Will the U.S. collapse?
It is often said predicting the future is a fool’s errand. Complexity is often recursive, infinite, and unimaginable, shifting possibilities at wreckless, incomprehensible speed. One day, one event, one person can change the whole world, if the timing and context is right. What is the point then trying to answer a question like the above?
Morbid fun, I guess? Really though, I don’t need to know the future, or even be confident in it, but prediction is useful. If it’s possible we’re headed toward a particular future, we should think about how that changes our actions today. It helps map possibilities, determine what to attend to, and then plan, organize, and plot. I am nothing if not a planner, and so I can’t imagine a better way to spend a Saturday afternoon in the sunny shade next to playing children at a park, listening to the peaceful sounds of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s pioneering visions of ambient. I’m weird that way.
When I think about the possible collapse of my country, I bring many things to the pondering. Fear, of course. I don’t want my country to collapse, or to live collapse. But I also bring a unique positionality, one delicately resting between higher education, K-12 education, local and state politics, a foot in high tech and its obsession with AI, and another foot in trans communities of color, youth, teachers, parents. I am a creature of the often forgotten Pacific Northwest corner of the United States, from both its cities, suburbs, and rural communities. But I am also a traveler, having professional and personal connections to people in a hundred countries, most of which I have visited, glimpsing their mainstreams and undergrounds with locals as my guide. I share all of this not to give my predictions authority, but to help you interpret them; they are the bias I bring to what I see coming, illuminating some things, masking others.
So what do I think is going to happen if the United States stays on its current course? So much and little of it good. And so a content warning is in order: the picture I paint is dire, and that may not be what you need right now. Read it when you’re ready to reckon and make your plans. (Also, I do have some hope, but I’ll save that for the end).
Trans exclusion entrenches
I’ll start with one I’m closest to. Trans activists, myself included, will fight hard. We will win some cases, lose some others, be more out than ever, and find a growing coalition of allies who valiantly defend us. Many of these will be parents, who had to choose between loving their child or falling to hate. In some ways, we will be freer than ever, and that will be progress.
But I do not think this will be enough to liberate us. Laws and culture are sticky; humanity has broadly been skeptical of trans people for its entire history, and this recent blip of acceptance has been met with fierce resistance globally. The left will see little prospect of defending us, because the majority of the public in the U.S. does not fundamentally believe that we deserve equal rights, because they fear us, or find us inhuman. The long road we were always on for liberation will stretch further out as we are thrown under the bus politically, as people forget us and larger problems loom. The majority will sympathize with us, and make concessions when they do not cost them anything — power, money, a sense of safety and order. But otherwise, we will be forgotten, as marginalized groups in the U.S. so often are.
Trans folks like myself will increasingly be faced with the choice of making a life as part-time pariahs in an increasingly hostile anti-trans world, or making our own worlds, as so many of us already do. Worlds full of love and freedom, but that offer little material wellbeing, as we necessarily disconnect ourselves from the broader world.
Education and research withers
As a Professor in academia, this one is also close. I’ve seen decay already for many decades: neoliberal forces framing higher education as fundamentally about jobs and profit have been popular on the left and the right, eroding academia’s fundamental mission of the discovery, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. We persist between the cracks of public pressure to make classes ever larger, prove our ROI to governments, and carefully administer our dwindling resources within a hostile regulatory regime. This White House has taken this underling rot and accelerated it, cutting everything it can to and through the bone, leaving only the things politically valuable to one man, and our only defense is a judiciary that gives allegiance only to a conservative lens on the law, but nothing to the survival of our democracy or the prosperity of its people.
Education in the U.S. was always in a position of begging, and the fruitful collectivist public contract of the past 70 years has been broken. We either return to a former state of elitism, funded by patrons with agendas rather than the public, or we somehow forge a new compact amidst all the other chaos in the country. I have seen no evidence that we are capable of that coalition building, nor evidence that the public wants to elevate scholarship above all of its other immediate concerns. This likely means that our institutions fade as the rest of the world’s thrive, and we go from being at the top of the world to a footnote, with decades of work to rebuild, if we choose. I will be here for this whole fight, but we are coming unarmed, unprepared.
The generative AI bubble bursts
Industry has bet its quarterly profits on a gambit: that it can monetize GenAI’s impressive but flawed capabilities in the short term, and reinvest those rapidly enough to create new economies, built upon the data traces of human activity from the past. To realize this, it will have to steal our words, build an ever larger surveillance state to monitor or speech and actions, and compel governments, as they have done with the U.S., to clear the path to this new world privatized world that centers profit and productivity over human flourishing. The promise throughout will be faster drug discoveries, more time for the hard problems, and more time with family and friends, as is the promise of every productivity technology, but it will really be about more profit.
But little of this will happen. The public is rapidly learning the limits and harms of the technology, precisely because of the hype machine that has compelled them to invest so deeply in it, to see these up close. The hollowing out of higher education will leave the country with little forethought about the possibilities in the technology, as this administration cuts grants for research funding, doctoral students, undergraduate researchers, and conferences in the name of attacking people of color and trans people. Industry has already shot itself in the foot, halting junior hires, cutting off its future capacity for the design and engineering workforce to realize its visions. It is Wile E. Coyote, hovering past a cliff, not yet realizing there is nothing to catch it. The tentpole industry of the U.S. economy collapses, with few other opportunities for growth, as the rest of the economy is choked by tariffs, closed borders, and uncertainty.
Climate extremes kill, displace
While all of this happens, the future we know is coming, comes. Extreme weather events increase in their magnitude and frequency. The growth in heat deaths each summer continues to climb. Our fragile, unmaintained infrastructure, first built by public investment, craters under the constant weather crises and public disinvestment. As the economy falters, short term measures like air conditioning fall out of reach for our growing poverty class, while the rest of the world is long down the path of sustainable energy. Pockets of the U.S. manage, like the Pacific Northwest, Minnesota, and Vermont, guarded by geography and local investment in sustainable futures, while most of the rest of the country becomes more expensive as housing and jobs wither under the annual collapse of habitable infrastructure. Climate refugees show up in the less affected pockets of the country, creating crises of housing shortage, cultural change, and political infighting about what to do.
The right doubles down on its lies, long dismissing any of these realities, and blames the left, and political infighting about what to do becomes intractable. There’s no money to repair things constantly falling apart, but there’s no appetite to let (rich) people die. There’s no time to build the world we should have been building since the 1980’s. It’s too late, and everyone in power knows it, and so “Big fucks small”, as Alfie of Peaky Blinders would say. We fight to survive, everyone for themselves, because we are hot, tired, and hungry.
Reproduction fades
The U.S. is already declining in population growth. Our generous open borders have always masked that. As the borders close, we begin to see what that looks like for the country. The population ages, there aren’t enough people to care for our elders. Entire cities, as some already are (e.g., Pittsburgh), are built atop an age bubble, with local industries fundamentally relying on an aging, ill population. Politicians begin to ponder enticements to reproduce. Some argue for reopening borders to restore the flow of labor. Industries begin to realize that they cannot function without people, and the broken promises of GenAI have not compensated, instead only amplifying the experts, but doing little to grow the broader labor face. Robots still can’t fold laundry, fix a roof, make a sandwich, and the ones that can do useful things are expensive and gate-kept by corporate boards.
But young adults are having less sex than ever. Schools have been underfunded for decades, and become prisons of industrialized, “personalized” learning, with no time for play, no safety for their identities, no sense of opportunity or future, with their burned out parents struggling to pay the bills as cost and workload increase for lack of people. Youth cope by retreating to their virtual worlds, forming relationships instead with LLMs, trying to escape the hostile adult spaces that surveil them. As they age into their 20’s, having children seems impossible, with laws that are hostile to family planning, to child care, to education, to diversity. We open the borders in desperation, but no one comes, because there’s little here to offer.
We all get sicker
Our current system involves monetizing illness, burning out providers, criminalizing health care, and enriching middle men, and creating as much friction as possible by privatizing every part of our health care system. Our cost and outcomes are already horrendous when compared to the developed world for these flaws. Our new administration is doubling down on all of these systemic ills, kicking people off of public options and into ERs, erasing medical research, disinvesting in the mRNA technologies that will mitigate the devastation of our next pandemic, all while increasing the likelihood of pandemics, chronic disease, and our leading causes of death.
Public health faces similar fates. Abandoning public transit infrastructure in favor of internal combustion engines for every individual means more smog, less exercise, more heart disease and diabetes, more isolation. Eradicating population health research and statistics will make these trends invisible. Having a growing population of depressed, sick, and poor people with nowhere to go but the emergency room will harm all of our health, but deterring most from pursuing health career at a time when the country ages. This effects will be self-reinforcing, making us all sicker.
Rural communities are abandoned
The people who created this conditions to save their way of life find that nothing their dear cult leader promised came to pass. There are no new jobs. Kids flee rural towns as soon as they can, for lack of opportunity and inclusion. The same trend we’ve seen for decades continues, until most small towns empty. They become places that children come back to visit for as long as their aging parents live (assuming they weren’t queer kids disowned by their parents for not confirming to the cruelties of organized religion).
But cities are not the destination of youth. Decades of NIMBYism and car culture have precluded adequate housing supply, and so once great urban spaces become enclaves of wealth, as many are already becoming. Culture dies, for lack of art, and cities become corporate machinery, with well-oiled infrastructure for moving white collar workers to and from their curated luxury lingering glimpses of the American dream. Cities become bubbles of progressivism, disconnected from the decay around them, as the extractive project of capitalism converges to its apex.
Youth instead move to the ex urbs. They make their own small businesses, find cheap housing, and create their own micro cities, freed from the weight of rural and urban decay. These become the cities that incubate small glimpses of America’s possible futures, but they are fragile amidst the surrounding decay.
The economy collapses
The great capitalist engines of the U.S., long the envy of the world, sputter without political vision to invest in our people. Closed borders, climate change, population decline, AI bubbles, education decay, and a culture of cruelty and hostility numbs entrepreneurship. There are pockets of regional thriving, but the weight of the rest of the country’s decline pulls these down. The country remains closed off from whatever growth or opportunity is emerging globally, now because of xenophobia, later because of fear of competition.
The world, of course, was built upon a global economy that relied on the economic stability of the U.S. The reconfiguration of economic power in the world places countries like China at the top. China just barely escapes its own collapse finding plenty of other partners with which to trade, and the U.S. is left behind, with nothing to offer the world but a memory of greatness. Most who wanted to visit or move here lose interest, finding more opportunity in the vibrant futures of being imagined elsewhere.
Our democracy collapses
None of these forces provide the context for renewing our commitments to democracy. Trust as already exceptionally low. The information landscape, fragmented by the Internet, alternative media, and a President that has destroyed any sense of shared conversation through his lies, deceit, and destruction, leaves us with no shared knowledge, nor a shared conversation. People passionate about saving democracy create spaces for like-minded people to come together in the middle, but the far left and right wings cannot reconcile. There is already so much that has been lost; the stakes are too high to lose anymore. There is no middle that offers hope, because all a middle can offer is more compromise.
The rapid erosion of democratic norms on the right begins to translate into concrete disruptions in democratic process. Political assassinations rise to levels that deter public service at scale. Some elections don’t happen for lack of candidates. The desire for an authoritarian savior amplifies on both the left and the right, because anything less seems intractable. The shouting of millions online quiets, as most voices are replaced by GenAI fueled bots, screaming for us. Democracy lives on in small pockets in person, trying to burst through, but all of the oxygen has been taken up by misinformation, distrust, and social entropy.
In the end, we become Russia, but on fire.
Yikes. This is definitely not a dystopia I want to live through, even though so much of it is already happening at a small scale. What I see in the above is actually the slow death of something that has always been very fragile: a few hundred million people in the U.S. sharing an idea that freedom, democracy, and mutual respect are a recipe for our collective prosperity. That is, of course, what we have lost in our current President. He has no interest in any of these things and neither do most of the people who voted for him. The death of these values is the death of the United States, even if half of us still believe them.
While this is where we are headed, we don’t have to go in that direction. So many of the forces above are things that have been with us for the entire history of the country, to different degrees, and we have nevertheless resisted them. The U.S. was always a country built on oppression, exploitation, and lies. The only thing that has redeemed us, morally and economically, was a dream of a better, more perfect union that centers the equality and inherent worth of all of our people, in all of their differences. If we can keep faith in those ideas, and realize those ideas through our action, I do believe a different future is possible. Nothing about realizing those ideas will be easy, but I hope the dire alternative above makes it clear how much that hard work is necessary and worth it to steer our ship in a different direction.
What direction might that be? In essence, the opposite of the above:
- Trans people can live their lives, with equal rights and without fear of violence, and with the health care and respect we need to be well
- We have vibrant education and research institutions that make sense of the world, imagine better futures for us all, and educate everyone, for the better of everyone.
- We invest in figuring out how GenAI, like all other tools, should and shouldn’t be used to support our flourishing
- We immediately start building for a sustainable future, like the rest of the world, and maybe even capture some of the industries necessary to realize it.
- Many people have children, and we support them, with time off, child care, and family planning, giving hope to children that they can be themselves and find their place in a world that loves them
- We guarantee health care, because a healthy public is a creative, loving, productive one
- Rural communities thrive, becoming vibrant, richly connected communities connected to ex urbs, suburbs, and cities through sustainable, fast, green transit, amplifying trade, cultural exchange, and mutual respect
- Our economy continues to be an engine of the world, full of innovation, creativity, ambition, and collaboration, because we invest in our people, and welcome everyone
- Our democracy becomes the envy of the world, for its stability, trust, and humanity, making other democracies stronger
I do think that most people in the country want the above, even the ones that voted for our chaos agent in chief. Let’s go change some hearts and minds, and turn this ship around together, before we crash into that iceberg.
