Why the Year 2025 Might Be the Last for America as We Know It
Chaos following the ’24 election could trigger the downfall; I just hope Uncle Sam doesn’t go out like a cowboy and take the entire planet with him
It doesn’t get more doomscroll-y than that title of hyperbolic clickbait predicting a looming era of darkness and the downfall of the Stars and Stripes. But anyone who writes and even semi-pays attention to politics knows that these pieces write themselves.
After fifty years of steady decline and the one-two punch of Trump and COVID, America and Americans are barely hanging on. Pull on just about any societal thread in my home country and one could be led to a fall-of-the-nation-as-we-know-it level event.
Be it the near third-world level social and poverty scores, the general political despondency, and anger mixed with 390,000,000 guns, extreme weather from climate change and its continued denial, surging fascism, right-wing militias’ war games in the forest coming to the streets, Christian theocratic authoritarianism imposed by fundamentalist stacked courts with lifetime appointments, or nuclear war triggered by the over-aggressive foreign policy of an arrogant dying empire determined to keep its neocolonial exploitative grip on the throat of the world.
Again, these pieces write themselves. My family keeps telling me to channel my years of daily meditation into some positive essays — maybe I should and maybe I will.
But there’s a lot to be pissed off, worried, and freaked out about. The outlook is bleak and half of Medium feels like Paul Revere banging a bell and screaming our heads off — I hope others are channeling it into more action than I am over here sipping Czech pilsners.
Obviously, predicting the future is a fool’s errand. I am that fool and am going to go out on a limb and say that the 2024 election, no matter who wins it, might be the catalyst for the rapid end of America as we know it.
Here’s why…
Regardless of who wins the next presidential election, half of the country is going to be convinced it was stolen.
In terms of information, it is already two nations
How can a supposedly democratic country function when its citizens have lost faith in the election process? In short, it can’t. That’s where America is at the moment. The US is bifurcated into two factions that don’t even live in the same information universe. It’s impossible to move towards anything besides destruction if you can’t agree on a basic set of facts.
In America, the most fundamental piece of a democratic society, voting, has been completely corrupted in the eyes of the populace.
And it’s not just the ‘Stop the Steal’ crew. Shallow-memoried right-wing loons love to remind the equally amnesiac Democrats that they never accepted the results of the 2016 election. Despite a two-year thirty-two million dollar investigation that turned up little and the subsequent indictment of multiple Clinton lawyers for lying, many are convinced that one was rigged.
Six years later they’re still shouting about Bernie, Jill Stein, and Putin, so it isn’t that surprising that Steve Bannon and the boys started a ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign BEFORE the 2020 election even happened. Dangerous and inexcusable? Yes, but not wholly surprising.
The next election is going to be much worse on all fronts. It truly doesn’t matter who wins. It doesn’t even matter if Trump’s fryer-grease-laden heart makes it to ‘24.
Regardless of who wins the next presidential election, half of the country is going to be convinced it was stolen.
If Trump or DeSantis or any other “Christian” from the GOP wins, Democrats are going to rightly point to the voter restriction laws and the gerrymandering done by Republican state governments. They’ve got suppressing voter turnout down to a science and will probably keep just enough people away from the polls in swing states to win the electoral college but again lose the popular vote.
Democrats would contest it, but the right-wing stacked federal courts would probably uphold the ruling, leaving the nation again horrified and pissed off that winning by millions of votes doesn’t matter. Just like after Trump got elected, there’d be massive protests — that will be historically large if it is again Trump himself.
The right would counter-protest and claim they’re simply “righting the wrong from 2020 when that election was stolen through mail-in ballots and Dominion voting machines.”
Thirty percent of Republican voters ALREADY believe that violence will be necessary to ‘save the country,’ so it turning ugly is almost inevitable. It would be the summer of 2020 mixed with January 6th, cities burning, state capital buildings targeted, vigilante violence, and utter chaos.
If the Democrats win in ’24, it would be more or less the same, just a different sequence of events. Republicans wouldn’t believe it was fair, would repeat January 6th but on a much much much larger and more organized scale, down to the state and local level. Lefty voters would counter protest, and it would be the same chaotic and violent result.
Barring some miracle or charismatic leader emerging that can bring unity, the next presidential election could very well be the last for this iteration of America.
Thirty percent of Republican voters ALREADY believe that violence will be necessary to ‘save the country,’ so it turning ugly is almost inevitable. It would be the summer of 2020 mixed with January 6th, cities burning, state capital buildings targeted, vigilante violence, and utter chaos.
The global opportunity of a vulnerable superpower
Naturally, in that state of chaos, competing geopolitical forces will see an opening. The only reason America has been able to dominate to this level for so long and rack up tens of trillions in debt is that the USD is the global reserve currency. Since 1971, it hasn’t been tradeable for gold so central banks around the world buy US Treasury bonds.
American government IOUs are the basis for the world economy.
But many have been wanting to change that. The US has gotten overly sanction-happy in recent decades, and its adversaries have seen how easily and effectively America can ruin an economy by simply snapping its fingers and keeping a country out of the SWIFT banking system.
America, with a shrug of its shoulders, can literally cut an entire country off from doing business with the rest of the world.
So, our two main rivals — essays that mention one of them allegedly don’t get curated — have been planning and hoping to break that system.
The recent volatility in America has already gotten countries to rethink their relationship with the nation and its debt, staring nervously at their multi-billion dollar stacks of Uncle Sam’s IOUs.
In another sure sign of America’s impending isolation and downfall, even allies like France — having just been told to f*** off by the US over the Australian sub deal — know America isn’t the dependable friend it once was and recalled its ambassadors for the first time ever in 2021.
Germany has slowly been taking its gold out of the US and keeping it within its own borders. Add on the current Nord Stream 2 mess, and they might be ready to strike a deal with a new partner for their own economic future and stability.
Countries in the past that would have never disobeyed the iron fist of Washington DC are now doing so, like Nicaragua leaving the OAS and hoping to move forward with plans for their own canal.
If America is a charred mess of protests, burning cities, a government that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of its people, and has a record of throwing its friends under the bus as fast as it did France, all allegiances will be reconsidered.
At that moment, America’s geopolitical rivals could introduce a new global financial framework and many nations could get on board.
Within a matter of months, it would become a multi-polar world again for the first time in almost a century.
Without that status as the global reserve currency, America’s debt would become real. US Treasury bonds would be a hot potato as central banks looked to offload them, leading to an even steeper decline and America’s precipitous fall from leading economic superpower status to just another player.
If America is a charred mess of protests, burning cities, a government that lacks legitimacy in the eyes of its people, and has a record of throwing its friends under the bus as fast as it did France, all allegiances will be reconsidered.
That’d be the end of America as we know it. The tombstone would read ‘Dominated from 1945–2025.’ The nation would still exist, but who knows what would happen. Would it break up? With the West Coast, Texas, and Florida all claiming independence while the red states in the center formed a separate union and the East Coast kept DC and the flag?
That’s a separate tangent. The important point is that it wouldn’t be the same dominant USA that the world has known since Bretton Woods.
Another question is how gracefully would Uncle Sam fall? With over eight hundred military bases and a level of global hegemony never before seen in the history of the world, would it be possible to give up that position without a fight?
It doesn’t have to be the end of the world, but it surely would be a period of mass economic hardship for most Americans. The country could transition to being one of many powerful nations vying for economic power and influence. It doesn’t need to be number one.
Would it have to be a complete disaster? Could America handle the ego hit and become like France or South Korea and be a rich nation but not the world's mega-dominating superpower? Could it readjust, reinvent itself, rein in the military spending, maybe fix some roads, and get Americans healthcare? Is that way too optimistic and naive?
I don’t know if I could ever see American leaders having the humility of Gorbachev and negotiating a peaceful disintegration and decline.
America would go out slumped behind the bar at the saloon, bloodied and half-conscious, one hand on a six-shooter and the other holding a bottle of whiskey. Uncle Sam would take a pull, wipe the blood from his forehead with the back of his hand, and with one eye open blast a few of the first brave souls that pushed through the batwing doors.
Then, just before he’s overwhelmed by the coming onslaught of hated non-white rivals, he’d grab the nuclear football and zap the entire planet and its eight billion souls into another dimension.
But hopefully, I’m wrong.
