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

The Shining City Fades

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

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

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

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

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

Where's the babies?

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

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

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

Is Guadalupe-Hidalgo Someone’s Cousin?

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

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

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

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

The Ten Month War

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

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

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

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

The Winter of ’41 (and ’42)

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

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

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

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

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

Modern problems require 19th century solutions!

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

Sigh. The AI images make a comeback...

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

The Treaty of Austin

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

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

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

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

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

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