This 4T can still go many ways. It can culminate in the establishment of an authoritarian right-wing order analogous to Spain under Franco. The economic elites would largely love that -- a land of low wages and high prices, brutal discipline of the workforce, and suppression of everything other than cultural tendencies that promote rigid obedience to economic and bureaucratic elites. America would have a brain drain much as did Franco's Spain, with its best and brightest finding their ways elsewhere, much as Spanish Republicans found their ways to such places as France, Mexico, and the USA. Only when the natural tendencies of an Awakening Era and the aging of the political elite have their inevitable conjunction would things loosen up.
We could have something like the French Revolution, whose Jacobin fanatics exterminated the 'obsolete' aristocracy and hangers-on in the name of a hyper-rational new order. The Millennial Generation could yet turn out that way because it has yet to find any self-interest in the economic order that we now have. Heavily in debt and often poor despite a solid work ethic? It is likely to see radical solutions that unleash them from the tethers of poverty.
It can end after America has become (for a short time) an Evil Empire that most of the rest of the world deems necessary to defeat and liquidate (as was Nazi Germany or Thug Japan)... and does. The victors will establish over the parts of America that they occupy institutions like theirs and perhaps cultural norms from their countries. In such a scenario I can imagine a city like Atlanta under Brazilian occupation developing an impressive Carnival... or children having to learn Japanese (even if in a Roman script) in Japanese-occupied northern California. Let us hope that the winners choose to bring a 'New Birth of Freedom' to a defeated America whose economic realities are back in the nineteenth century in the wake of all the destruction. Evil-doers will face harsh retribution, and many might hang themselves if they are not hanged by the victors. America might be partitioned into smaller, demilitarized units.
It can end in the obliteration of Humanity, or at least all traces of modern civilization necessary for life beyond the Stone Age. Nuclear winter, anyone? No thanks! The weapons are strong enough and plentiful enough.
Here's my most favorable prediction: we Americans revert to what we used to do well, picking and choosing what was great as determined later to be great. We will develop a political consensus that ethnic inequity, homophobia, sexism, and gross inequality of economic result will be unconscionable. We may shrink or expand the role of government as some consensus demands. But this will be done through democratic process. We will of course cast off the grossly-undemocratic government by lobbyists that we now endure.
We could have something like the French Revolution, whose Jacobin fanatics exterminated the 'obsolete' aristocracy and hangers-on in the name of a hyper-rational new order. The Millennial Generation could yet turn out that way because it has yet to find any self-interest in the economic order that we now have. Heavily in debt and often poor despite a solid work ethic? It is likely to see radical solutions that unleash them from the tethers of poverty.
It can end after America has become (for a short time) an Evil Empire that most of the rest of the world deems necessary to defeat and liquidate (as was Nazi Germany or Thug Japan)... and does. The victors will establish over the parts of America that they occupy institutions like theirs and perhaps cultural norms from their countries. In such a scenario I can imagine a city like Atlanta under Brazilian occupation developing an impressive Carnival... or children having to learn Japanese (even if in a Roman script) in Japanese-occupied northern California. Let us hope that the winners choose to bring a 'New Birth of Freedom' to a defeated America whose economic realities are back in the nineteenth century in the wake of all the destruction. Evil-doers will face harsh retribution, and many might hang themselves if they are not hanged by the victors. America might be partitioned into smaller, demilitarized units.
It can end in the obliteration of Humanity, or at least all traces of modern civilization necessary for life beyond the Stone Age. Nuclear winter, anyone? No thanks! The weapons are strong enough and plentiful enough.
Here's my most favorable prediction: we Americans revert to what we used to do well, picking and choosing what was great as determined later to be great. We will develop a political consensus that ethnic inequity, homophobia, sexism, and gross inequality of economic result will be unconscionable. We may shrink or expand the role of government as some consensus demands. But this will be done through democratic process. We will of course cast off the grossly-undemocratic government by lobbyists that we now endure.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.