What A Beautiful World This Will Be
Trying to gameplan a plausible, POSITIVE future (for fictional purposes).
One fun part about writing fiction is that you get to conjure up possible worlds. Some of my favorites are worlds that are basically like ours, but with one strange thing that sets it apart. I played with this in my first book A Traitor to Dreams, positing that there was a device you could hook up to your head that would literally remove unwanted desires, neuroses, and thoughts for good. Now, what is inside that device provides the thrust for the story, but that's not the topic at hand.
I also enjoy fictional worlds that are like the modern-day, but take place with entirely different geography, maybe on a different planet. Big cities might resemble New York or Tokyo or London or Beijing or L.A., but they're not exactly the same. Things like that can be a lot of fun. Jon Mollison did something like this with his excellent book Neon Harvest. Imagine Miami Vice: the planet and you get the vibe. It was really. fun.
Other types of worldbuilding involve what a plausible future could look like. Some writers, like Neal Stephenson, predicted a lot of things that exist now some 30 years in advance. I love stuff like that, but my writing aims are far more modest. Being an American, I'm typically focused on Burgerland here, given that it's the place I have the most knowledge about and experience with. The fun part is that such imaginative exercises can actually provide some real-world insights. I’m not talking about how one might go about achieving an imaginary end-state devised for fictional purposes, but even imaging a plausible end-state itself has benefits. It helps you the things together, make connections, and perhaps maybe start to draft what steps could be taken to get there . . . for weal or for woe.
Let's talk about the woe part: there has been an overwhelming avalanche of dystopian fiction since time immemorial. Or maybe the 1970s. Or maybe since World War I. I really don’t know the exact date, but the Great War is as good a line of demarcation as any. Europe had been decimated for reasons few people actually fighting truly understood, or were told about.1 New technologies evolved to allow people to kill each other faster and more cheaply. Entire generations of young men were wiped out, and the overall mood was grim. The Second World War a mere two decades later didn’t help, and a feeling of unease and outright pessimism permeated a lot of art and literature. The end of World War Il alleviated this, and for a time in the 1950s and 60s discussions about the future took a different tone: Flying cars! And end to disease, hunger, and want! Billions of people living in harmony! Food pills that would provide all of your daily nutrition in one convenient dose! Sliced bread! A way to get rid of ring-around-the-collar!2 Weird clothes! SPACE COLONIES! Like Donald Fagen sang:
Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream’s in sight
You’ve got to admit it
At this point in time that it’s clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A-OKWhat a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be freeGet your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There’ll be spandex jackets one for everyoneWhat a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free
I was the class of 2000, which isn't technically the beginning of the third millennium, but shh! Why let facts get in the way of something that sounds cool? We were told sine Kindergarten how special that was and how special we were. We even buried a time capsule to be dug up at our graduation and filled it with a bunch of stuff, including pictures of where we saw ourselves in the year 2000.3 I missed the unearthing ceremony, but my friend Phil went and he said I apparently drew a super-rad picture of me wearing a leather jacket and pink pants with lightning bolts on them, standing in front of a motorcycle. The year 2000 was going to be so cool, guys. Instead, I was a fat kid with big hair going to college. There were no flying cars. Disease still existed. Ditto world hunger. We didn’t all just get along—I saw the race-riots of the 90s. Rodney King and O.J. Simpson blasted into our homes. The Bill Clinton years. Chaos at the border. Racial tension. Increasingly violent and vulgar pop culture. NO SPACE COLONIES. Hell, the last time America, or anyone, went to the moon happened about a decade before I was born. I did see a space shuttle blow up, though, so that’s something.
I still want those pants, by the way.
Some things were better in the 90s, but that time wasn’t some golden age, although it seems like one now. The thing is, the 90s had everything we complain about now, every single thing, just in its awkward teenage years. There is no RETVRN to the 90s, or to any time, that wouldn't just bring us back to this exact point.4
This ties into the entire point of this essay.5 And you'll never believe what came after the 90s! Hint: it was awful.
The point is, a lot of the predictions about the future were way off. Exponentially off. But I'm not going to blame the people who made them, because they were products of their time. Optimism is kind of nice, though, and for a novel I am about halfway through writing, I spent some time a few years ago imagining what this country could be like if lots of things went right. For this story, I didn’t want to predict doom and gloom, but its opposite: optimism and sunshine. Or at least a better world; you might not be able to make it from New York to Paris in 90 minutes, per Mr. Fagen, but there would at least be space travel.
I'm not going to recount the plot of this soon-to-be-finished6 novel, but use it as a springboard to some modest, though plausible, predictions of what the United States could look like if someone, anyone, takes concrete steps to address some of the massive problems facing it. Many of these are derivations of theories and ideas proposed by other thinkers and that I read and thought, “This would be really interesting to put in a story,” or “I already thought of that for use in my story.” Others are just me reading the writing on the wall, which more accurate that tea leaves, and then assuming someone makes the right choices. The two big thrusts of my plausible fictional near-future America are ORDER and COMPETENCE. Most of my “predictions” are derived from the need to increase these two principles. And they will be increased. No blackpills here, friends.
It’s been said many times before, but there is that crown lying in the gutter just waiting for someone with the testicular fortitude to pick it up and do what must be done, not out of hate or malice or spite, but out of obligation to do what is best for the citizens of this country. What a novel idea! It's so insane, so far-fetched, you'd have to be a daydreaming novelist to think it could really happen.
The First Leader to Address the Crime Problem Will Win and Enjoy Massive Popularity.
This one looks like a layup, and we have real-world examples of this: Nayib Bukele,7 the president of El Salvador, cleaned up his country, which was affectionately known as the murder capital of the world,8 simply by putting gang members and other criminals in jail. You know, that thing that we're told doesn't work? Turns out it works!
I'm not joking about my aside—in law school, for example, we learned on and on and on AND ON about how taking criminals off the street, increasing police presence in high-crime areas, and vigorously enforcing the law doesn’t lower crime. You're supposed to just, I don’t know, talk to criminals and give them jobs and education and the crime problem will magically disappear.
The funny thing is, everyone of all races in America knows what a steaming pile of nonsense this is. Even the “Defund the Police!” people are backtracking, trying to gaslight you into believing that they never actually said “Defund the Police!”, or that even if they did, they didn’t really mean it. But they totally did.
Nobody is happy with American cities reaching third-world levels of crime and danger. The actual third-world, in fact, gets insulted by the comparison. Nobody is happy with violence and drugs and theft and robbery and general ugliness. I think we’ll see someone actually. tackle this problem, clean up America, and reap massive electoral rewards. I think the changing demographics of this country will help here: blacks and Hispanics and Indians and Asians and Middle Easterners are going to be far less tolerant of crime and far less susceptible to being guilted into coddling criminals than affluent white people are. And complaints about crime and its effects will be taken more seriously when they’re made by people who aren’t white. There is no such thing as a “natural conservative,” but law and order isn’t political to people who fled war zones to come to the “shining city on the hill” and find it just as dangerous.
However, there is a big caveat here: America is schizophrenic and its electoral system rewards short-term thinking.
Remember: At the city level, Rudy Giuliani cleaned up New York City during his tenure as mayor, and then when the hard work was done, he got tossed out because “Republican! Yuck!” I’m being somewhat facetious, but I enjoy ribbing New Yorkers every chance I get, so roll with it.
Given that America is insane and we have two insane political parties, the more-insane one/less-stupid one tends to get its way more often than not, so I could see someone enact a Bukele-style national cleanup, have it work out great . . . and then get voted out in favor of some lunatic who releases all of the criminals again. People tend to forget that things don’t stay as they are just because, and that the people involved actually matter. America, with its frequent elections, tends to undo everything the previous guy did back and forth until you get whiplash. But for the sake of our prediction, let’s say the people really love our hypothetical president so much they're willing to bend a few rules in order to keep him around so that the jails aren’t emptied by his venal and corrupt political opponent9 . . .
American Democracy Will Undergo Some Serious Changes.
The problems and contradictions with Our Democracy(TM) as practiced are too glaring to ignore. Remember: we are now a country imprisoning and/or disqualifying people the current regime doesn’t like so that people don’t vote for him in order to . . . uh . . . save Our Democracy. It’s insane.10 As such, I can envision a world where things like term limits for presidents are relaxed. I can think of a few presidents in my lifetime who could have easily won a third, or more, terms.11 At some point, given the sheer size and heterogeneity of our population, only an iron hand will be able to keep it orderly, and this will result in, let's say, some sort of permanent presidency once the right guy who has the proper support of not just the people, but the elite and the required institutions, comes into power. There may one day in our lifetimes be an election that is the proverbial “last election,” at least for President and at least for a while.
I can see Congress and the Judiciary hanging around as vestiges of the old ways, the way the Senate did in Rome once Augustus took power, to give the people some modicum of choice in rulers and the feeling that their vote still mattered. But I can also see a time where our permanent president, our king in all but name, is so popular and so good at what he does, that heritage America's historical anti-British, anti-monarchy strain just won’t matter. Ditto free speech: I foresee it hanging around but curtailed in interesting ways. Like blasphemy, for instance. We already have blasphemy laws in all but name, but I can see them being extended to actual religious blasphemy, considering the near-future America will feature many religions that need to play nice together.
There is a reason for this: Americans aren’t the same people of they were in 1776, or 1976, or even 2006. New Americans do not care about the intention of the Founding Fathers. It’s not their history or their people (yet).12 So the country will have to adapt or be torn apart.
American Demographics Will Continue to Change, but Peace Will Be Kept Through Force.
In my positive fictional vision of future America, there is no going back, only through. America will remain multi-ethnic and multi-racial. The open-borders experiment will be regulated, but immigration will still be allowed due to the global need for free mobility of labor to go along with the free mobility of capital. You might not like this, and even if you do, you cannot ignore that despite the economic benefits (accruing mostly to those at or near the top), it does destroy and alter the preexisting culture. My point is that American culture (a) has already changed beyond recognition over the last 25-30 years, and (b) it will continue to do so. So while our permanent president would likely enforce American laws and prevent the endless, unregulated deluge of God-knows-who into this country, heavily regulated immigration would continue. Given the sheer amount of habitable land in this country, I can see Americans who want to self-segregate self-segregating, and those who get along with people of other races and cultures continuing to live in relatively close proximity to each other. Freedom of association would be back on the menu, and the country could stay together but live apart as different groups desire. Ironically, this’ll bring us closer to federalism than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. As long as nobody is fighting or being treated unfairly I think this would work out.
However, in order to prevent the worst of the inevitable friction which will arise no matter the best efforts, a Singapore-style heavy handed approach would be undertaken to keep Balkanization from erupting into the kind of violence the term’s namesake is infamous for. I don’t think there will be breakaway ethnic enclaves—I don’t see identitarianism tolerated by enough people to be more than a fringe idea, but I do see every group advocating for themselves in a nonviolent political way. Again, this assumes a heavy hand a la Lee Kwan Yew to keep things nonviolent. This, in turn, may lead to an eventual American ethnogenesis as several generations of Americans grow up with an actual dominant culture and political/economic stability, where different factions aren’t tearing each other apart, and recognize that we are indeed all in this together. This one is a bit of a pipe dream, but there is potential. However, in a fictional world, it can totally happen. A big part of this relies upon the existence of a permanent president making politics mostly unnecessary for 90 percent of people to engage in. Talk about an improvement!
The culture will be a whole lot different, but I think it could work. And just think of how good American tacos will be!
Competence Will Be King
Nobody will care about political theory when indoor plumbing threatens to go the way of the dodo bird. When a routine trip to the doctor means rolling the dice on whether or not you survive. When airplanes start falling from the sky. These things will not be tolerated as DEI rightfully becomes viewed as “didn’t earn it.” Nobody will care anymore what color or sex their engineers and scientists and doctors and pilots and attorneys and generals and plumbers are, as long as they are doing a good job. I can see there still be some sort of modest quota system, necessary in the multi-ethnic, multi-racial America we will see, in order to keep people from feeling like their group is getting a raw deal, but the pool will most certainly come only from those who did earn it. This will repair the credibility of such initiatives.
Culturally, Degeneracy and Decadence Will Still Exist as It Always Has, but It Won't Be Celebrated, It Won’t Be Encouraged, and It Won't Be In Your Face.
You're not going to stop unmarried people from having sex. You're not going to stop people from being homosexual or transgender. You aren’t going to stop abortion. You aren’t going to stop prostitution. You aren’t going to stop drug use. You aren’t going to stop gambling. Many of these things are too popular in America, and there’s no putting the toothpaste back into the tube, especially when it comes to vice.
These things will always be with us. Economically, while things in hypothetical future America will be better, you'll also never fully eliminate poverty or hunger or unemployment, much like you never fully eliminate vice, though these things will be lower (I’ve seen this happen in my lifetime).
I'm not advocating a libertarian “Just legalize everything and end the state, bro!” mentality. I can see keeping and making most of this stuff illegal again! I also see these laws being used to keep such vices out of the public square and into the shadowy fringes where they belong . . . but not vigorously enforcing them until the encroach on normal people. So, for example, maybe anti-sodomy laws are technically on the books, but nobody will really care what the proverbial consenting adults do behind the proverbial closed doors. Proverbially.
Publicly, I can see this stuff quietly being put back into the closet and back into the margins of society, out of our kindergartens and back to the seedy but kind of chic and sexy nightclubs and backrooms where it belongs. Transgression will be transgressive again. If consenting adults want to let off steam, there will be the equivalent of red-light districts, or places like Las Vegas used to be, for that instead of having our entire culture be a red-light district. This will likely lead to more cool culture and provide a release valve for those—and only for those—with the necessary means to act as guardrails to prevent this sort of behavior from hurting others. Yes, vice will be mostly an upper-class thing. Same as it ever was. That’s good because the rest of us need to focus on creating the stable society that allows a counterculture to exist. Strong families = strong nations.
People wanting to see dirty pictures of naked women in compromising positions aren't going to be able to do it over the Internet (I foresee heavy regulation of porn in hypothetical future America, because (a) it has severe deleterious physical and mental effects on men and women, (b) it’s a hotbed of human trafficking, and (c) it’s inimical to family formation) so it'll be shoved back into gross theaters and behind the counter at a convenience store or video store (in my future America, video stores will make a comeback).
I do see the government doing something to incentivize marriage and childbirth, but I do not foresee women foregoing the job market en masse. I do see some measures taken to reduce inflation, in particular the price of housing. Maybe massive construction projects to build new homes that are big enough and affordable enough for young people. Further, with lower crime, there will be more viable neighborhoods to live in with good schools and so on.13
In a polyglot, multiethnic, multiracial, and multi-faith society, a lot of new Americans are not going to be as tolerant of degeneracy—or blasphemy—as normal Americans and mainline American Christians are, which will give social and cultural conservatives enough allies to finally do something meaningful about it. I think we’re already seeing the Christian-Muslim coalitions against gross stuff being taught to schoolchildren. Add people of other faiths and races and ethnicities to this coalition, and I think our permanent president will have to take such concerns about public morality seriously in order to keep the peace.14
Sorry, friends: you’ll just have to do your thing behind closed doors and after midnight like they did in your grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ days.
Speaking of Public Morality, It Will Exist but Won't Be Strictly Enforced.
Every culture needs a public morality. Right now, ours is secular post-World War II neoliberal progressivism and it seems it’s gone as far as it can go. I think the future America will return to something much deeper, a sort of more conservative cultural Christianity despite the declining number of Christians in America and the increase of Muslims and people of other faiths.15 Americans will pay lip-service to religion and religious principles, sort of how they do in Greece: enthusiastically celebrate the high holidays with all of the religious trappings, crossing themselves when they walk by a church, being respectful to priests and the religious in general, even publicly and proudly identifying as Christians to anybody who asks, but not actually going to church or anything. Islam and other faiths will be much the same eventually as American culture does to them what it did to Christianity.
The core of religious believers will not be harassed, and religious protection will be enforced as long as all faiths get along, with strict punishments for those who don’t, but neither will this be a theocracy.16 The permanent president will appear in public to receive the blessings of popes and bishops and patriarchs and imams and rabbis and so on, while espousing a universal traditional morality. And stupid “spaghetti monster” fedora-stuff and super-edgy satanism won’t be taken seriously as actual religions so as not to insult Muslims, Hindus, etc., with a concern for Christianity as an incidental byproduct17—remember, we’re trying to maintain order here.
I don't predict a national divorce or shooting civil war, since populations are way too intermixed, and I don't think that normal people really want this to happen.18 In my fictional vision of a future America, bloodshed would be kept to a minimum and people will look at the late 20th and early 21st centuries as something of a collective fever dream, a period everybody wishes they could forget. It’ll be akin to your crazy triple-masked, five-times boosted neighbor who screamed at you that you should die for going outside to get your mail without a mask, that your kids shouldn't be allowed in school or anywhere for not getting the shot, and believed that people deserved to die for not “TRUSTING THE SCIENCE!” and injecting themselves with “horse paste,” but now says "Well, that was a weird time, wasn't it? We just really didn't have enough information to make any good decisions and we all were just sort of muddling through!" and wants an amnesty.
And so that might be the only thing that could derail this vision, I guess—another insane pandemic.
I hope you've enjoyed my vision of what America could look like if things actually. go right. You'll notice it's neither BASED and RED-PILLED, nor dominated by blue-haired landwhale commissars going door-to-door mutilating children’s genitals, because those things will never happen. I also didn’t touch on foreign policy (if the things I envision come to pass, I think America would become decidedly less-interventionist) or corporations (I think our permanent president would bring the corporations to heel, telling them they either play ball with his agenda or their assets are confiscated; I could see the same thing being done to universities, with the addition of debt jubilees) and I'll leave it at that. There are obviously potential problems that would require a separate post to flesh out, but I get into them in my soon-to-be-finished novel.19 Let me know where you think I’m wrong, and as always, things might be bad, things might get worse, but there are always, always, better days ahead. All things pass, the bad times as well as the good. Stay strong.
- Alexander
PS Seriously, I want those pants.
Government's lying their way into whipping up war fervor is as old as time.
What the hell was ring-around-the-collar, anyway? Did anyone really get it? Was it a medical condition?
Now let's just see if I can land the plane.
Now that's a prediction I cannot keep.
This is a travesty right up there with America no longer having the world's tallest building-we're supposed to be the best at everything, darn it!
Yes, white collar crime and corruption would be rooted out just as vigorously as street crime.
One of the selling points of neoliberal democracy is the orderly, predictable, reliable, and peaceful transition of power at regular intervals. Like much of what the Framers set up, this requires (a) cultural and religious homogeneity and (b) an overwhelming percent of the population, like 90 percent, adhering to what is essentially an honor system. Absent that, your country starts to like those banana republics you used to make fun of.
Top of my head: Reagan, Clinton, Obama.
I discuss the potential for an American ethnogenesis later on in this piece.
Viable potential overhauls of the education system are beyond my area if expertise.
The fact of the matter is that Christians and white people can’t get anything done because it’s considered bigoted and racist by the people in charge. But if there are non-Christian brown people saying the same thing, suddenly the powers-that-be have to take it seriously or else they’re bigoted and racist. America is profoundly stupid when it comes to stuff like this, but we have to deal with the country as it is, not how we want it to be. Yet.
I mention Muslims so much, despite them being a small fraction of the U.S., because unlike Christians, Muslims actually stand up for their faith and have... uh... ways of making people take their religion seriously.
In this hypothetical, though plausible, America, every religion would need to be given equal respect, including Christianity. You can’t laud everybody except for one group, who is blamed for everything, and expect (a) order and (b) people to go along. We see the current folly with regards to both race and religion in the United States. Something has to change, and I foresee that it will. In fact, I can see the strict imposition of order finally allowing some sort of ethnogenesis to take place.
I don’t know where Judaism falls into the picture, since Jews don’t seem to get too upset about blasphemy and things like that. I could very well just not be seeing it, so please correct me if I’m wrong.
I don’t really think the powers-that-be want this to happen either, despite insane bragging about unleashing F-16s and nuclear bombs on Trump voters or whatever.
“Soon” is variable.
Some might consider this post a lark, but it's more important than they think. For all its faults, the Left had a vision they could rally the troops toward. Their shiny, sexy utopia's failure to materialize hasn't been enough to defeat them, though. Because you can only fight a vision with a better vision.
I recently remembered while watching Blackpilled's Gay '90s series that they used to play pro-gay propaganda in school and I used to dislike it because I, and everyone else, didn't realize what this had to do with us as kids. Of course I know now, and looking back it's very obvious, but there was plenty of this sort of thing back then. The one he played on stream later was uncovered to have been spearheaded by a member of the Weather Underground. The'90s are over done, long forgotten. No one can realistically Retvrn to that.
I have my predictions about where things will go in the years ahead, but I do not see this forever slide down the slippery slope continuing indefinitely. It can't. Unless the fall is controlled and regulated, and done soon, the landing is only going to get messier once the bottom is hit.