young people witness the failure of the US General Strike, they come to the conclusion that mega-businesses now control the US, and Mexico will be next. What starts as small groups of university students and young labor organizers quickly morphs into a revolutionary group which looks to the experience of 1910-1920 and thinks ‘we missed an opportunity and didn’t go far enough.’ Before Joventud can contest the 2030 presidential election, either with ballots or bullets, another group, better organized and much better armed, makes their move. 

The economic turmoil north of the border causes recession in large swaths of the legal Mexican economy, principally in agriculture and mid-level manufacturing. As the US gets poorer, its people import fewer illegal drugs, opting to make them at home instead. The Mexican cartels see their revenues from drug and human trafficking drop by 35%. While the Sinaloa Cartel operated more as a business than a traditional criminal empire, the decades of warfare between the Mexican state and the cartels shattered the Sinaloas, creating a power vacuum in the 2020s. Other cartels like the Zetas, Jalisco and Tijuana move into this vacuum and do quite well for themselves until the 2028 general strike. By 2030, they find themselves forced to move into more traditional spheres of organized crime: racketeering and extortion. Unfortunately for both the leaders of the cartels and the citizens they victimize, violent crime and a violent response from the state pushes the cartels towards bankruptcy. 

At this point, the leader of the Zetas holds a meeting with other cartel leadership, and the group comes to the conclusion that the only way way to beat the state, is to become the state. 

This book is about Tanzania,
but I think Louis XIV's statement
crosses both time and space...

Over the first few weeks of 2030, they seize police stations, government buildings, and most crucially, public utility operations. Government officials that don’t resign or go along with this change in power are, if they’re lucky, dismissed. Many more are simply executed for failing to declare loyalty to the local cartel. Initially, the process runs uninterrupted, resulting in only 800 documented deaths, and the seizure of 10 western states. In response, the United States launches an intervention in northwest Mexico, led mostly by Special Forces conducting clandestine drone strikes and targeting killings. The Reactionary President threatens Mexico with outright invasion if the situation, which the US is actively making worse, isn’t quickly stabilized. This, combined with the humanitarian crisis in the 5 eastern states, leads the sitting Moreno President to declare a state of emergency. 

And these are just people protesting the undermining of democratic institutions through
boring means like cutting funding for election security and poll worker training in 2023.

But the backlash is immediate and swift. The people of central and northern Mexico learn from the failure of the US General Strikers. They spend one day taking walks in the park, and ten days seizing government offices and crucial utility and transportation hubs. Fortunately for them, only the federal police oppose the Joventud Revolution. The military and local police stand by, or actively support the revolutionaries. Within days of declaring the Joventud candidate the new President of Mexico, the revolutionaries consolidate control and are now stuck with the difficult prospect of governing a shaky coalition with two internal rebellions and a threatened international intervention. This, along with a humanitarian crisis and an economy in free-fall. International reporters and pundits give the new government less than a year before being overthrown. But they underestimate the resolve of both Joventud and the willingness of older generations to go along with, or at least fail to oppose, the revolutionary regime. Many in Mexico take a ‘wait and see’ approach, many hoping, in the back of their minds at least, that the new government in Mexico City will be able to put the cartels in their place and bring relief to the Yucatan.

We’ve largely ignored developments in the Caribbean and Central America, so let’s take a quick look at those two regions. In the chaos of the 2028 General Strike, the US government forgot to continue propping up the governments of Haiti and Puerto Rico. By 2035, the Haitians are seven years into self-government sans Yankee meddling. The strongest gang of the current crop vying for control of the country emerged on top after a civil war. Puerto Rico defaulted on its dollar-denominated debt, but without being chained to absurd fiscal policies dictated by Washington, the country is finding its feet as an independent nation for the first time since Spanish conquest in 1508. The Mayan-speaking people of Guatemala and El Salvador are watching the action across the border in Mexico quite intently, as the violence and famine ebbs and flows across their border. 

Back in the United States 

By 2030, most of the residual violence and disruptions from the strikes are over. The Reactionary Party prepares for the midterm elections with an air of glee as trimmed voter rolls and outright disqualification of rival candidates means they are almost certain to maintain their majorities in Congress. But in the shadowy networks of former criminals and former strikers a new movement has emerged. It is the brain child of an out of work engineering professor and it takes its name from the famous speech which described America as “the Shining City on a Hill.” This movement resolves to fight the corporate oligarchy through violence and terror rather than through normal political channels. Because this network is cellular, each operation works independently of the others. Once a goal or target is agreed upon, communications between the groups are severed, with each operating based on local realities, with local resources, rather than relying on electronics, all of which are heavily surveilled by the state. The one connection between them all is a device invented by the professor, and refined during the general strike.

The device itself is referred to as a suitcase EMP, but that's not technically what advice does. Rather than overloading and destroying electronic circuitry the way an electromagnetic pulse would, the suitcase EMP sends out a low-energy signal which disrupts surveillance and communication equipment within a few hundred yards of the device. Electronics within the functional radius of the device begin to malfunction, but they don’t immediately fail as they would in the wake of an EMP. Lights will flicker on and off, cell phones remain on but show no reception, computer screens begin showing distorted images but never quite fail. Shining City plans on this disruption lasting long enough for them to carry out their objectives. Over the summer each cell picks a target and in late July they swing into action. 

Suitcase EMPs are activated near the target areas and heavily armed militants storm into high dollar fundraisers with the express goal of killing both mega-donors and their congressional lackeys. Of the 12 planned attacks, 10 go basically according to plan. The EMPs disrupt communication just long enough for the gunman to get into the donors’ suites, kill their targets, and leave before security forces have a chance to react. Only one of the 12 attacks is disrupted in the hours before it was scheduled to happen. Authorities interview the suspects, who remain tightlipped. One even kills themselves in custody. The local authorities have no idea that this is part of a wider plan. Only one of the attacks does not go according to plan, only because of a last-minute addition of security by an extra paranoid billionaire. The Shining City operatives make it into the facility, but then find themselves in a gun battle with private security. The attack turns into a hostage situation. By the time the tear gas clears, all the attackers, their targets, and many innocent bystanders lay dead, 127 fatalities in all. This number almost doubles the 68 other fatalities in the other 10 attacks that went according to plan. 

This attack becomes known as the Midterm Massacre and triggers what later historians will call a ‘vigorous government response.’ Many of the political prisoners and even common criminals who have been released in the previous year in the wake of the general strike, are now targeted for arrest or, barring that, extrajudicial killings. The oligarchy looks at the paranoia of the billionaire who hired extra security in the days before the attack and decide that further privatization of policing is the order of the day. Pro-corporate media works hard to portray the Shining City movement as a bloodthirsty terrorist organization, but 60% of the population looks at the Shining City movement and thinks, “I wish I had the courage to do that.”

A single murder by handgun is a tragedy,
a thousand murders by spreadsheet is fine, apparently.

In 2032, the Reactionary Party crushes the Demonstration Party and easily wins election. This victory is largely a product of naked voter suppression by further trimming voter rolls as well as open election interference, disqualifying many potential rival candidates. One of the Reactionary Party’s first priorities is to illegalize bankruptcy for private individuals as well as eliminating protections on inheritable debt. Another law allows corporations to vest personhood in artificial intelligence programs, turning corporate personhood from a political fiction into a technical reality. That these programs operate in a manner subservient to corporate boards, and are in no way independently intelligent gets swept under the rug. Corporate boards use these AI programs to tell the public that any ‘tough’ decisions they have to make, for instance closing a factory or laying off office workers, is called for by the AI, and not the voting members of the board. 

Over the next few years the government continues to roll back protections for citizens, turning the bill of rights into a legal fiction. Political-economic decision making becomes ever more the purview of a handful of mostly men living in fabulously wealthy enclaves surrounded by ever-growing slums and shanty towns. The reforms passed by the Reactionary Party really begin to bite; more and more people drop out of the formal economy because the risk of taking and passing on debt outweighs the need for formal employment. In practical terms this means that the US economy shrinks from a high of $29 trillion to just over $25 trillion by 2035. Furthermore, the population declines from 335 million to just over 325 million. This in-formalization of the economy and the detachment of 70% of the population from it means that a serious revolt is brewing amongst the underclasses. While security services disrupt half the cells of Shining City in the years after the Midterm Massacre, the movement has not gone away. Instead, they're busy recruiting allies for 2036, and planning something big.