Crossing the Threshold of the Long 21st Century

Before We Begin…

The rough draft for the decade from 2025 to 2035 ballooned to almost 6,000 words, so I concluded I would need to scrap my initial plan to tell the story of the coming century by the decade. Instead, each Friday will cover a five-year period, starting in 2025 and ending in 2125. On top of changing the chronology of the storytelling, I realized I had a second issue on my hands. I could tell the story of the coming century solely through a dry, textbook style, outlining momentous events and tracking broad trends. But to really tell that story, we need characters to follow. People who’s lives can give the imagination something more concrete to grip on to as the wild beast of history careens from one landmark event to another. So I've decided to take a page, and four characters, from the book that Dr. Mattson and I are finishing. At the start of Inequality by Design, we meet three high school graduates of the class of 1980, and follow them for 40 years, as their lives are buffeted by the corporate-approved creative destruction of the neo-liberal economic era. By the end of the opening chapter, as the main characters enter elderhood, their kids and grandkid are entering adulthood in the year 2020. So it is these four who we will follow through the first half of the unfolding Long 21st Century.

What better metaphor for the coming century, than a gate topped with barbed wire, dwarfed by an approaching storm?

Also, Oklahoma's wild weather generated this image, not AI. More on that later...

The rough draft for the decade from 2025 to 2035 ballooned to over 6,000 words, so I concluded I would need to scrap my initial plan to tell the story of the coming century by the decade. Instead, each Friday will cover a five-year period, starting in 2025 and ending in 2125. On top of changing the chronology of the storytelling, I realized I had a second issue on my hands. I could tell the story of the coming century solely through a dry, textbook style, outlining momentous events and tracking broad trends. But to really tell that story, we need characters to follow. People whose lives can give the imagination something more concrete to grip on to as the wild beast of history careens from one landmark event to another. So I've decided to take a page, and four characters, from the book that Dr. Mattson and I are finishing. At the start of Inequality by Design we meet three high school graduates of the class of 1980, and follow them for 40 years, as their lives are buffeted by the corporate-approved creative destruction of the neo-liberal economic era. By the end of the opening chapter, as the main characters enter elderhood, their kids and grandkid are entering adulthood in the year 2020. So it is these four who we will follow through the first half of the unfolding century.

A fine read, even if it was
as much a way to talk about
the USA in the 60s and 70s,
as a detailed examination
of the Long 14th Century.

    But before we meet our protagonists, I want to throw out a quick note about the title of this post. Calling an era a 'long century' is, like everything else under the sun, not new. Perhaps the most well-know example come from Barbara Tuchman's book A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century. Published in 1978, the book covers the events of the Great Famines of the early 14th century, the Black Plague, the Papal Schism, peasant revolts, and the general breakdown of Western European society as it transitions from the Medieval Period (roughly 800-1300 AD) to the Early Modern Period which began sometime around 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople, the flowering of the Italian Renaissance, and the start of the Age of Sail. Setting aside the academic criticisms, the concept that Tuchman spoke to was the idea that the events which defined a period of transition didn't conform to the neat limit of 100 years. Thus, the changes experienced by Western Culture which were amplified by the beginning of the Little Ice Age, fundamentally reformed what it meant to be a member of Western Christendom. And that era ran for nearly 150 years, aka a century and a half. A long century, if you will. And that period seems suspiciously similar in length to the philosophy underpinning the Iroquois Confederacy's Great Law of Peace, a philosophy that one should consider the impact of their actions on the next seven generations. Arabic thinker and historian Ibn Khaldun's Dynastic Change and Its Economic Consequences posits a similar length of time as the life cycle of any given dynasty.

    This is all to say that I believe we, the people of North America, have already crossed the threshold. While I don't know what event future historians will point to as 'the' triggering event: September 11th, the Great Recession, Calderon's War on the Cartels? Heck, they may even reach back to the first iteration of NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994 and ushered in a transformation of the North American economy from three big, separate entities, into functionally one, tightly interlinked mega-economy. Indeed, if the Long 21st Century began in 1994, and runs until some seminal event circa 2125, that would bracket the Long 21st Century quite nicely. 

For giggles, I played with AI image generation for the four main characters. This was a for-fun experiment and I will return to stock images. But let us return to the four characters of the narrative, shall we?

    The first is Marty Junior, first-born son, unsurprisingly, of Marty Senior. Growing up, Marty took his role as big brother seriously enough he had a few run-ins with the law, beating up anyone he perceived as picking on his little brother or sister. By 2025, Marty Junior is a 33 year old cyber security specialist who works for the State of Michigan. He lives in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan with a wife, Tina, and their (uncreatively-named) newborn son, Marty the third, aka Trey. 

    Little sister Jillian celebrates her 30th birthday in 2025. Her parents secretly joked that she got all the brains of the family. Those brains won her free rides to the University of Michigan and that to a Canadian medical school. A few years out of residency, she and her husband Chris run a health clinic in Ashtabula, Ohio, which operates at perpetual near-bankruptcy. Jillian is pregnant with the couple’s first child. 

    Our third character is the younger brother, 26 year old Bobby, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Like his father, Bobby suffers from dyslexia, which has made him a perennial temp-worker. He is a bit of a black sheep of the family, as their overworked father’s deteriorating health over the course of the 2010s left Bobby without a stable father figure. Bobby showed up quite drunk at the father’s 2020 funeral, and hasn’t spoken to Marty Junior or Jillian since then. 

    Apart from these three siblings we have 16 year old Allison, the granddaughter of Jenny, another protagonist from the first chapter of Inequality by Design. In 2020, her family left the rustbelt for the warmer climate of the Gulf Coast, but their 30 year old car only got them as far as western Tennessee before breaking down for good. In 2025, Allison is slogging through what passes for an education at a chronically underfunded high school. Unlike her mother at the same age, she is not boy-crazy. Having spent her entire childhood moving from one apartment to the next, always one step ahead of eviction, she never established close friendships, and was never quite able to pin down what she wants to do with her life. 

The Big Picture: 2025 to 2030

Is that a sunrise or a sunset?

The first few of the years are deceptively calm for both the United States, and our four main characters. International headlines periodically mention a devastating drought pushing the people of the Yucatan towards starvation. A dramatic series of financial and political crises across the northern border in Canada disrupts some cross-border trade, but most people in the U.S. are just trying to get by. Making basic ‘getting by’ harder, import tariffs cost every American roughly $2,600 each year, but US-manufactured goods to replace more expensive imports often fail to materialize. At the same time, attempts at mass deportation pursued by the Reactionary Party administration in Washington pushes more and more recent immigrants and native-born relatives into a shadow economy rife with exploitation and criminal elements. While events in the eastern hemisphere make trouble over there, North America appears a serene island of stability by comparison. But pressures in all three major countries are building. 

I don't know what this chart measures, but 
it certainly looks bad for Canada...

Three horsemen of the economic apocalypse visit Canada: first comes electoral chaos, with no obvious replacement for the Trudeau government, followed by the collapse of an inflated real estate market and declining exports to the US. These factors spark a government debt crisis. The western provinces demand grater financial accountability from Ottawa, and hold referendums to refusing to send tax monies on to the federal government. Like the independence referendum in Catalonia, the government responds with arrests and laws banning provinces from holding plebiscites. This goads Quebec into outdoing the western provinces, with the provincial parliament votes to formally ‘confederate’ with the rest of the country. The province will no longer enforce laws passed by the national parliament, and will explore creating their own currency. The move is meant to force the Canadian government to backtrack on banning plebiscites, but instead provokes the national government to send in the Mounties and dissolve Quebec's National Assembly. But the move backfires, and the western provincial parliaments side with Quebec, passing laws to explicitly ban local businesses from collecting federal taxes.  By 2028, the country is divided into two hostile camps, the confederates of the periphery, and the centralizer provinces in between. 

Mexico's drought monitor readings last year.
Yes, I know, the Yucatan looks okay for now.

If Canada suffers from a deluge of problems, to the south a lack of deluges causes a different set of problems. The failure of cool-season monsoons leads to crop failures across southern Mexico and Central America. Starvation pushes some five million desperate people to crime and lawlessness, a situation local criminal gangs are only too happy to exploit. While the government in Mexico City does attempt to ship gran to the region, most of the shipments end up looted by the starving or stolen and held for ransom by gangs. The Maya-speaking peoples of the region view the fight between the Spanish-speaking gangs and government forces as just another instance of second-class citizenship and historical brutality. The Maya break into outright rebellion, and they are quickly dubbed the Zapatistas Nuevas by the Spanish-speaking population. This Pan-Maya movement even appeals to Spanish speakers sick of being held at arm’s length by the central government in Mexico City and being forced to take in people deported from the United States. 

As the year 2028 begins, the United States appears insulated from the brushfires burning to the north and south. But that appearance is deceiving, and the US is just a much a tinderbox of economic and cultural resentments. Every conflagration requires a spark, and because history has a sense of humor, an income tax cut proves to be that spark. A law passed in 2026, supported by both political parties, goes into effect. It eliminates the higher tax rate on overtime, while simultaneously ending the requirement that employers pay overtime for any work past 40 hours a week. Most work-forces without a union contract, and even some with one, quickly find their OT disappearing from their paychecks in January. 82 million Americans work hourly-wage jobs, and many salaried employees also receive some form of overtime compensation, so the consternation and fury spreads quickly. 

If your start a republic by protesting taxation, why not end one protesting taxes?

Still believing the political process might solve the problem, Americans flood congressional offices with angry calls. But Congress fails to repeal of this despised reform, with some even responding to constituents to get different jobs. Since the right to strike was also eliminated early on in the reactionary administration, labor unions and non-unionized workers must turn to a more informal method of protest. They call for everyone in America to take a walk in the park on April Fool’s Day, and stay there until tax day on April 15th. Municipal parks across the USA fill with millions of people. The media sends the message that this April Fools joke will be a one-time event, but the next day, the parks fill up again. Then the next day. Then the next. A week into the General Strike, some 30% of the US labor force takes “walks in the park” rather than going to work. Many who do not call off work participate in slow downs and stoppages, vowing to do half the work expected. The strikes prove surprisingly successful, grinding the economy to a halt. 

The oligarchs hold the cards though, and tell every elected official in the country if they ever want to see a single cent in campaign contributions again, they will break the strikes. The majority of elected officials comply with their corporate task-masters. National Guard units are mobilized, and police officers called in for extra pay working on “park clearing” details. In some cases, local cops and national guardsmen refuse to comply with the orders. When this happens, private security companies fill in support roles, freeing up those who do obey orders to put on riot gear. 

It is NOT hard to find a real-life image of cops 
clearing protestors out of a park. Your challenge,
dear reader, is to guess which park clearing this
is a picture of...

At this point, our four characters re-enter the narrative, and we will follow them through the General Strike of 2028. So, let’s make this all personal…

Marty Junior

Marty Junior counts himself as one of the good guys. Working for the State of Michigan’s eponymously-named Office of Remote Surveillance, Marty monitors the online activity, especially financial transactions, of organized crime with a focus on human trafficking. Starting in 2025, the state received federal money and expanded definition of human trafficking, including labor organizers and charitable NGOs accused of harboring illegal immigrants or naturalized citizens targeted for deportation. Marty finds the expanded definition troubling, but a round of automation and job cuts puts to rest any doubts he may have. Junior even gets a promotion to shift supervisor, which largely insulates him from the job cuts. Plus, his superior assures him that ‘loyal men’ will be needed in the near future, rather than increased automation.

When the general strike begins Marty and his agency are more than willing to backstop National Guard and private security forces with communications and intelligence. They monitors both live feed cameras and cell phone traffic of the park walkers, turning the information suspected organizers of the strike over to local police agencies. Arrests take place overnight at suspects residences, before they can get to the protection of crowds at local parks. Marty goes home every day after work and loses no sleep about the possible fates of these political prisoners.

        In the years following the crackdown on the General Strike, Marty Junior boasts to his superiors about the vigor with which his office tracked down cell traffic and cash app transactions. He concludes the late-night arrests prevented the Detroit-area protests from getting out of hand. When speaking to people outside the office, Marty rarely mentions his work, and often draws on his experiences before the strike, if the other person asks anything like probing questions. Even with Tina, he rarely talks about the core of his work.

Like this, but with corporate sponsorship...

Jillian

Julie and her husband Chris thought they would be a power-couple; she would be the doctor providing care, while Chris the accountant would make sure they get paid. They even identified Ashtabula, Ohio as a community underserved by the health care system, thinking this would provide a stable customer base. But the joke was on them, as insurance payouts declined and patients found themselves unable to afford copays. To keep their clinic open, the pair find themselves having to hire additional staff to collect payments and manage paperwork, rather than provide direct patient care. 

While Jillian, Chris, and the fifteen clinic employees sympathize with the striker’s, they know they cannot take time off to join the strike, as the clinic would certainly lose too much revenue. The staff of the clinic demands some sort of solidarity, and a vote is taken to is taken to open the clinic to them anyone ‘walking the nearby park’ without up-front payment required. The Ohio governor declares a statewide curfew, and the State Police show up to close the clinic. Jillian and the staff leave, but show up the next day to operate as normal. Much like in Michigan, the state authorities in Ohio regard such actions as trouble making. Since he manages the clinic, state police arrest Julian's husband Chris while he is on his way back to a local park to spread word about the services the clinic might provide. This move infuriates both Jillian and the members of the staff who then vote to take half of their staff to the park to help treat any injured strikers. While Jillian stays to oversee clinic operations, half of the staff is present when the local park is surrounded by mounted riot police and the National Guard. 

Eventually, the tools of empire used abroad,
end up getting used on the people of the homeland.

When the protesters refuse to disperse, the state attacks. Hundreds, including the entirety of the staff are either injured or arrested very few escape the police cordon. The crackdown results in several deaths a number of critical injuries, and sparks general outrage across the state. The next day when protesters meet at the parks, they come heavily armed. In some places this results in tents standoffs with the police but in others, including Dayton and Toledo the strikers shoot first. Dozens are killed and hundreds injured across the state. Those currently in custody are beaten and tortured on suspicion that they are somehow coordinating the spontaneous riots on the outside. The victims of this state brutality include Juliana's husband Chris, who staggers out of the prison with broken shoulders and black eyes.

Bobby

As mentioned earlier Bobby works a series of temp jobs in Louisville Kentucky. Needing every dollar he earns, he does not participate in the first day of the general strike, referring to the people by the media moniker of April fools. As the strike enters its second week, Bobby loses his temper job unloading trucks at the Louisville train station.Most of the freight trains in the country are either halted or operating way way behind schedule. While Bobby is initially frustrated with the strike, an idle railway worker encourages him to go to one of the local parks and actually meet the people he's upset with. Bobby follows the advice and ends up befriending several strikers. With temp jobs dried up and rent due on the 15th, Bobby sews what’s left of his cash into his windbreaker, grabs his sleeping bag, and heads to the park. There, he joins hundreds of others on the path to homelessness. 

As word of the riots in Ohio filters down to Kentucky guns, improvised explosive devices, and Molotov cocktails begin showing up ay discrete locations around the park. Bobby is highly suspicious that at least some of these have been placed by agents of the state, and he and a friend actually detain someone leaving a crate of national guard issued hand grenades. 

Go south, young man!

When Bobby receives a phone call from his mother begging him not to participate in the strikes he tries to do the right thing and turn the hand grenades over to a police officer. This move predictably backfires, with Bobby arrested for possessing stolen government property. Fortunately for him, he's sitting in county jail when the crackdown begins in Louisville. The park he had been at is the scene of some of the worst fighting. Over 300 people, both strikers and security forces, losing their lives. Bobby is further fortunate that the governor of Kentucky is much more soft in his support of the corporate state and very quickly offers an amnesty to everyone arrested during the rioting if it will get the bloodshed to stop. This tactic, along with the collective horror due to the Battle of Louisville, brings the general strike to a slow-motion. Finding an eviction notice on his door, Bobby grabs his sleeping bag and jumps on an empty freight train. As the train rumbles south, Bobby calls his mom and lets her know he's leaving Kentucky.

Allison

I mentioned above Alison found everything about school boring: classes, teachers, fellow students, all of it. So she dropped out and started working full-time at a fried chicken place. At the beginning of 2028 Alison is 19 years old working as a shift manager. As the strike begins the fried chicken places teeters on the verge of bankruptcy because the franchise owner keeps demanding more and more profit from the business. The owner even visits the restaurant the day after the general strike begins, and threatens to fire anyone who participates going forward. To show he’s serious, the owner fires two line cooks who called out the day before. This action completely backfires. The entire staff walks out and heads straight to the nearest park. They make impromptu meals for fellow strikers and generally serve as a nucleus to organize everything people living in the park might need from food to clothing to shelter to sanitation facilities. Well this would mark Allison out as an organizer and someone targeted for arrest, the entire operation is done with sticky notes, pencils and absolutely no electronics. 

Allison throws herself into the organization of the strike camp with enthusiasm, finding a meaning that she never found in the mindless rigidity and conformism of high school. Allison and the other strikers are fortunate that the mayor of Memphis is one of few elected politicians in the state of Tennessee to not tow the corporate line. The Mayor argues quite publicly that the police department has better things to do than kick people out of parks that are technically owned by the public which currently is filling them up. This buys the strikers an few extra weeks until the Tennessee National Guard moves in to clear out the protest camps in early May. The Tennessee state government then dissolves the city government of Memphis, turning all its functions over to the county and declares that anyone found in the parks after the middle of the month will be arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. 

Allison and her work crew stolidly return to the restaurant. Their boss agrees to rehire them, on the condition that they pay back the franchise potential profits lost during the strike. This move has the double effect both garnishing meager wages while simultaneously showing the employees just how much profit they provide the franchise owner. The workers in public agree to this, but hold a secret meeting and decide to assassinate the franchise owner. The restaurant’s bartender has military experience and improvises an IED from household items. A week later, the franchise owner’s car blows up shortly after leaving the restaurant. Everyone in the restaurant is suspected of participating, but they all keep quiet and the police can never actually pin it on anyone. From the silence surrounding the bombing of the boss's car, emerges an unspoken consensus; "We could do that again."

"I don't know what happened, we were busy at working..."

A Peaceful Coup

        My planned post this week, on the topic of electoral politics and small ‘d’ democracy in North America required a serious re-work. I decided on a rewrite for two reasons: 1 - the rough draft wasn’t very good, and 2 - current events stepped in, giving the topic a renewed urgency. So, let’s count the votes and declare some winners and losers!

        Before we can get into future implications, we should do the boring work of defining what we’re talking about. Clear definitions in the social sciences are difficult at best, and downright thorny at worst. An obvious example would be; when does a cult stop being a cult and become a religion or ideological movement? I’ll let you take a minute to ponder that one…

       So, here in North America, our three biggest nations operate a system of political economy we might broadly refer to as liberal republicanism. For my readers in the USA, you read that right! We operate a two-system state AND a two party system for electing the leaders. It gives circular logic a run for its money. Go ahead and chuckle, Canada and Mexico, I’ll wait. 

The logic of the American political system...

        Chuckles aside, what do the two terms mean? In brief, liberalism covers the rule of law; the assumption that people have rights to protect them from government power, as well as offering socially acceptable avenues for retribution in case the problem comes from fellow citizens and not the state. This second part begs the question; is justice just the commission of a second crime? 

        As for republicanism, well, none of the three countries really operate a democracy. Rule is not of the people, in conformance with the Greek translation. No, all three countries operate a system in which representatives, elected by the citizenry, set laws and govern. Thus, I think the term republic better describes the system of all three states. Speaking of states, all three countries really operate, to one degree or another, a federal republic. 

        These two systems do not have to operate hand in glove. An authoritarian government could operate a court system with an elaborate and rich tradition of jurisprudence. Sure, those laws might not protect citizens from the state, but they would provide stability, order, and an investment-friendly legal climate. Hooray commerce! Similarly, it isn’t hard to imagine a democracy with none of the protections of the rule of law. Have the people voted for a decision that harms you directly? Suck it up chump, the mob has spoken! 

That's a pretty hot take there, Tommy.

        So on the surface, liberal republicanism provides a very attractive set of checks and balances. If the state overreaches, you can take it to court. If a law is unjust, take your case to the ballot box and get the law changed. And for better or worse, that’s largely how the system operates in all three countries. If you feel like that’s not the case, stay tuned, we will come back to this point. 

        Because there’s a third benefit offered by liberal republicanism that gets to something more core in the human experience. A great deal of (recorded) human history revolves around the struggle for control of the church and the state. And very often, that struggle involves a lot of young men killing each other, usually for the benefit of a few old guys. Compromises and power-sharing often had more to do with the mutual exhaustion of the combatants in any conflict. Even among hunter-gatherer tribes, without a common language or culture, one group must assume the arrival of a new group portends increased competition for sparse resources. And when we’re all nine meals away from serious, physiological discomfort, you can image how that often plays out. 

        But under a liberal republic, we have, for now, stumbled on an elegant solution to this unceasing competition for power and resources. As a coworker of mine once put it, the United States operates a system by which every four years we get the chance to carry out a peaceful coup. I don't know where he got this turn of phrase, or if he came up with it on his own, but I really appreciate it, because it sums up the balancing act nicely. If the people, and, let’s be honest, the power brokers in business and politics, have had enough with the direction of the country, and think a new one needs tried, we can throw the bums out with minimal collateral damage.

Do note the lack of bullet holes in the sign.

This same process, the “Peaceful Coup”, can largely be applied to Canada and Mexico. Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, Canada has always managed a peaceful coup, and maintained a liberal republican form of government. The Mexican history of peaceful coups is much shorter, but has been successful so far. After decades of one-party rule, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), conceded defeat In the wake of the 2000 presidential election. For the first time in modern history, Mexico managed a peaceful coup, installing the National Action Party (PAN)’s Vincente Fox as president. This was not the end of the world for the PRI, and they even regained control of the presidency in 2012. In 2018 and this last summer, a new political party, Moreno, won the presidency both times. In short, the United States of Mexico has seen the  peaceful transfer of power five times since 2000. Before then, one has to go back to the 1910 election of insurgent candidate Francisco Madero. And calling the 1910 election a peaceful transfer of power is, well, a bit of a stretch. Madero gained the presidency after forcing strongman Profiro Diaz into exile, then winning a follow up election overseen by a caretaker government, And given the systemic violence that proliferated under the Porfiriato government, and the nearly two decades of violence that followed Madero’s assassination in early 1913, the 1910 election was more the eye of a hurricane, rather than a truly peaceful transfer of power. 

        And this nearly two decades of violence following Madero's assassination, points to why the ‘peaceful coup’ is so important. Between 1910 and 1920, the generally accepted bookend years of the Mexican Revolution, at least a million people died, with many millions more displaced, to say nothing of the social, cultural and economic damage done to the people of Mexico. And much of the violence flowed from a history of violent transfers of power. As the risk of flattening a lot of Mexican history, Porfirio Diaz, the president who fled into exile in 1910, came to power through a violent coup in 1876, and served either directly as president or as the power behind the throne, from then until 1910. Before him, Mexico went through a long history of instability and elite infighting, often egged on or outright caused by foreign interventions by the United States and France, to say nothing of the decade-long war for independence fought against Spain from 1810 to 1821. None of this is to say that Mexico was doomed to a century of political instability, but that political instability often invites more instability in what often becomes a positive feedback loop. And generally, the instability only comes to an end when one man emerges as the undisputed master of the nation. Until the next strongman challenges his power. Again, this is not unique to Mexico. This pattern can be seen across cultures and eras, whenever the grievances and anger of both common people and elites reaches a boiling point. 

It's no accident Hobbes wrote
a political treatise putting man's
predilection to violence and
greed during the chaos of the
Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
People were pretty fed up with
'the Establishment' then, as well. 

        For all the warts and ugliness of American democracy, it has to be said that no one actually died from political infighting as result of the 2016 election. Even the violence that followed the 2020 election was minimal compared to say, a palace coup. But I think we have turned a corner here in the US, and, as noted last week, what happens here will have consequences, some foreseeable, some not, across both our northern and southern borders.

As you may know, last week a young man, Luigi Mangione, murdered a health care company CEO in mid-town Manhattan. I won’t go into the details, as the situation is still developing, and the particulars aren’t the only reason I find the incident important. What I think is important about it, is the symbolic power of the act, and the public response to it.

 

First, the symbolism cannot be understated. Political violence by US citizens against those who actually run the state, the corporate elite, has been virtually non-existent. This is a nation in which an ultra-rich family can literally push a moulding drug epidemic into overdrive, leading directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. When they finally get taken to court and and found guilty of pushing addictive narcotics, said family faced no real penalties. I say no real penalties, because even though the family was found liable for $225 million as the result of a civil suit, the family has a net worth of some $10.8 billion in 2024. The Sackler family has been allowed to keep their money and their freedom. Now imagine that same set of facts, but replace the Sacklers with some poor hillbillies cooking meth, or maybe some poor black people selling crack, and try to imagine the system letting them effectively go free. For that matter, apparently the President-elect is contemplating a literal war with Mexico over cartel drug violence. No leniency for the poor or the brown. But I digress. The main point I'm trying to make here, is that the Sackler family wears suits and ties. They bribe, I’m sorry, contribute to the campaigns, of US politicians, so those who sit atop America's political economy, don't view them as ‘bad’ people. And the Sacklers are just one of any number of CEOs and corporate bosses whom the population reviles. Yet no vigilante has gone after any of them. Until now.

If these wanted posters are any indication, this may just be the start...

        I don’t know if this shooting marks the start of open season on America’s ruling class. I assume the elites will hire twice the number of bodyguards, maybe push more CCTV surveillance, and try to carry on with business as usual. And the predictable response leads us to the second reason this murder seems to be fast becoming a tragically important symbol - the public reaction to the murder. Outside the halls of power and the offices of their media lackeys, the public response across the country has run the gamut from an “oh-well” level of indifference to “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” bemusement, to outright calls, from the right and left, of “let the class war begin!” The people of this country bear such a naked resentment for their supposed betters in the C-suites of corporate America, that cold blooded murder is viewed, at this point, as a reasonable response to a system which stymies any attempt at reform or change. And this change in mood represents a very dangerous shift in the mood of the country. 

        And if, as I suspect it has, a corner really has been turned in the collective unconscious of this country, then the match has been lit, and we are just looking for the fuse. Even in more normal times, this would be a deadly-dangerous place for any country to find itself. America has witnessed widespread political violence before, most notably during the 1970s and the 1900s. But in both those instances, the economy was growing and the American people's faith in our collective project, never penetrated into the mainstream the way it seems to have today. 

Yeah, we all have to do our part, but can we 
avoid becoming space Nazis?

        And unlike the early 1900s or the 1970s, the American people, as well as our neighbors to the north and south,  face cascading crises. I’ve already painted a broad outline of the five big ones: a rapidly-warming planet, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, environmental damage working its way up the food chain towards a human population, which looks set to go into a nose dive over the next century, to mass migrations that will put the current panic over the southern border to shame. For all these problems, there is one thing that Americans (and every other people of this continent) very much have control over, and that is how we choose to react. We could retreat into authoritarianism and abandon liberal republicanism, deciding that making that other group over there suffer a little more than my group is suffering, is preferable to trying to build some sort of collective project together. And a collective project will certainly be what is required to face the storms of the next hundred years. No individual, family, or even community, can muster the resources to tackle the present challenges, because they are are woven together like a tight knit sweater. These problems are mutually reinforcing, and literally planet-wide in scale. And yet, even at this late date, we still, might, have the means to tackle these problems, and if not to solve them, then to blunt the worst impacts.

        We can embark on this project collectively, as liberal republics, but the only way we can do this is through collective action. And for the societies we’ve built, the best way to perform collective action is to take a vote, make compromises, roll up our sleeves and dig that drainage ditch. Because that's what we are literally talking about. Will people continue to have access to clean drinking water? Working sewers? Whenever possible, electricity? The scale and scope of the current predicaments resemble the cascading crises of the Late Bronze Age collapse, an event that was just as world-ending to the people of eastern Mediterranean, as the crises bearing down on industrial civilization today.

 

This is what happens when Pharaoh 
ignores your memos about the Sea Peoples.

        One key difference between us and them, is the peaceful coup. The mistakes of one monarch, pharaoh or emperor can be reversed with a vote. Or more likely, several votes. At least, that was my view a few months ago, when I first drafted this essay. It appeared that engagement with the political system in the United States meant that American's were ready to re-engage with the process. Voter participation in the US reached levels not seen in a very long time. I let myself hope that people were giving the ballot box one more try, before resorting to more traditional methods of regime change. 

        Now, I’m not so sure. For decades, those outside the top income brackets knew the system wasn’t operating with their needs in mind. But now, It appears that even sons of the elite are ready to kill to change the system. In the history of revolutionary moments, this alliance of elites and commoners is a necessary step to blowing the system up. And if the current reactions of the elites in power, the utter, public bewilderment at just how reviled they are, is any indication, then we will get the next step towards a revolutionary moment; the complete bungling of some response to a systemic crisis by an out-of-touch elite. And the people's response to those systemic failures can be the emergence of movements and leaders to pressure the system for peaceful change, but it can also be mob violence, insurgency, and the toppling of the established order. And when that happens, all bets are off, as any group can sweep in and claim the right to lead, usually with the backing of a lot of young men with guns.  Keep this in mind as we proceed, because the inability of the systems of political economy here in North America to respond to the challenges of the coming century will be a central theme of the scenario I’m constructing. 

        Because that's where this is all going, a decade-by-decade look at the next hundred years in North America. We will start with the coming decade, 2025 to 2035, with a focus on events in the big three countries of the continent. But for now, I’m going to stop weekly posts for a the holidays, and resume early next year. Have a very merry whatever you choose to celebrate, and I will see you here in January!