Positive Reconstruction in 2029

I'd gotten away from posting to this blog, as I've mostly moved the posts from the Positive Reconstruction series to Substack. Ryan and I are still posting regularly to Substack under the title Compounding Fractures, to both promote Inequality by Design, as well as speak on current issues. We have series on Universal Basic Income, State Capitalism, and of course, this fictional series about the future direction of the United States. If any of that interests you, please head over there, peruse what we've written, and subscribe if you like what you read. 

Without further ado, here's the next post in the Positive Reconstruction series: 

2029 - The Eye of the Hurricane

By January 2nd, half a million citizens surround Washington. They carpool, take buses and trains, they sit in cars, crash on friend’s couches, they rent rooms, and some even camp out at parks a day’s walk from the borders of the district. The people bring signs, they bring food, they buy bottles of water for fellow travelers. Some bring hopes and dreams. Some bring cynicism or opportunism. And yes, a great many of them bring guns. The Congressional session for 2029 is scheduled to start January 3rd.

I know, this is from Maryland's Eastern Shore, but a picture of the sunrise on the Winter Solstice is too poetic to pass up.

In the last days of 2024, military bases around the district cancel leave and stock up on MREs. Junior officers and NCOs scour strip clubs and flophouses for the enlisted men and women missing from morning muster. In some units, desertion rates reach 40%. For those still on base, many report to the infirmary. Accident rates spike on bases as troops become desperate to avoid the orders they know will come down. On January 1st, several combat regiments are mobilized and deployed to interchanges along I-495 in Maryland and Virginia, just outside DC. The governors of both states ask the federal government to remove the troops, and get no reply.

Early on the morning of January 3rd, half a million Americans wake up, partake in the early morning rituals of eating breakfast, cleaning up, and start towards the nation’s capital, unsure if they will live to see the sunset. It may seem cliché in an age of global supply chains, information superhighways and trans-national corporations with budgets larger than the GDP of entire countries, but control of the levers of government still matters. America rolled the dice in 2024 and wound up in an era of lawlessness and rampant corruption, both monetary and moral. These things happen fairly regularly to peoples all around the world and throughout time. So on a not-so-chilly January morning, the country rolls the dice one more time.

The notion of who sits in the halls of Congress by the end of the day isn’t just an issue about changing the window dressing at the Capitol. In November, 16 states put secession on the ballot. The language varied a bit from state to state, but most followed the line “if the federal government refuses to seat the lawfully elected senators and congresspeople of this state, will the state consider itself sovereign and independent of federal law?” Yes or No? Of the 16 secession referendums, only one failed. And that one failed because the state, Texas, voted it down in favor of another referendum to break the state into 5 separate states and form the Lone Star Confederation. If everything is bigger in Texas, and secession is a ‘go big or go home’ proposition, Texas voters chose to go that extra mile.

I swear, this is how people south of the Red River see the world.

While the Solidarity Movement is largely decentralized, the President-elect and Congress-elect do agree they shouldn’t approach DC in one group, as every one of them knows how drones work. So the President-elect approaches, along with some 50,000 supporters and much of the congressional delegations from the Northeast Corridor, from Baltimore. The VP-elect and much of the Southern delegation gather and march from Manassas Junction. Other delegations and their supporters depart Bethesda via I-70 for the district.

Yes, the southern delegation met up at THAT Manassas before heading to DC.

In a moment made for history books, a half-strength platoon of nervous Air Force MPs halt the President-elect and their supporters at the I-495 overpass over Good Luck Road near Carrollton, MD. 

Good Luck Road at the I-495 overpass. History sometimes happens in the most unassuming places.

The MP’s commanding officer tells them to turn back, that they constitute an unlawful assembly. Ominously, drones approach, hovering over the people massed on the two lane road. The President-elect asks if the CO intends to betray his oath to the Constitution and receives the retort that his orders are lawful. A tense standoff ensues until word runs through the crowd that the Solidarity delegations from California, Nevada and Utah have been waved through the blockade at Friendship Heights and have made it as far as the Washington National Cathedral. A woman in the crowd shouts at the MPs that the blockade is over and if they fire on the crowd they’ll just be murderers. The CO orders his men to do just that.

The MPs refuse. Their NCO and junior CO arrest the senior CO and let the Solidarity people stream past. 

Later, people on both sides of this confrontation find out these reports weren’t entirely accurate. The blockade was still intact at the DC-MD line in the area of Friendship Heights, but when asked, the Army CO told the delegates the Metro system was still running. With a less-than-subtle wink, the CO stated that his orders only covered the surface roads. The delegates and their supporters made history by getting on the subway and simply riding it to the Capitol building.

Similar events play out repeatedly around the area. By lunchtime, two hundred thousand people are milling around on the National Mall, and supermajorities of the new Congress are ready to take their seats. In a scene we’ve seen before in this series, both DC and Capitol police refuse to block entrance to the Capitol Building, and in the case of the Capitol Police, actually arrest ICE and DHS agents that try. While the Solidarity-dominated Congress sits at the Capitol, the remainder of the regime barricades themselves in the White House.

Congress swears in the President and VP-elect, an event which is broadcast and live-streamed to the whole country. The President calls on all 50 states to recognize the new Federal government, and in what will go down as an act of borderline-megalomania, orders the military into the city to force the surrender of the criminals hunkered down in the White House. Fortunately for both Solidarity and the nation, the generals and admirals not holed up with the regime announce they will defer to the duly elected government.

The regime has a history of stiffing contractors. I wouldn’t finish the plumbing work either, if I were them.

By the time the sun sets, the Washington National Guard, the DC police, and 10,000 armed Solidarity supporters have the White House surrounded and the utilities cut off. Construction of the new bunker under the old East Wing included many redundancies for fresh water, gas and electricity.The regime declares they will wait out the besiegers until the military clears the streets. But at some point in the design process, unpaid construction workers ‘forgot’ to install redundancies for the sewer lines out of the building. The current regime emerges surrenders after three days of having to smell their own shit. On January 7th, the Solidarity President declares to the cheering crowds on the National Mall, the renaissance of the United States. Next week, we check in with the kids of the three protagonist from Inequality by Design. The week after, we will find out if Solidarity can make it stick.

Positive Reconstruction in 2026 - The Wildfire Rages

        In 2025, the wind blew through and knocked down anything without the backbone to stand up to it. And in on that tempest flew hot embers, which fell amongst the rubble. Like so many seeming contradictions, fire is both a blessing and a curse. Life itself depends on heat to make enzymes and proteins fold and unfold. Cooking food freed energy which our early ancestors bodies’ directed to our brains and muscles. Heat catalyzed our very existence. In the wrong circumstances, we regard fire as so dangerous we need entire teams of people to fight it. But we have tamed the flame. It forged the tools that build our cities. It is good that some looked into the flame and thought “Why not? Why shouldn’t we use it?”

Insert snarky caption here...

But there are those who stare too deeply into the flames. Those who are drawn in by the erratic dance of oxygen, heat and fuel. And in the clutches of the wrong men, fire is a weapon. A rapid expansion of heat generates the pressure that fires a bullet from a gun, or explodes a bomb, lays waste to your enemies lands. And those men have spread that flame far and wide, burning the land in search of any threat they can find to justify adding to the blaze. These men speak of building a new world, but their actions betray them, as the only tool they know. They twist the flame from giver of life and illumination, to one of terror and desolation.

The fire ignited by the regime burns brightest in communities it feels will put up the least resistance. Masked government thugs move from daylight raids in workplaces and sites where immigrants gather, to nighttime raids on homes full of sleeping people. Yes, some of those raids end badly, with citizens defending themselves and their families with whatever tools they have available. And every time, the regime uses the injuries or deaths of federal agents as proof and justification for continued crackdowns. The irony of all this, is that the stated goal of driving immigrants out of the labor force does not lead to an influx of native-born people seeking to fill those jobs. While instances of native (ie white) job seekers filing into empty meat-packing plants are loudly reported, the majority of job openings go unfilled. Some employers raise wages in hopes of filing those positions, which only encourages people to cross back over the borders to try to fill them.

But government crackdowns aren’t limited to rounding up undocumented immigrants. The continued sew-sawing of trade deals and tariff rates continues, as the regime in Washington tries to use US trade policy to punish enemies and allies abroad. The administration pushes up tariff rates on Canada for harboring political dissidents, and on Mexico for harboring drug cartels. It uses the threat of higher rates to try to push the Europeans to increase their military budgets, which is ironic considering the US military budget for 2026 is a whopping $ 1 trillion. It uses trade deals to push East Asian allies like Japan and South Korea to take more hawkish stances against China. Most of all, the regime cracks down on imports from Vietnam, as Chinese companies use the southeast Asian nation as a trans-shipment point for selling goods to the US under lower tariff penalties. All these actions both drive away foreign allies, and drive up prices on consumer goods in the US. By summer, the regime declares it is fed up with ungrateful allies, and formally pulls the United States out of NATO. In response, the EU walks away from a set of tentative trade deals, covering about 30% of global trade, with the US, which further drives up prices.

The Art of the Deal when the other side
doesn't care for your 'deal'

Baseline inflation skyrockets past the 7-9% rates posted in the wake of the Covid pandemic. And the baseline number conceals the 15-20% increases for food prices. Higher prices lead to less spending, which by the summer of 2026 leads to layoffs in the retail sector. While some of those laid off do filter over into sectors like food processing that are hiring, these meager gains are wiped out by the end of the year, as US manufacturing firms lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. The value of the dollar both internally and in foreign trade continues to plummet, making imports even more costly than the increases driven by the tariffs alone. The problem with picking trade wars with the whole world, while wrecking the labor markets inside the country, tip the country into full-blown stagflation. While official numbers won’t show it, the number of job-listings and the number of actual hirings continues to dwindle. 

All this happens as federal spending on debt service crowds out both private-sector lending AND causes the federal government to spend more on debt service than it does on the principal of the nation’s debt. By late fall, the federal government cannot pay its bills as set out by the 2025 budget, and cuts have to be made. Federal Medicaid spending, which was already slated to drop the following year, must be slashed in the current year. Doctors don’t get paid, and patients don’t get care. Nursing home managers sweat about whether they will have to close their doors and turn residents out at Christmas. By the beginning of November, flash mobs rob grocery stores for food, while hospitals and clinics have to cut staff pay and hours, leading to labor unrest in rural and urban areas. 

Wait 'til you see the 2026 wait times!

And we get to the moment no doubt some of you have been waiting for. What happens with the midterm elections? The answer, at first, is anti-climactic. The elections go ahead as usual, though with ever-increasing voter suppression in the form of closures of polling places,  throwing hundreds of thousands of voters off the rolls, gerrymandering, and that old favorite of politicians afraid of the wrong results, ‘ballot irregularities.’ The exit polls indicate a crushing defeat for the ruling party and a sweeping landslide for the opposition. But that result only holds for a few days. The regime immediately sets about invalidating election results, claiming widespread voter and ballot fraud. Precincts with high tallies for opposition candidates see their results invalidated due to alleged security breaches. As the weeks drag on, it becomes increasingly clear that the will of the electorate will have little-to-no impact on the balance of power in Congress.

But backlash from the state doesn’t end there. While almost every other branch of government sees its funding stripped to the bone to make payments on the debt, the regime’s enforcement arm suffers no spending cuts. In the wake of such an obvious rebuke to the regime’s policies, the President orders ICE to round up and deport domestic political opponents, and anyone who might lift a finger to support them. Governors, state representatives, city councilors, dog catchers, no one is safe. Many are deported to the gulags of El Salvador, while others simply disappear into the ether. ICE doesn’t keep much paperwork, and their planes that set out across the Gulf of Mexico often turn around halfway there, returning with only the ICE agents and pilots still on board.

This may be jumping ahead a bit, but by the 10th anniversary of the Second Revolution, a rough estimate puts the number of deported undocumented immigrants at 3.2 million, about 125,000 political prisoners arrested, and nearly 500,000 homeless people forced into labor camps between 2025 and 2028. Of this number, at least 10% die either in transit or in detention. In retrospect, 2026 marks the high point of the regime’s power and the period of maximum repression.

But even as the fires of authoritarianism burn bright, methods of resistance multiply at all levels of American society. For some, this takes the form of open revolt, though it is mostly small groups, and often targeting goods and materials used by the regime. Rolling stock mysteriously breaks down only days after being taken in for service. Construction materials ordered for the building concentration camps get diverted or stolen, often sold on the black market to anyone with cash. Immigrants, both legal and not, find shelter in spare rooms, basements and attics of friends or family to avoid ICE raids. Boycotts spread, as do labor strikes. Protests and crackdowns become normal, and anyone who ends up being anyone in the political economy of the post-Revolution can point to a scar or story from one. Even as many people try to go about their lives and try to avoid the bubbling cauldron. The country fears what 2027 will bring.

Keeping It Personal - The Remainder of 2025

I'm going to use the hell out of these AI
abominations!

As a teen, Marty Jr watched his father struggle to find employment after the big box store he managed closed for good on Christmas Eve, 2008. While the family never experienced homelessness during the Great Recession, money became a lot tighter. Some of his childhood friends moved with the families in search of work, while others unofficially moved in with Marty’s family on-and-off as their home lives became increasingly unstable. Junior managed to secure scholarships and Pell grants to pay for college, and while he wanted to study linguistics, he found he had a knack for computer language. After graduation in 2015, he found work at a cybersecurity company, and soon after met Tina, the woman he wanted to marry. By 2020, Marty Junior settled into a stable family life, a sense of security which had been torn away from him as a teen. 

Then his father died. Little brother Bobby showed up drunk at the funeral. Family drama ensued. Jillian had choice words for both brothers. Their mother had a nervous breakdown. It was a mess, but at least Marty had his job and wife. With a baby, Trey, on the way, Marty moved his mother into the granny shack behind their Ann Arbor home, and put his nose to the old grindstone. By 2025, Marty is 33, now a father of two, and a member of an Elks lodge. A true pillar of the community. 

The cybersecurity firm which Marty works for recently received a fat contract from a certain government defense contractor. They’ve been tasked with monitoring social media chatter for anti-government sentiments across Michigan and northern Indiana. While others at the firm express displeasure at the intrusive nature of this surveillance, Marty loses no sleep over it. When the firm’s AI software picks up on a ‘radical’ group chat involving immigrants’ rights activists seeking to warn communities of impending ICE raids, Marty dutifully hands that information off to law enforcement. In his mind, these groups will interfere with public safety, causing the kind of chaos associated with his little brother. As America continues to destabilize and 2025 draws to a close, Marty silently promises himself he will not let the floud winds battering the nation, to disrupt his home life.

Jillian doesn’t remember much before the age of five, but remembers with terrifying clarity her kindergarten teacher breaking down as a passenger jet crashed into a tall building on TV. After that, childhood became little more than a series of crises and threat indicators. Adults transformed from gentle protectors to vengeful gods, always shouting and never taking time to explain anything. By the time Jillian enters her tween years, the Great Recession gutted those gods, reducing them to pale husks of themselves. 

Jillian always with the good hair. In every timeline

The sense that her family life was dying combined with the teenage urge to leave, to explore. Jillian spent hours wandering the mordibund mall at the edge of town. running her hands along metal railings, inhaling the stale air in search of a taste of the lost innocence of what must have been a simple, or at least more optimistic time. In this temple to American consumerism, she listened to the hushed conversations of older kids about the before times. How beautiful the 90s must have been.

In high school, Jillian made the mistake of doing well on standardized tests. Offer letters showed up, enticing her to apply to this or that university. Her mother’s trembling hands gripped hers, imploring her to make something of herself. With her father’s health failing, Jillian heard in her mother’s desperate voice a clarion call; “This world is ill, and you must tend to it.”

Earning a pre-med bachelors only took Jillian three years, but she had a full scholarship, so she took a fourth year to finish a dual degree in French language and literature. But as the acceptance letters from medical schools flooded in, with them came cost estimates, and lighter offers of financial aid. Jillian began to dread those letters, until one arrived from a medical school in Quebec. Nervously, Jenny took an entrance exam in French, which she barely passed. Two years into med school, her father died. The funeral became, in her mind, a liberating event, for nothing tethered her to Michigan any more. She considered staying in Canada. 

But life comes at you fast, and by 2025, Jenny found herself wrapping up residency and opening a non-profit clinic in a poor corner of Ohio with her husband. Chris had a knack for business, and figured he would be able to make the dire economics of running a doctor’s office work. The newlyweds hired a few friends to help run the place and put out their shingle. While the clinic stayed (barely) in the black, their creditors informed Jillian the clinic’s debt had been sold to a private equity firm. The new bosses were not the same as the old ones, and soon demanded cost-cutting measures and fatter profit margins. They told Jillian that marginalized communities don’t turn a profit, and that her clinic needed to turn away Medicaid patients, as many were set to lose their benefits in the near future. The clinic New Years Eve party was a somber affair. 

Younger brother Bobby starts 2025 as he does every new year since his father’s death; young, dumb, drunk and in love. Or at least in some approximation of it. The lessons he took from his father’s funeral five years earlier have only been reinforced over the years; drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. At least in adulthood, Bobby found a stability and joy which eluded him as a child.

That is a man's beard. No soi bois at the train yard!

The youngest of Marty’s kids, Bobby barely remembers his as a happy, healthy man. After the big box store closed, his father spent the next twelve years working himself to death. Quite literally. The loss of health insurance and the lackluster coverage available through Bobby’s mother’s employer, left him with untreated diabetes barely treated. And working. Always covering shifts at the burger joint he co-owned with an old friend. Bobby would pretend to be asleep when his dad would finally get home, or when he would leave early in the morning. After high school graduation, Bobby stayed at home, working odd jobs and temp jobs and jobs neighbors didn’t want to do. In the back of his mind, he suspected that if he left his mother alone for any length of time, she might disappear too. Then Covid hit, and he stopped pretending. Indeed, he rarely slept. The realization he’d squandered what little time his father had to give him kept him up at night. 

When his older brother sold the house to cover their father’s medical bills, Bobby moved in with a pair of high school buddies working in Detroit. Bobby sees the same set of friends, or interacts with them through online avatars. And he manages his love life through an online dating app. Everything in his life resides on his phone, but an event in early 2025 plants more than a seed of doubt in his head.

Marty Junior visited him in Detroit, and left a USB with Bobby. On it, Junior had catalogued and categorized the entirety of Bobby’s online presence for the past year. And around the thumb drive, he’d wrapped a note, asking Bobby if dad would have expected more from his favorite son.

The incident was almost enough for Bobby to pick up the phone and actually call his older brother. To call him out. But before he can work up the courage, as he scrolls through the online footprint of his life, an IP address catches his eye. Bobby begins digging, and discovers that his brother’s data collection routed through a server farm in Utah, and that the only data storage facility anywhere nearby, is operated by the NSA. Bobby always knew his brother worked in cybersecurity, but this revelation starts him down a rabbithole, kindling in him a sense of paranoia he didn’t know he had. 

Far to the south, in Memphis, Tennessee, Jenny’s granddaughter Allison starts 2025 in a much different place. Not just geographically, but much lower down the class structure from even perpetually-feels-broke Bobby. At 17, Allison spends this year twiddling her thumbs, biding her time until graduation in May. But after graduation, she has no prospects, no hope, no vision for any kind of future for herself beyond staring at the screen of a smart phone until she dies. Her mother Ruby lords the phone bill over her, demanding good grades and quiet from her daughter whenever she’s home. Allison cannot think of it as home, as the landlord vacuums up whatever spare money the family can scrape together. Grandma Jenny jokes that the man must live between their couch cushions, because he always seems to know when the three have any extra money in their pockets. 

"Generic white girl graduates generic high school"
AI is the future, man! I'm telling ya!

Allison graduates with decent grades, and toys with the idea of attending community college, but tuition keeps rising, and the idea of going into debt to pay for an education seems darkly funny to her. When her two friends ask why she doesn’t enroll too, Allison jokes that if she’d had to pay for the first twelve years of school, she’d be suing the shit out of the school district to get her money back. Then the trio get drawn back into endless scrolling.

On the longest day of the year, something snaps inside the young woman. The AC hasn’t worked at their apartment in weeks, and Allison hasn’t felt good all summer, and at once realizes why. Every summer, Grandma Jenny used to take her to a pool at least once. Allison hasn’t gotten to glide through the water in five years, and she’s sick of feeling hot and sweaty every day. So she dares her friends to follow her into the fountain at the park. The other two girls refuse, so to prove nothing bad will happen, Allison tosses her little backpack at them and jumps in. She gets in ten minutes of splashing around before a cop pulls her out of the lukewarm water.

After a perfunctory dressing down, the cop informs her that he’s not going to ticket her for being a dumbass. He says it in a way that implies Allison should be grateful, but instead it pisses her off, and she starts shouting insults at the man. Before he can decide if he’s going to arrest her after all, her friends drag Allison home, all the while chastising her for acting like a little girl. When she gets home and changes, Allison discovers that her phone was still in her back pocket for the swim, not in her backpack as she thought.

With no money to replace it, Allison realizes she will have to find something to do with her time, so she walks down the street and takes a job as a waitress at a fried-chicken restaurant. As the months go by, she saves up enough money to buy a new phone, but when faced with the price tag she balks. Something deeper in her changed since that day in the fountain. The lack of a smart phone gave her something she didn’t know she’d lacked - free time. When she walks to work, she can think instead of streaming a podcast. When she’s at home, she can read a magazine or, heaven forbid, crack open one of Grandma Jenny’s harlequin romance novels. Most of all, Jenny finds herself actually talking to people: people at the bus stop, customers at work, her friends, even, most embarrassingly, her own family. As 2025 draws to a close, Allison plans to take a road trip with her friends Dora and Tasha, down to New Orleans for New Year’s Eve. But the day after Christmas, she shows up at Dora’s house to find the half of the family missing. Dora and her two younger siblings are on their own, made orphans by zealous ICE agents. Allison and Tasha cancel their plans and help their friend try to locate her parents.