The first Trump term and now the 2nd will push the US in a certain direction. Trump will not get too much credit from the historians. It will be noted that there was a shift. The voters are not happy and part of it is that the US Constitution is no longer working for us citizens the way it did in the 1900s, even through the Reagan years.
The result will be a US with a big army and some strength. But no longer keepin military bases all over the world and cruising air craft carriers. Those were around for the purpose of providing a base in a place where there was not a lot of US support. Middle East, Asia, Russian neighbors. Air craft carriers do not enter the Baltic as those are now all NATO countires. And they never did.
The other trend that we will see is that red states are on their own. The South will be poor. Even federal highway money will be less and less. The blue states will continue as they did. They produce a lot of income and will take care of their own. They will invent their own healthcare.
Healthcare will change. Traveling to a different state may require travel insuranc, in case you get sick. The states will become little coutries. Sharing only the millitary and the dollar. Federal spending will tighten and will run a lot like the EU. Some states will need to be bailed out from time to time. Catastrophies will need special laws for recovery, each one. Some kind of financial arrangements are made. Somehow the states will get independent economies. Don’t ask how, I am not an economist.
I think it is a good bet that we are currently at a tipping point, and that the US will be pushed in a certain direction. I’m not entirely certain, at the moment, exactly what direction that will be. But I would lay pretty high odds that it will not be in a direction that I would view as positive.
What will keep the fascists – and yes, I am going to keep using that word – from sucking the wealthier liberal states dry, to further feather their nests and fuel their ever more infamous schemes? Don’t say the judiciary.
I agree with the vibe of the OP for sure. I think the specifics are fairly unpredictable.
Yes, the constitution no longer works well at all, but I’d add that capitalism as we know it is on its last leg. Not just in the US, but globally. I think the global anti-incumbent wave of 2024 was due mostly to economic and social dysfunction.
The US is currently a dog composed of Blue states and Blue cities being wagged by a tail composed of Red states. This is not a pattern set for long-term stability. I think a showdown between a band of Blue versus the Trumpian federal government is the mostly likely way in which the tipping point goes from totter to topple.
I doubt all that. The prognostication hasn’t been too accurate lately and I’m not sure if your prediction will break that trend. Two years isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things and if the country is going to hell there will be an election to course correct then.
I do agree that historians will write about this era I just don’t think we are going to see the weakening of the USA to the degree you see especially since the country has faced bigger challenges, both real and perceived, in the past and has emerged more entangled and stronger.
We’ve never had a more corrupt, incompetent, vengeful, and generally obnoxious president. And that’s saying something. On its own, that would just be embarrassing, but with practically the whole Republican Party cheering him on and kissing his ring, this could get really ugly.
Temporal proximity to events distorts their perceived future historical importance. People forget great depression, WWII, Civil War, post-revolutionary times, the Cold War, etc. Those were vastly more significant. What we are seeing now is the predicted reaction to globalization and a realignment of political coalitions.
Will it be disruptive? Yes. Will it end in the de-facto fragmentation of the USA? No. The power of the common market is just too valuable. The only one who benefits from a real weakening are the USA’s strategic competitors.
The Civil War, perhaps. The others were small in comparison to what might happen in the next 4 years. In all those eras, we had rational leadership (both parties) dealing with serious issues. Even the successionists in the 1860s were more rational than Trump. Now we have generally good conditions at home and abroad, and a guy at the helm hell-bent of fucking everything up. It seems different somehow.
24 hour ‘news’ and social media that is designed to maximize attention via manipulating strong emotions is, imo, the largest component of the set of differences.
Reagan was the tipping point; Trump is just the US approaching the bottom of the cliff electing Reagan pushed the US over.
As for what historians will write in 20 years, I expect it’ll be about how the US genocided most of the world population (including most of its own), kicked off World War III and the end of industrialized civilization. Assuming there are any historians, that is.
Which includes many of Trump’s boosters as well as Trump himself who openly seek a United States that is more insular, less engaged on the international stage, and generally permissive to authoritarian regimes as long as they don’t seek to operate within the US direct sphere of influence.
I remember a few years ago telling someone, “Nixon was a crook, but at least he cared about the United States.” Donald Trump is the only president we’ve had who I don’t believe cares one bit about the United States beyond what profit he can extract from it. If Trump thought he could make a buck from it, he’d burn the country to the ground. That such a nakedly venal man could attain the highest office in the land is an indication of a deep rot.
George W. Bush was immensely more damaging to the US than Trump has been up to this point. In my perception, and I doubt in mine alone, 9/11 marked the end of the post-Civil War US. That happened on Dubya’s watch, and we can debate to what degree he was at fault. What no one disputes at this point, however, is that what he did after that was utterly stupid, stupendously costly, strategically counterproductive, and massively destructive to lives and property. I would even venture to say that the stupid coming out of Dubya’s mouth was worse than Trump’s performance art logorrhea. It is only dimly remembered now because it was as boring as it was unintelligent, though a few lines live on infamy (“I’m the decider”; “Is our children learning?”; etc.).
Trump pretty much would have to start WWIII in order to do as much damage.
Trump is a master troll and has indeed been very traumatic to the people of the US and the world in general, and he has completely corrupted and destroyed one of our two major parties (which latter thing may or may not be a good thing in the long run, as it was already a rotten institution before he began fooling with it). His election denial and 1/6 putsch were unforgivable sins, as has been his grifting and that of his family and flunkies in the aggregate.
My guess (and hope) is that Trump 1.0 and now 2.0 will lead to the exposure, processing, and rejection of what is weak and putrescent in our polity without doing Dubya-level damage. We shall see, as they say…
Kind of adorable that people still think what we’re witnessing is just rational actors responding to rational market signals, rather than the historically familiar path of new media paving the way for old hatreds to melt the brains of a whole society. Then it was radio, now it’s social media.
