My wife came home and said “It’s not going to be like Nazi Germany, it will be like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, where the smart and competent people are taken out and shot.”
What say you?
I don’t think people will be round up and shot, but America’s reputation for standing up for what’s right will be trashed. The US won’t be trusted to stand up for anyone other than the US. Our former allies are on their own.
A lot like the previous era.
Fascist theocracy and the purge of much of the population, followed by genocidal war against the world (probably beginning with a nuclear bombardment of South America and Africa to kill as much of the population as possible), then a nuclear exchange ending in the probably permanent collapse of industrialized civilization.
No, they will be asked to pay for our friendship or suffer. A protection racket of sorts. Like I see the Philippines being forced to allow our bases to be opened back up or face China alone.
China will pass the United States as the most powerful country in the world.
Europe will step up and keep Ukraine from getting overrun by Russia, with South Korea providing a major assist.
Here at home Trump will prove to be a disaster. There will be a blue tsunami in the 2026 midterms and the Democratic candidate will win in 2028. Hopefully there will be no retirements or deaths on the SCOTUS in the interim.
…I’ve argued for a while that America is already a dystopian state. And I’d point to the prison population as an exemplar. El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and American Samoa are the only countries ahead of America on the list of people incarcerated per capita. Russia is nearly half the rate. China is 1/5th. Most haven’t been convicted. And the exception to the 13th means that effectively slavery is still on the books.
More people were killed by the cops in America last year than any other year. The numbers aren’t going down. The apparatus of a totalitarian state is already in place. Its just…for most people, its too much to think about.
In Gaza people, including children, are regularly being hunted down by drone. And it barely raises and eyebrow. When it starts to happen in America, I suspect most people will just be glad that “it wasn’t me”, and go back to watching Law and Order. What will the next era of the USA look like? It will look like that.
Will?
Next “Era” rather than the next few years, I’d bet on a Nehemiah Scudder:
The USA has always been far too fond of Religion over the Constitution, and the blending of the Republicans and many Christian sects into a near unity is only getting worse IMHO.
The Right has become very, Very fond of the big man who claims to have all the fixes and throws the popular scapegoats into bonfires. Given another dozen years, it won’t be figurative, with a tiny bit of “We’re just joking, I’m sure some of them are fine people” into full blown “Deus Vult” with of course, said God being in their own White favor. Trump is going to be the patron saint, who while “flawed” in life, lead the way.
Non-whites who toe the line will be second class citizens. People who don’t convert, surface or otherwise will be marginalized, flee, or be stripped of rights and wealth to the point of being economic if not literal serfs.
The technocrats/elites will pay lip service to the new religion and meanwhile run the nation along with the political caste in a manner resembling Putin’s Russia.
And like Putin’s Russia, the vast majority of the nation will comply, out of fear, out of love of being on “top” of their “enemies”, or out of apathy.
That has already (mostly) happened, starting with the ill-conceived 2003 invasion of Iraq. Trump is just making sure none of our European or Pac Rim allies will invest any trust in us…unless they quid pro quo, you know.
I don’t know where you are getting that but without the United States in the picture none of the other NATO countries have enough stockpiles of weapons and materiel nor manufacturing capacity to keep Ukraine in the business of conventional war. I’m sure there will be efforts to support Ukraine as best possible but they won’t have any more HIMARS much less the longer range ATACMS, so Ukraine will be left with whatever artillery they can get shells for and drones, and while that is probably sufficient to keep the Russian Army at bay for quite a while they aren’t going to press any offensives to retake major areas of contested or occupied territory without heavy artillery and armor.
I am far from confident about the purported “Blue Wave”, much less a “Blue Tsunami”, even how tame the action was in 2018 mid-terms. Also, a lot of ‘Red’ states pushed back against federal election watchers in this recent election (technically, the FEC does not have rights to actually directly observe polling stations), and you can bet there will be no federal oversight in 2026. We will still have elections because even autocrats have to move carefully about eliminating all vestiges of democracy, but how “free and fair” will vary depending on who controls the statehouse of particular states. Local officials in those states who push back will be harassed, threatened, and possibly even jailed on allegations and manufactured charges of ‘election fraud’.
But most of all, climate impacts will continue to become ever worse; both 2023 and 2024 were successively the hottest years on record with ocean temperature anomalies in late 2023 and all of 2024 remaining not only well above the previous 10 year average but no longer even following the seasonal trend that has been observed since high fidelity measurements have been taken. This is an increasingly strong indication that anomalous ocean thermal heat has reached a different phase and may well be an unrecoverable tipping point. The Berkeley Earth atmospheric temperature model has reported a >1.5 ℃ anomaly for 2023 and will do so for 2024 with virtual certainty, and while any good climatologist will tell you that technically we need a 10 or 20 year baseline to confirm that we have exceeded the +1.5 ℃ anomaly threshold set by the Paris Climate Accords, virtually all of them will tell you privately that we have already exceeded that with high confidence and nothing short of global geoengineering efforts reliant on unproven technologies has any hope of pulling that back down in human lifetimes.
The now minimum expected temperature anomaly by 2100 is +2.7 ℃ (which I think is ridiculously optimistic; more likely close to +4 ℃ not even accounting for unexpected feedbacks), which will wipe out most or all of the Greenland Ice Sheet and will substantially reduce several major Antarctic ice sheets with no hope of recovery in millennia (basically until the next ‘ice age’ comes). Feedback effects from unfrozen permafrost, ocean heating and release of seabed clathrates, expansive growth of methane-producing anaerobic bacteria, and loss of most if not all rainforests produces positive feedbacks that we can only really guess at, but the most optimistic of those guesses is “not good”.
And what will the Trump Administration do about that? Shut down or hobble NOAA and NWS from making long term assessments, silence NASA, NOAA, and USGS climate researchers, likely sequester the satellite-based observational data that other nations use to make climate and hydrological models, and “Drill, baby, drill!” because nothing says success like a broiling planet with uninhabitable tropical regions and the former ‘breadbaskets’ of North America and Europe struggling to grow staple crops in hot and dry conditions occasionally punctuated by massive atmospheric river-driven derechos and massive tornado systems, not to mention hurricanes and typhoons that dwarf even the massive, fast-moving storms we’ve experienced recently.
Stranger
And really, only about half of the US. Democrats and the like can get bent.
We will never be trusted with a piece of foreign intel again.
More and stronger hurricanes.
That is my biggest fear, and altogether too likely to happen. My wife gets a quizzical look on her face when I mention Scudder - she’s not a Heinlein reader.
My, but you;re such a debbie downer.
If the billionaires are in charge, that’s the LAST thing that would happen. Hard for Musk or Bezos or anybody to make money when the entire world is a smoking ash pile. Even hard when half the population is in death camps. So even the cultural revolution or the Kmer Rouge-type situation are out.
One of my favorite quotes from the Closer:
I remember once hearin’ a speech about what it meant to be an officer of the CIA and the man who gave this speech talked about the struggle to control civilization and how we’re always fightin’ the same fight, and he used the dark ages as an example. And he talked about how on the one side you had the pragmatic king who was greedy and power hungry and basically took advantage of people whenever he could. And on the other side you had the idealistic church forcin’ everyone to follow the same rules, believe the same thing, and all that. Neither the king nor the church was ever completely right or wrong, both sides ended up doin’ terrible things to get what they wanted, really terrible things. The point of the story was this, that this struggle from the dark ages had been goin’ on forever, and the church and the king might take on different philosophies but they would always fight each other, pragmatists and idealists, and at most times, you’re better off standin’ on the sidelines, lettin’ them duke it out. But every once in a while, one side or the other decides it might be better just to blow up the whole world just to get its own way and when that happens you can’t stand on the sidelines any more. You have to pick a team.
Right now the King is the billionaires and what’s left of the old school repubs, and the Church is the end times religious right. And this may be the time that they may want to blow up everything,
I’m thinking hemlines will be lower and the cardigan will make a brief comeback.
Based on this thread I found from 2002, I’m thinking the SDMB is awful at predicting the future.
They aren’t; Trump, the white nationalists and the Christian fanatics are. And Trump won’t live much longer. And the latter groups want to kill everyone who isn’t them. The billionaires will do what they are told or get a bullet to the face.
yes yes, now go take an aspirin and sit down.
Go ask the Russian oligarchs who “fell out a window” how much money protects them from a dictator.
Fundamentally, money works great, for as long as the people you’re bribing want the money more than they want something else. As soon as that equation changes, though, money stops working.
It gets particularly messy when someone figures out that they can use the power of the state to get both your money, and the thing they want, if you stand in their way.