Looking at the facts, there’s no reasonable conclusion except that US democracy is done for. But rather than face facts, I’m turning to fiction. So, here’s a story about the collapse of Trumpism, crony capitalism and the AI/crypto bubble. Fiction is a relatively unfamilar mode of writing for me, so critique (on style and structure rather than plausibility) is most welcome.
The crash of 2026
The crash of 2026 began with a literal crash. A Tesla robotaxi operating on an open highway for the first time, inexplicably swerved into the path of oncoming traffic. Coming in the other direction was a Cybertruck whose driver, relying on self-driving capabilities, was busy checking his investments on the phone. His instant death spared him from the knowledge of his impending bankruptcy.
Tragically, a school bus was following, and its brakes failed (the school district later blamed budget cuts for inadequate maintenance) The driver did her best to steer around the wreckage but the bus overturned and burst into flames. By the time the smoke cleared, there were six deaths, including the busdriver and two children, as well as the occupants of both Teslas. More then 30 schoolchildren were taken to hospital. The images of death and disaster ran on TV and social media for weeks.
The reaction was swift. By the end of the day, Tesla’s robotaxis had been taken off the road throughout the US, and demands for retribution were everywhere. Several Tesla dealerships were torched and others closed down. The situation wasn’t helped by a bizarre tweet from Elon Musk, appearing to suggest that the bus driver was a “crisis actor”.
By the time Wall Street opened the next day, the financial analysts had done their sums. The legal liability for the disaster would run into billions, enough to wipe out most of Tesla’s cash reserves. And with the robotaxi business gone, there was nothing to conceal the truth of Tesla’s situation: a company with declining sales and margins trading at more than 100 times its current earnings. With the prospect of massive short sales at the opening bell, trading in Tesla shares was suspended.
This was bad news for Musk, who faced margin calls and the loss of his holdings in X and SpaceX, both secured by his ownership of 16 per cent of Tesla. But as usual in such cases, he got off easily. Musk turned up soon afterwards on a Caribbean island he had bought through a shell company years previously, along with the government of the nation that supposedly ruled it. No longer the richest man in the world, and theoretically bankrupt, he nonetheless enjoyed the comforts of a mansion and a super-yacht, each with its fleet of servants.
The situation was rather different for the owners of the other 84 per cent of Tesla, who collectively faced the loss of nearly a trillion dollars. Those with diversified holdings and no debt took the loss philosophically, as an offset against the massive profits of recent years. But others, who had borrowed to buy both Tesla and crypto assets like Bitcoin, faced disaster, especially when rumors spread that Tesla was about to dump its own massive Bitcoin holding.
The price of Bitcoin fell 25 per cent overnight. Longstanding HODLers were not concerned, reminding themselves that Bitcoin had fallen many times before, and had always rebounded. But now that crypto-currencies were embedded into the financial system, there were plenty of players with a shorter-term perspective. They started talking to economists, who almost universally agreed that crypto-currencies were inherently worthless. Traders who had gone all in on crypto suddenly saw the merits of profit taking. Regulators, who had been quiet since the passage of the GENIUS Act, started asking questions.
The real disaster came with the exposure of large-scale fraud at Tether, the most prominent of the stablecoins, which were supposed to trade at exactly $1 US. As the volume of investors seeking to quit crypto increased, it emerged that the supposedly ironclad asset backing of Tether had been undermined by a complex web of derivative transactions, allegedly the doing of a “rogue trader”.
Once Tether “broke the buck” the run was on in earnest. Wall Street banks found that that they had significant direct exposure to crypto and even more through their counterparties. They went into lockdown, calling in whatever debts they could.
The realisation that the multi-trillion dollar valuations of Tesla and Bitcoin had been spun out of thin air led to a harder look at Wall Street’s “Magnificent Seven” now reduced to six. Claims that AI was about to generate massive wealth if only more billions were invested looked silly. Investment in data centers stopped abruptly.
Nvidia was the first casualty. Once orders for chips from the hyperscalers dried up, its business was over. The advertising businesses of Google and Meta, and the Amazon retail business, went next. There would be no growth in sales of consumer goods for some time to come. Microsoft and Apple, with real businesses and products, fared better, but their values, based on hyperbolic price-earnings ratios, fell drastically. Crowds of ruined investors, milling in the streets, became violent, and were suppressed by heavily armed and masked thugs, presumed to be ICE, with several deaths. Increasingly violent protests and even more violent suppression followed.
At this point, a global financial crisis similar to that of 2008 was now inevitable. There were loud calls for an internationally co-ordinated response. But such co-ordination, already inadequate in 2008, was non-existent this time. Fed Chair Kevin Hassett, appointed by Trump after the removal of Jerome Powell, couldn’t even get his global counterparts to pick up the phone.
With less direct exposure to the crisis, other countries sought to protect themselves, imposing exchange controls, and preventing repatriation of funds to the US. Crypto trading was banned in many jurisdictions, and holders of crypto were required to report their positions to regulators.
Taken collectively, these disasters threatened to wipe out the entire wealth of the Trump family. Naturally, Trump struck back, announcing the discovery that trillions of dollars in US foreign debt was fraudulent, and would be expropriated. The remaining US public debt, following the plans previously announced by Stephen Miran (chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers) would be forcibly converted into 100 year bonds, at rates to be set by the US. The EU and Canada reacted by freezing US-owned assets. Trading on major stock exchanges around the world was suspended.
At this point, global capitalism seemed doomed, along with democracy. But somehow things turned around. With their donors facing ruin, dozens of Republican Representatives and Senators switched sides, throwing control of Congress to the Democrats, who immediately announced impeachment proceedings against Trump. Trump called on JD Vance to expel the traitors from the Senate, but, sensing the ground shifting, Vance temporised.
Trump attempted to declare martial law, but was forestalled by Vance and the Cabinet, who invoked the 25th Amendment to remove him. At Trump’s urging, a MAGA mob, including dozens of the masked gunmen now ubiquitous on American streets, marched on the Capitol, planning a repeat of 2020. But this time they were met by the army, with fixed bayonets and machine-gun emplacements. After a brief exchange of fire, the crowd fled, leaving dozens of dead and wounded behind.
The Vance Administration lasted only a few days. After seeking assurances that he would not face prosecution, Vance resigned in favor of Jerome Powell, who had been hastily appointed as Vice-President and was seen as the technocrat most likely to restore faith in the US,
The fallout was rapid. Facing impeachment and likely criminal charges of corruption, Supreme Court justices Thomas and Alito resigned, while Gorsuch and Kavanaugh decided that their appointments had been improper all along. The five remaining members of the court unanimously overturned the previous finding of Trump’s presidential immunity, and discovered that participation in the January 6 insurrection was in fact treasonous.
Facing this catastrophic defeat, MAGA fragmented. A minority of Trump’s supporters genuinely repented of the disaster they had brought on their country and became zealous defenders of democracy. Another group pointed to the feeble statements they had made criticising Trump and tried, with varying degrees of success, to maintain a role in public life. Some of the MAGA base gave up on politics altogether, suddenly discovering that Trump was just as corrupt as the Democrats he had railed against. Others remained loyal to their fallen leader. Republican state governments collapsed as the party fragmented.
Trump’s trial proceeded rapidly this time, and he was sentenced to spend his remaining days in prison, along with many of his cronies. There were some scattered insurrections which were rapidly put down, with their participants held in the various detention centres conveniently created by Trump.
Now, in early 2028, the world economy is gradually climbing out of the pit created by the crisis. The financial sector, a shadow of its former self, remains largely nationalised, and the disastrous losses in the crypto sector have yet to be resolved. But AI technologies, now in the public domain after the collapse of the hyperscalars. have started deliver significant (though not stratospheric) productivity benefits. Continued declines in the cost of solar power and battery storage have dispelled concerns about shortages of electricity, and have supported new investments in rewiring the economy in the US and other countries.
The reconstruction of the US political system will take much longer. President Powell, virtually assured of re-election, has proposed a constitutional convention that would replace the failed two-party system. The first step, already implemented in most states, has been a shift to instant runoff voting in Congressional elections, along with the scrapping of the primary system. But a shift to full-scale proportional representation is expected, with the former Republican party splintering, and socialists gaining significant support in cities and even some rural areas.
There is, as Adam Smith observed, a great deal of ruin in a nation. It will take decades for Americans to repair all the damage done by their experiment with fascism. But America has huge resources, both human and natural, and (at least in this fictional account) the traditions of democracy are finally reasserting themselves.
{ 79 comments }
Alex SL 08.31.25 at 10:55 pm
That is a very nice narrative, and it is obvious that a large financial crash is coming. If it is frightening enough to Republicans, it may well end Trump’s administration.
Unfortunately, it is otherwise all too optimistic. Among the fundamental constants of the last few decades that have got the USA into this mess are:
First, there are never any consequences for powerful and rich people. The only way to see consequences for a powerful and rich person is if they first lose their wealth; that is why Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and Bernie Madoff ended up in prison but Adam Neumann, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump never did, because the former lost their wealth, and the latter did not. God forbid that a billionaire or, for that matter, a former president ever sees repercussions like the little people for breaking laws or doing a war crime. No matter how bad an economic crash, the people who caused it will not feel any consequences. This culture of shielding the powerful and rich at all costs also means that no, the supreme court justices will not resign. That idea is unthinkable to them, as it is to the vast majority of Americans.
There is no solution to this problem except a deep cultural change where the American public at large sees billionaires, elected officials, and judges as deserving more accountability than a weed dealer or a shoplifter, because, as the comic book hero goes, with great power comes great responsibility. And I don’t see that happening overnight.
Second, MAGA is a cult, and it is not going away even if Trump dies tomorrow or is removed from office next year. They will be back in 2028 or 2030 or 2032 or 2032, and their mission will still be to abolish democracy, to destroy science, to remove minorities from any position of status and responsibility, and to conduct ethnic cleansing.
There is no solution to this problem except to purge the Republican party of MAGA, and to make the entire right-wing media ecosystem illegal, and to completely overhaul the US education system, including making home schooling illegal. None of that is going to happen in my lifetime. So, within a few years the goldfish-like memories of the voters will just bring MAGA back under a different name and with a different leader.
Third, the Democrats are utterly useless. Even if brought back into power (and it would have to be them, as president Powell is much less likely than president Vance putting Powell back into the Fed to restore faith), they will not implement the reforms outlined in the second-to-last paragraph. They are in their happy place fund-raising and handing that money over to consultants who tell them to go further to the right and seek bipartisan solutions on ethnic cleansing oh sorry immigration.
There is no solution to this problem except to purge the Democratic party of centrists, and given the realities of primaries, the byzantine campaign donation systems, and the hilariously undemocratic intra-party governance of the USA, that isn’t ever going to happen.
I would love for a better outcome, but realistically, the choice is between (1) fascism and (2) a few years of hapless centrists not solving any of the structural issues that lead to fascism, followed by fascism.
Cheryl Rofer 08.31.25 at 11:19 pm
This is very good.
Thank you, John!
John Hamilton Farr 08.31.25 at 11:59 pm
Damn that’s good…
John Q 09.01.25 at 12:14 am
@Alex You’ll notice that all the leading figures except Trump (along with unnamed cronies) get off scot-free. It’s fiction, not fantasy.
Seekonk 09.01.25 at 12:29 am
Brilliant!
Rich 09.01.25 at 1:14 am
Too optimistic! Where is the dystopia? Where are the zombies?
John Q 09.01.25 at 2:14 am
Rich @6 There’s not much point in fiction about a dystopia when you’re already in one. And there’s loads of financial zombies, not to mention Zombie Economics
Cheez Whiz 09.01.25 at 3:46 am
Well thought out and well done, Mr. Quiggan. I raised an eyebrow over the collapse of crypto, but its likely once money guys get scared enough to look. I raised the other eyebrow at the popping of the AI bubble, but again, a good scare might do it. But when the Republicans went along with Vance giving up the White House, I was out of eyebrows. Republicans willingly surrendering Trump is entirely believeable in this scenario, but giving up power by giving up Vance? This is not our Republican party. The screams from Fox and the Freedom Caucus would deafen the world, and this would be the moment Vance and Theil have been planning for years. Vance might be forced out by a Democratic party that grew a continental-sized spine, but it would be a bloody fight.
Dan Strong 09.01.25 at 6:44 am
I’m with Alex SL on this one – I enjoyed the story, but it did strike me as hopelessly rosy-eyed. It’s hard to swallow the suggestion that there are, in fact, limits to what the Republican party would tolerate from Trump. Not to mention the idea that the sclerotic Democratics would be able or willing to effectively exploit a political crisis of the right.
John Q 09.01.25 at 8:18 am
Dan @9 Did you read the opening para of the post ?
Mike Huben 09.01.25 at 12:49 pm
The most improbable thing (to me) is the resignation of the Supreme Court justices. If anything, resigning would make them even more vulnerable. Not to mention that the right-wing corruption would continue to bribe them, now to stay in office.
Dave 09.01.25 at 1:37 pm
I believe this will all happen exactly as described, but over a few decades instead of years.
nastywoman 09.01.25 at 2:18 pm
SOOO BEAUTIFUL!!!!
– and we play with most of it already on our game of
WOR(L)D DOMINATION with the
UTMOST BEAUTIFUL ADDITIONAL SINK of NEW YORK and CALIFORNIA
going
FULL SOCIALIST (in any Americans Mind)
and doing completely their OWN FUN SINK (as Elon would) say – why Elon is currently -actually far, faaar too involved in his WAR against the UK and Germany that he put the US kind of on PAUSE.
YES SIR!!!
Harry 09.01.25 at 2:41 pm
“Second, MAGA is a cult, and it is not going away even if Trump dies tomorrow or is removed from office next year. They will be back in 2028 or 2030 or 2032 or 2032, and their mission will still be to abolish democracy, to destroy science, to remove minorities from any position of status and responsibility, and to conduct ethnic cleansing”
It is a cult, but it is a personality cult. Once Trump is out of the way it will fragment, as personality cults often do. This may not be as optimistic as it sounds — there are a lot of very people in the cult who are unstable, angry, and armed. And maybe someone can pull together another personality cult composed of some of the fragments, plus other dangerous forces. I can’t think who, but then in 2014 I had no idea a Trump could. Gwyneth Paltrow?
Jerry Brown 09.01.25 at 4:07 pm
It has the elements of a story. There are an awful lot of villains and at least some of them get their just rewards. The protagonists need some development. Maybe some more work developing Powell as a reluctant hero. And you have to change the names of course. And sex sells so you want some in there somehow with this bunch. Maybe think George Clooney as the Powell character on the verge of being fired for some Trumped up charge on the eve of the traffic accident. And he gets saved by some unlikely heroine somewhere in the judicial system. Maybe like a fictional Amy Coney Barret type who sees through the Trumped up charges and decides to act in the interest of justice for a change. Stranger things have happened.
Laban 09.01.25 at 4:50 pm
“a repeat of 2020”
You mean a guy in a buffalo head dress being escorted through the Capitol by officers ?
I seem to remember far worse unpleasantness in the name of George Floyd, which people seemed quite pleased about.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/trump-flees-to-bunker-as-protests-over-george-floyd-rage-outside-white-house
I think the dollar is unlikely to still be the reserve currency by 2100, unless by some miracle the United States can be re-industrialised. I think that’s what he’s trying to do, however imperfectly, but he only has 3.5 years and a nation divided in many ways who have watched living standards fall for decades . China has a high-IQ, hardworking* population which is far less multicultural, and living standards and morale are on the up.
It’s not that I’ll welcome our new Chinese overlords. Anyone working in the tourist industry will tell you Americans are much more generous.
the point of the Chinese Exclusion Act was basically – “these guys work too hard for too little”.
Michael Cain 09.01.25 at 5:57 pm
I wouldn’t be so sure that the regular military would respond quickly to a President Vance’s order — based on a 25th Amendment takeover — to deploy and fire on American civilians. Trump has been replacing a lot of high-level officers based on what looks like a loyalty requirement. It seems possible that we would instead get a demonstration of “This is why the Founders didn’t want a standing army.”
JimV 09.01.25 at 6:30 pm
What I’ve heard recently about MAGA (and believed) is that about 37% of the people in the USA (and maybe elsewhere but with different focuses) are mean sociopaths or worse who enjoy Trump exactly for all the evil things he does, and are going to be with us always, some of them billionaires. So even if things do get better, they will get worse again, and the story, which I enjoyed, has some fantasy in it. (I enjoy good fantasy.)
Robert J Berger 09.01.25 at 8:14 pm
Loved it, wish it comes true. (the later part with Trump and his Minions in Jail and the country comes to its senses, hopefully we can avoid total economic destruction)
Cheez Whiz 09.01.25 at 10:55 pm
But those soldiers were chosen for loyalty to Trump personally. With Trump out of the picture where do their sympathies land? Questions like this abound throughout the (optimistic) scenario here, and is why the honest reality-adjacent answer is “nobody knows”. There’s a list of authoritarian personality cults to compare, with a range of outcomes (as I read somewhere) from The People’s Temple to Scientology. Can Vance be David Miscavige? Man has devoted himself to presenting as an empty suit, so who knows.
J-D 09.02.25 at 12:15 am
Alex SL’s reaction on finding John Quiggin’s story implausible is to make suggestions which are much less plausible.
Alex SL 09.02.25 at 12:30 am
Harry,
These people existed before a Trump candidacy was a twinkle in anybody’s eye. For many decades now, they became school board members to push for creationism, they have worked towards filling the judiciary with Federalist Society hacks, they have carefully built a vast radicalisation machine ranging from local radio across Fox News to Youtube influencers, they have effectively infinity bribe money for elections at their disposal and an entire network of think tanks to influence elected officials, all with the aim of transforming the USA into a white-dominated plutocracy with the civil rights of, at best, the late 19th century.
(I think they would not re-introduce racial chattel slavery… probably… but many of the libertarians among them would likely be okay with indentured servitude, as they think that any contract is ethical and acceptable if it is entered into without literally having a gun held to one’s head; they don’t count “if you don’t do this, you will starve to death” as coercion, and the only freedom they care about is that of the wealthy to do as they please with their wealth.)
Do you think these people will go away or conclude that they are now in favour of liberal democracy, a welfare state, scientific expertise, and gay marriage once Trump is gone? This authoritarian movement didn’t start with Trump. It merely coalesced around him. It has completely taken over the Republican party. It will stay, and it will come back electorally even if they lose the next two elections, which would in turn depend on ICE not standing guard in front of most polling places to, ahem, “maintain order”. It would take a generational effort to discredit this movement, and there is no sign that any significant, organised counter-movement exists to undertake that effort.
Chetan Murthy 09.02.25 at 2:11 am
Oof. John, I thought I was pessimistic. Capital controls, expropriation, oof.
Not saying you’re wrong. I moved my 401k entirely out of US investment and
into European ones. But they’re still housed in a US brokerage, so haha, subject
to expropriation and capital controls. Sigh. Goddamn FATCA and FBAR.
Chetan Murthy 09.02.25 at 2:24 am
Dan @ 9: I would answer differently from John Q. I also -fear- that there are no “limits to what the Republican party would tolerate from Trump”. None at all.
In that case, this ends in one of two other ways:
civil war in America
America collapses and the rest of the world walls it off and goes its own way
B/c they’re speed-running the destruction of the systems that keep America working. When those systems fall apart, either the G(r)OPers turn (John Q’s scenario), or there’s civil war, or America descends into some sort of hell.
I say this to my European, Asian, and elsewhere friends: plan on a world without America. Plan on it. Hell, plan on a world in which America is your enemy. I’ve lived in America since I was four years old. I’m the sort of American who hasn’t left the country since 2007 (work trip). I spent 3yr in France on a postdoc. Besides that and a few trips for work, I’ve never left the country. I’m -that- sort of American: stay-at-home.
A week ago, I booked travel to France to start re-learning French and look around for a place to emigrate to. Maybe it won’t be France. But it’s coming. I regret not having done it in early 2025; it’s time to do it now.
We’re falling apart. Maybe not the way John Q describes it, but we -are- falling apart. [As Dan says] Our elites are either complicit or feckless cowards. That’s no way to run a country.
Prepare yourselves, prepare your countries. Talk to your elected officials.
nonrenormalizable 09.02.25 at 5:16 am
Plausible or not, in about 6 months time this post will be the source material which various LLMs will draw upon to inform users that two Teslas had a serious crash resulting in the deaths and hospitalisation of several schoolchildren, and that Tether will have broken the buck.
David Eisenberg 09.02.25 at 9:22 am
In terms of style, it works really well. It reminds me of one of the “future history” stories I ever read: The Great Nebraska Sea.
Laban 09.02.25 at 9:39 am
Chetan Murthy 24
Rural France is pretty neat, as long as you don’t expect too much. A very liberal friend lives in a village where le Pen is by far the most popular politician.
OTOH, France have perfected lawfare against dangerous parties, as have the UK. Le Pen is banned from standing in 2027, and the SNP found legal problems at the height of their electoral appeal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Branchform
Harry 09.02.25 at 12:38 pm
Alex — not sure what I said to provoke that comment really. Yes, it coalesced around Trump. But its a minority of R voters; the primary system and his cult of personality coalesced it. Most R elected officials at the national level will revert to supporting business interests as soon as they dare (a lot of them genuinely fear for their lives, and those of their families). If Vance or someone else can do what Trump has done MAGA will remain very powerful. And maybe they can. I just don’t see who it is.
And yes, the Dems seem hopeless, there’s very little opposition. As of now it looks entirely possible that the Trumpists are going to induce the Dems into the error of choosing Gary Numan.. sorry, Gavin Newsom as their candidate. Not saying it isn’t grim, of course it it. But coalitions are coalitions, and this one seems to have required a particular person to bring it together, and that person can’t last long. Remember too that the leading figures in MAGA are a bunch of scumbags who are genuinely driven by personal ambition more than anything, and that’s not a recipe for long term stability.
Jacob 09.02.25 at 2:13 pm
If US democracy persists, will you decrease your estimate of how good you are at analysing and predicting politics as a result?
Mike Furlan 09.02.25 at 2:37 pm
(a lot of them genuinely fear for their lives, and those of their families).
Rather, I think, an even worse fear, that differing with Trump will hurt their careers. And not just R politicians, the country is run by careerists who are easily manipulated or intimidated by Trump.
(Put me in Tim “Apple’s” place, for one example, and I’m not sure I would behave any better. I’m not blaming.)
Another explanation is Adrian Tchaikowsky‘s in “Bear Head” that some people are like parasitic insects that invade and exploit ant colonies in a way that the ants have no defense.
Chetan Murthy 09.02.25 at 3:49 pm
Laban @ 27: I am not yet a refugee. But the way I understand it, “once a refugee, always a refugee”. [esp. since I’m 60] I don’t think I’ll be resting easy wherever I land. It’s just a safe[r] place with the rule of law (for now) and if things start to hot up, I’ll move on.
As a famous philosopher once said, “it is what it is”.
BigHank53 09.02.25 at 5:38 pm
Nvidia would be fine; they make perfectly good products in demand from people who need to do computationally intensive modeling: animators, meteorologists, anyone using CAD. The ridiculous pricing set by crypto miners and AI investors would stop, and they’d have to return to a profile like AMD’s.
DOP 09.02.25 at 6:32 pm
Alex SL:
You wrote: “There is no solution to this problem except to purge the Republican party of MAGA, and to make the entire right-wing media ecosystem illegal, and to completely overhaul the US education system, including making home schooling illegal”
So why does homeschooling need to be illegal? Do you have kids? I was never an advocate until I realized we needed that option (virtual public charter for us but full HS for some). You might be falsely associating homeschooling with conservative christians or christian nationalists and while that certainly is often the case, there is a sizable portion of secular non religious families that choose home school or public virtual charters for their own reasons (academic advancement, special needs, etc.).
So maybe rethink that?
John Q 09.02.25 at 7:08 pm
Jacob @29 “If US democracy persists, will you decrease your estimate of how good you are at analysing and predicting politics as a result?”
If US democracy persists because of events similar to those I’ve described, an economic crash followed by a Republican split-up, I’ll be looking prophetic.
If the Dems win the 2026 midterms, Trump serves out his second term without much more damage to democracy, and Vance is defeated in 2028, not so much. But the loss of my self-esteem as an analyst and predictor would be a small price to pay.
And, if neither of these happens, and Trumpist rule continues, I can comfort myself that I am old and on the other side of the planet.
IM Merc 09.02.25 at 7:11 pm
It’s hard to imagine a description of a financial collapse in 2026 that doesn’t mention the collapse of OpenAI. It’s the center of the AI industry, much bigger than Anthropic, and it might not even make it to 2026. It is due to get a payment from SoftBank this year, but that requires it to shift to a for-profit model from a non-profit (that confusingly owns a for-profit subsidiary), and it has abandoned its plans to do that, because it’s too difficult. If it doesn’t get that $40B payment, it might not even survive 2025.
This one company is inflating the AI bubble, and it is poised to burst, which would cause 1/3 of the entire US economy to pop. Yet, in your story the AI bubble seems to deflate slowly, and only after Tesla collapses and cryptocurrencies collapse. You even have Microsoft and Google failing but for reasons unrelated to the AI bubble bursting, which seems implausible. The AI bubble bursting is going to be the focus of the coming economic collapse, not a footnote.
I absolutely believe that Tesla is poised to fail. Look at its P/E ratio compared to a normal car company like Toyota and you see how ridiculously overvalued it is. It’s a matter of time before investors admit it’s actually just a car company and not one of the most innovative tech companies. Crypto will probably also collapse, but Ponzi schemes are difficult to predict, and people might push money into Crypto thinking that when the normal economy is collapsing it’s a safe haven. People are dumb like that.
Also, Musk being theoretically bankrupt is a fun thing to imagine. But, he’s a centi-billionaire with political and defense-industry connections, those guys don’t go bankrupt, at least not quickly. Cabinet officials would deem his companies too big to fail, and the government would step in to save them, with DoD officials providing cover because of SpaceX.
It’s fun to pretend that the Republicans might find a spine and remove Trump from office, but that’s never going to happen. What’s much more likely is that the stress of the collapse of the economy would cause a 79 year old president in poor health to have a heart attack or stroke and die. With their figurehead gone, MAGA and the whole GOP would fragment. The Silicon Valley VCs would have nothing in common with the religious zealots. Trump has made sure there’s nobody to challenge him, which means there’s nobody who could succeed him.
nastywoman 09.02.25 at 7:14 pm
but on the other hand Trump just posted on Truth Social:
‘In the Transcendental Logic, there is a section (titled The Refutation of Idealism that is intended to free Kant’s doctrine from any vestiges of subjective idealism, which would either doubt or deny the existence of external objects. Kant’s distinction between the appearance and the thing-in-itself is not intended to imply that nothing knowable exists apart from consciousness, as with subjective idealism. Rather, it declares that knowledge is limited to phenomena as objects of a sensible intuition. In the Fourth Paralogism (“… A Paralogism is a logical fallacy”), Kant further certifies his philosophy as separate from that of subjective idealism by defining his position as a transcendental idealism in accord with empirical realism, a form of direct realism!!!’
nastywoman 09.02.25 at 7:37 pm
on the other hand
Governor Newsom’s Press Office posted on Labor Day:
HAPPY LABOR DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT IS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY WITH A SICK WARPED RADICAL MIND, KILLING SMALL BUSINESSES WITH CRAZY TARIFFS, TAKING HEALTH CARE FROM CHILDREN, PARDONING J6 THUGS, SENDING THE “PRIVATE ARMY” TO ARREST GRANDMA, WRECKING OUR BEAUTIFUL ENVIRONMENT, DEFUNDING OUR SCHOOLS, AND DESTABILIZING LONG-STANDING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS. HOPEFULLY THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT, AND OTHER GOOD AND COMPASSIONATE JUDGES THROUGHOUT THE LAND, WILL SAVE US FROM THE DECISIONS OF THE MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL. BUT FEAR NOT, WE HAVE MADE GREAT PROGRESS IN RECENT WEEKS, AND AMERICA WILL SOON BE SAFE AND GREAT AGAIN! AGAIN, HAPPY LABOR DAY, AND GOD BLESS AMERICA! — GCN
So perhaps OUR GREAT NEW LEADER NEWSOME will finally take over and FF VON CLOWNSTICK AND ALL OF HIS NONSENSE WILL FINALLY BE FORGOTTEN?
Chetan Murthy 09.02.25 at 11:06 pm
DOP @ 33: I’ll give a stab at explaining why homeschooling is …. bad for democracy. First, I’ll note that I’m pretty much a poster child for the absolute bollocks value of public schooling. I spent 6th grade-graduation in Texas public schools. It’s fair to say I didn’t learn much. I learnt so little, I decided the fall of my junior year to graduate early; meanwhile I was working 1-2 fulltime jobs in fast food at night/weekends, sleeping in class all day (when else would I get my sleep — I was up until 2-4am every night working in a Jack-in-the-Box). And yet I had excellent grades.
Public school was a waste of time. But OTOH, how else are we to ensure that all children mix with other children — other children who aren’t like them — and learn the basics of our history and our governance? If you leave it to these Christofascist parents, you’ll end up with an army of little Liberty University freshmen-wannabees. As bad as public school in my hometown was, my last year there the little Fascist parents were taking their kids out to send ’em to the Maranatha school. B/c public school was insufficiently -Christian-. My mind boggled even back then.
I do take your point that for some children, public school is inadequate: as I described above, I was one of those children (and I neglected to mention that it was a racist hellhole that scarred me for life, that engendered so much hatred in my soul that I’d happy drop a Tsar Bomba on that damn town), but the problem is, you can’t make public policy based on exceptions: you need to make that policy so that you produce the highest percentage of solid citizens possible. I would also argue that when we find public school to be inadequate, it’s almost always the case that more funding would improve the situation.
Though of course, in cases like Texas, nothing can be done: just fence it off and cede the land to Mexico: maybe if we give ’em a big payment, they’ll agree to take it off our hands.
J Monz 09.02.25 at 11:39 pm
Very nicely done. I have no quibbles with the plausibility, because although I may not expect the specific scenario you describe, I am quite certain that the actual events of the next few years will be even stranger and less believable than those you describe.
Alex SL 09.03.25 at 12:01 am
Harry,
Sorry if I misread you, but given your comment at 28, I think we have a very different read on the situation. Maybe the authoritarian, anti-science, eliminatory racists are a minority among conservative voters in absolute terms, but they appear to be the most politically active and the most reliable primary voters. I just don’t see how they will stop primarying moderate “I just want to lower taxes on business” style Republicans in favour of loons just because Trump is gone. The few moderates who are left are in fear not because of the single person Trump but because of those primary voters, influencers, and activists, and they don’t evaporate after Trump.
I worry that a lot of the current optimism about the USA is equivalent to a joke I saw in Germany when I was young: a father telling his children at bed time, “in 1933, Nazis came out of nowhere and took over our country, and then in 1945 they all disappeared again”. That is not how it works, unfortunately.
The last sentence you wrote is the most convincing argument, I must admit: these people aren’t loyal or competent, so they may yet collapse from in-fighting. Still, even just looking across what people report from MAGA, conservative, and Republican Reddit forums and other social media, the reaction of most voters in that space to recent months can be comfortably classified into two categories:
(1) Obviously I would never vote Democrats, because they want to destroy our country, but I am a bit concerned about the Tariffs. Can you fellow cult members explain to me why I should not worry?
(2) Dear glorious leader, I fully support everything you do, but now your Medicare cuts are affecting me personally and/or ICE have arrested my (Hispanic) wife, and I am hopeful that now that you have read this misspelled post on a random subreddit, you/DOGE/ICE will make an exception for my family, specifically, while continuing to hurt millions of others, as they should be.
Neither of these suggest that Republican voters will ever stop hitting themselves in the face with a frying pan. The first group are caught in a cult where voting anything but Republican is completely unthinkable no matter what Republicans do. The second group is too self-centered, sociopathic, and narcisissistic to be reasoned with. It is frightening to understand that there are millions of people who want to, e.g., make abortion illegal, no exceptions even in case of risk to the life of the mother, because everybody who needs an abortion is a (insert slur here) and needs to be punished, and then expect an exception to be made for themselves, because their situation is totally different, of course; but understand we must, because they vote, and they will vote even when Trump is gone.
DOP,
I grew up in Germany, and home schooling is illegal there, and I have never seen any problems with that. I understand that it is different if school-age children live in very remote, rural areas where there is no critical mass to run a school, but there are solutions for that in the digital age. I find it extremely unhealthy for society and the children to isolate one’s children from other children, be it for religious, racist, or classist reasons (and would outlaw all private and sectarian schools for the same reason if I could). I also simply do not believe that parents are qualified to teach unless they are certified teachers themselves, and even then they would likely only be qualified in two or three subjects. This means that home-schooling is by definition a minor form of child abuse through educational neglect.
If a decent education is available, that is; I am not saying that a medieval peasant had any other choice but to home-school, what with no professional school system being accessible to them. Similarly, if schools fail the students, that is a problem. But the problem is to a great degree caused by allowing wealthy people to remove their children from the public school system, thereby removing any incentive from wealthy people to support sufficient funding for the public school system.
ZDL 09.03.25 at 2:07 am
Because of course the entire rest of the world just waited on America to fix everything.
????
Even when mourning your nation’s and culture’s demises you can’t help but feel exceptional.
J-D 09.03.25 at 2:14 am
Although the digital age has made more possible, there were solutions long before:
https://flyingdoctor4education.org.au/school-of-the-air-song/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air
John Q 09.03.25 at 4:02 am
David @28 Thanks for the link to the Great Nebraska Sea. I really enjoyed it, especially the bit at the end about the political survival of the anished states
IM Merc @35 I’ve often expressed the view that the US is one big grift. The order of the dominoes in this story is a matter of narrative arc (I think that’s the correct term) not a ranking of the grifters in order of importance.
ZDL @41 You do know I’m Australian, right? I even mentioned this @34. Or are your views so US-centric (in a negative sense) that you can’t imagine an outsider having opinions on the subject ?
To everyone: can we call a halt to the thread derail of home-schooling
nonrenormalizable 09.03.25 at 9:29 am
AlexSL @22 and @40:
I am very often as pessimistic as you (and JohnQ) about the prospects of democracy in the US, and agree about how the authoritarian/illiberal tendency in American politics has existed long before Trump and will continue long after him.
The lone shred of doubt that I have regarding the inevitability of this disastrous future is the essential … stupidity and singularity of Trump’s ascent to power.
In almost every election cycle that he is not directly on the ballot, he and his supporters have either lost or failed to capitalize on their position. He seems to attract groups of uninformed and otherwise unengaged voters, at times running ahead of his own party in down-ballot races.
As a politician, he also seems exceedingly shameless, proudly ignorant, determined to engage in minor squabbles, and desperate for attention and adulation. This, his personal history, and other attributes have made him catnip for the press in the social media age. While there are other figures who seem to enjoy dominating our conscious hours (such as Elon Musk), no one has quite the same pathological skill of generating stories (ranging from incredibly stupid and petty to those with enormous geopolitical consequences) for the world to consume. If a foreign enemy were to design from scratch a Manchurian candidate to destroy the US from within, they could not have come up with someone with a temperament so unsuited for the office of president while being so irresistible to those covering Washington.
So if he were to vanish from the political stage before say, the next midterms, there would both be no draw for the class of voters I described above, and a break of the spell binding the news media. And maybe a good segment of the American public could then push back against any attempts to disrupt a fair electoral process.
The MAGA/Project 2025/Federalist society/ICE people will still be around, but without a Trump figure creating endless distractions for them, perhaps the full scope of their work will become much more salient and unpopular in the public mind. They are to some extent a fractured group with different end goals, and could easily splinter when there is no leader around who is (a) somewhat popular with the electorate and (b) is amenable to their views or can be manipulated into implementing them.
The danger is that the US has become hooked on the style of Trump — that he has indelibly shaped the office of the president and broadened the political economy so that people accept (and even demand) the same policies and type of leaders afterward. To some extent, this is what happened during the Biden years: the lack of daily disruptions, rambling tweets, and unceasing palace intrigue may have detracted from the sense of Biden as being in charge (on top of his own age and health issues). So perhaps we should expect a succession of mad Caesars in the years to come.
Laban 09.03.25 at 10:27 am
Please, nothing more like this. Instant ban next time
nastywoman 09.03.25 at 1:20 pm
AND FROM THE FUNNY INTERNET PHILOSOPHER WILSON:
“It’s finally happening. No, not the sweet meteor of death, not the rapture, and not the long-delayed federal raid on the child-sex-trafficking and human-sacrifice dungeon in Mar-a-Lago’s catacombs. (See? Two can play at that game, MAGA.) – But something that, for the first time in a long time, feels like political gravity is remembering to do its damn job — Donald Trump, the screeching orange parasite who first hollowed out and killed the old Republican Party and has been determined to wreck American constitutional government during his second term, is bleeding out — You can read it in the data. You can smell it in the flop sweat of the White House’s comms operation. You can see it in the failed social posts, the pointless, ChatGPT-generated trolling responses Karoline Leavitt pukes out in the Brady Press Room every day. You can sense the tension on the Fox set every night as they desperately try to get back to the real issues, like Joe Biden’s autopen and the scourge of trans Wiccan pickleball players in the NCAA,– You can see it in the not-so-subtle political body language of GOP hopefuls who, after years of genuflecting before the Orange Idol, are starting to edge away like someone realizing they’re in line behind a guy in a soaked diaper at the DMV.”
mw 09.03.25 at 2:54 pm
There is no solution to this problem except to purge the Republican party of MAGA, and to make the entire right-wing media ecosystem illegal, and to completely overhaul the US education system, including making home schooling illegal.
The ideal (but unfortunately not feasible) solution to authoritarianism would be a thorough-going, across-the-board federal government clampdown on media, education, and opposition parties? Do I have that right?
And home-schooling? Thread derail deleted – JQ
HowardNYC 09.03.25 at 7:00 pm
OLD = The realisation that the multi-trillion dollar valuations of Tesla and Bitcoin had been spun out of thin air led to a harder look at Wall Street’s “Magnificent Seven” now reduced to six.
SUGGEST = The realisation that the multi-trillion dollar valuations of Tesla and Bitcoin had been spun out of thin air led to a harder look at Wall Street’s “Magnificent Seven” now reduced to six (soon to be five, and eventually two).
this will add foreboding, much the way music for a horror movie changes tempo
as well, “gun on mantle in first act” sets up circumstances to make more plausible the third act’s usage of thegun
HowardNYC 09.03.25 at 7:13 pm
OLD = including dozens of the masked gunmen now ubiquitous on American streets
SUGGEST = including thousands of the masked gunmen now ubiquitous on American streets
as well, ought be mention of how these masked gunmen got spun up by way of a torchlit rally and generous handfuls of generic amphetamines tossed out in wee baggies, a dozen pills in each… along with fake video of minorities rioting and looting and raping… a fake rape video of a black man attacking a white woman gets 30,000,000 views thanks to hype by Russian-funded internet troll farms which in turn goes from bullshit false into perceived truth in less than 24 H
also, somehow weave in the effort to directly attack those known internet troll farms, never mind where, nor whomever is funding ’em… yeah… drone strikes on seventeen office buildings in European cities and over a hundred buildings across Asia… causalities estimated in the hundreds… quietly followed up by Seal Team Seven whose activities only became recognizable after listing all the minor governmental official and crony-capitalistic executives whose houses burned in the night or cars went off the road due to a tire rupturing or drowned in mistress’s hot tubs…
adding in such touches offer opportunity to turn this narrative from prose into the outlining of storyboard for a netflix miniseries… usage of handheld iPhone as camera to cut costs as well offer right off the streets realism…
Brad Pit will claw out Tom Cruise’s eyes for sake of the main male role
C-S 09.03.25 at 9:08 pm
mw @ 46
Actually, the comment said nothing about “ideal”.
Speaking personally, I would say that the ideal solution would be that the people currently enacting an authoritarian takeover would voluntarily stop, give up the gerrymandered power they’ve accumulated, and work to reverse the near-incalculable damage that’s been done.
Feel free to offer your opinion on how likely that is…
Alex SL 09.03.25 at 11:09 pm
Given that this is about fiction, I realise that I should have pitched my first response more as “first having the entire Dem leadership replaced would make for a more plausible story” etc. instead of making it about what I expect to happen IRL. Sorry.
nonrenormalizable,
I am not that sure I see his ability to generate stories or really to do anything well. He is largely unintelligible when he is talking, he is so transparently corrupt and selfish that he shouldn’t be trusted with organising an office raffle, and he is a famously incompetent businessman. Why is he still so successful? Part of it is certainly the media landscape (e.g., most R voters probably don’t have accurate information on his corruption and many bankruptcies), part is inserting himself into a pre-existing cult (which in turn was created and facilitated by media), and a small part of his support comes from trolls who find it funny to vote for a clearly unsuitable candidate to trigger the libs.
The thing is, Trump being so singularly unsuited for office is one of the things that has me worried, because to me, it shows that if US conservatives and swing voters will vote for somebody like that, they (or at least all except the aforementioned trolls) will be even more likely vote for a far-right candidate who is less embarrassing, more focused in his messaging, and more competent at installing a dictatorship than Trump is. You are right, Trump’s character is perfectly suited for destroying the USA, but a different leader might be more suited to creating a lasting dictatorship than he is.
mw,
I don’t know if you are in the USA, but I have frequently observed that many Americans do not understand the concept of having to defend [good thing] against the enemies of [good thing]. But I don’t understand what is so difficult about this. Free markets tend to collapse unless the government constantly enforces anti-trust regulation, contract law, quality standards, fraud prosecution, etc., using the state monopoly on violence if necessary. Democracy collapses unless those who want to destroy it are stopped, using the state monopoly on violence if necessary. Religious freedom collapses unless those who want to force everybody into their own religion are stopped, using the state monopoly on violence if necessary. My peaceful co-existence with my neighbours only works if any neighbour who starts violently attacking me for not liking my face is stopped, using the state monopoly on violence if necessary. Democracy only works if no one person is so rich that they can buy fifty members of parliament with their pocket change, so we need to avoid enormous inequality of wealth, using the state monopoly on violence if necessary. All of this is basic.
J-D 09.03.25 at 11:34 pm
… an army of archangels with flaming swords descending from heaven to set everything to rights.
That would, of course, be the ideal natural solution. The ideal miraculous solution would be for everybody to come to their senses without celestial intervention.
JPL 09.04.25 at 6:26 am
HowardNYC @49:
Gee, what’s holding you back? Granted Trump’s bizarro-world way of governing is a reductio ad absurdum, and the SCOTUS’s infamous decision is taken by Trump to mean, “I can do whatever (the hell) I like (like order the completion of the holocaust against the Jews after he helps Netanyahu do the same against the Palestinians and get away with it)”, at least John’s OP was grounded in the expert causal analysis of economic principles, policy and activity. But with daydreaming there are no obstacles to the slippery slide to absurdity. In the OP John has the economic catastrophe triggered by Tesla and Bitcoin, but I would agree with some commenters above that probably the greater danger is the bursting of the “AI” bubble, due to a necessary scaling back of expectations and hype and overexuberance of investment. But there are so many other dimensions that can’t be addressed in a short blog post. Mobs of MAGA voters are mentioned (and people forget that it’s the ordinary MAGA voters, the populace of populism, that is actually calling the shots these days), but would they be inflamed by their leader’s travails, stagflation, the Epstein affair or disillusionment? For a helpful response I would prefer causal analysis and problem-solving, rather than prediction, which in any case has to go through an understanding of the relevant causal laws, but not unrestrained fantasy. (I realize that you thought of your comments as a blurb for a blockbuster, but I hope your BP is OK these days.)
Thomas P 09.04.25 at 7:25 am
This story is so focussed on the IT-sector and a few companies at the top, but what would happen to the rest of the economy and world trade? Even a temporary loss of confidence in the dollar could cause world trade to grind to a halt, and it would be slow and painful to restart it. It´s quite possible that this would be enough to move the center of the world economy to China and its allies.
I suspect that by now Tether has their economy in order, even if it was a scam from the start. Their business model of borrowing money at no interest rate and then buying bonds that pay interest is simply too good even if they lose a bunch to bad investments as well.
nonrenormalizable 09.04.25 at 7:56 am
Alex SL @51:
Regarding the incoherence and unintelligibility of Trump: I have seen this description a lot over the past decade, and while I think it’s true on a technical and syntactical level (and becomes very apparent when we read a transcription of his contemporaneous remarks), I am perhaps below a certain threshold where I cannot completely dismiss his comments because of his style or the mangling of details around whatever point he attempts to make. It’s a sort of involuntary “sane-washing”, which if I managed to find an off switch for, I would find I would also have to ignore a lot of other less malevolent people in life who aren’t necessarily highly articulate and erudite.
That’s also the nub of the problem with the media commentariat, which is exacerbated by the fact that he holds probably the most consequential office in the world — so in quite a few occasions, the import of what he says holds tremendous weight. So even absurdities like the notion of “reciprocal tariffs” have to be parsed for motivation and substance. But the discussion and debate around “what did he mean?”/”this is the stupidest idea ever”/”there’s a kernel of truth here” generates its own news cycle, and Trump produces such content several times a week, if not every day. A 24 hour news network can fill up their programming hiring pundits to explain, contradict, or support any reading of Trump’s assertions.
(The essential incoherence at the heart of his words and the instinct for people to find meaning in them is part of his political success. Everyone from socialists to blood-and-soil nationalists hears the core of one of their central tenets in one of his daily complaints, and are tempted into the belief that Trump can be controlled or pushed further along those lines into some action. There aren’t many other politicians who appear as pliable on so many issues, despite his record of betraying those who’ve tried to ride the tiger.)
Added to this, Trump’s willingness to engage and comment on trivial things like the Sidney Sweeney ad campaign, Taylor Swift — and who knows what else that I just can’t be bothered to pay attention to — means he forces himself into every conversation or discussion. Whatever you may be interested in, he’s probably said something relevant to it.
He was of course a reality TV star himself, and I think that’s how a large chunk of people process him and his presidency. In a lot of ways, this entertainment format has primed us to a figure like him and the way he operates: take an obviously flawed and attention-seeking person, put them in some unlikely position, and watch the chaos that unfolds. Did he have multiple bankruptcies on his record? It’s part of his character. Is he yelling at world leaders in front of the press? Prime-time drama. Sending in the National Guard to Democrat-run cities? Let’s see how that works out. Unfortunately, there are no executive producers to cancel the show before it destroys the country.
PeteW 09.04.25 at 8:58 am
On topic I hope, this week the regime apparently murdered 11 people in cold blood by blowing up their speedboat.
The claim was that they were smuggling drugs – although the maximum penalty for smuggling in the US is NOT execution, summary or otherwise – but any evidence of this now presumably lies at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, along with their bodies.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-military-kills-11-people-strike-alleged-drug-boat-venezuela-trump-says-2025-09-03/
mw 09.04.25 at 10:15 am
AlexSL @51
I have frequently observed that many Americans do not understand the concept of having to defend [good thing] against the enemies of [good thing]. But I don’t understand what is so difficult about this.
Yes, I’m an American, and yes I understand it. But there liberal ways of defending the good and illiberal ways. I recoil strongly from JQ’s illiberal ‘ideal’ proposals as I do from most of MAGA. I do not want to replace right illiberalism with left illiberalism. We tried some of the latter under Biden with the ‘censorship by proxy’ (the federal government strong-arming tech and media companies to suppress unapproved ideas). I found that horrifying (and blatantly unconstitutional). No more of that, please from either side of the aisle. A few months ago, I listened to a podcast history of the revolutions of 1848 with the liberal constitutionalists stuck between monarchist conservatives on one side and socialist revolutionaries on the other. Plus ça change.
Michael Cain 09.04.25 at 2:06 pm
David @ 26: I was too old when I first encountered The Great Nebraska Sea. The writer has millions of square miles dropping 3,000 to 5,000 feet, mostly in the space of a year. I couldn’t help but ask, “Where did a million cubic miles of underlying rock go?” Was there just an enormous void down there? Or more likely, where was the corresponding up-thrust area? The Western Interior Seaway, which was a real thing in the same area during the Cretaceous, took 15 million years to form.
reason 09.04.25 at 3:44 pm
mw,
I suppose I’m wasting my effort here (not sure how good faith your arguments are) but suppressing abuse is not exactly the same as suppressing ideas. There is a general problem that believing in tolerance means you must also be against intolerance.
John Q 09.04.25 at 7:27 pm
mw, like Reason @58, I’m not too sure whether it’s worth responding, but I think you have confused me with Alex @1 to whom you were replying. My “illiberal” proposals consisted of punishing Trump for his crimes and adopting some modest electoral reforms.
SufferinSuccotash 09.04.25 at 7:28 pm
Basically quite plausible. The Hollywood ending may be far-fetched, but at least it’s a refreshing change from most near-future dystopias. If you want to expand the story, add in some 2026 context at the beginning (maybe right after the bus crash). Stagflation, the US increasingly marginalized in world affairs, Trump an invalid (almost there already), techbros spouting ever more hysterical claims about AI to keep the market afloat. All grist for the mill and all quite conceivable.
reason 09.04.25 at 9:19 pm
Alex SL
I love this paragraph:
“(I think they would not re-introduce racial chattel slavery… probably… but many of the libertarians among them would likely be okay with indentured servitude, as they think that any contract is ethical and acceptable if it is entered into without literally having a gun held to one’s head; they don’t count “if you don’t do this, you will starve to death” as coercion, and the only freedom they care about is that of the wealthy to do as they please with their wealth.)”
But there is another issue that I have libertarians – their inability to cope with the possibility that there are strong externalities. This is clear with the issues related to the response to the Corona pandemic. I don’t hear any talk any more that the hospitals were on the edge of complete collapse, which made emergency measures absolutely necessary. Strong externalities don’t fit in their world view and instead of adjusting their world view, they deny reality. I think this flight from reality at the same time as we are suffering from global climate change is not a coincidence. We have at the moment from the right a war on objectivity and even a war on reality.
Alex SL 09.04.25 at 9:27 pm
nonrenormalizable,
Good points regarding Trump’s modus operandi, but ultimately, what I am seeing here is the argument that Trump is attractive to many of his followers because he is unashamedly as stupid as they are, unfocused, so incoherent that everybody can hear what they want to hear, and commenting on every culture war issue. The problem is that this doesn’t convince me that he cannot simply be replaced with another leader to coalesce around by authoritarian personalities who really, really want a strongman leader in their lives. Because in contrast to e.g. scholarly erudition, business acumen, or a distinguished military career, his capabilities and qualifications do not appear to be rare or difficult to replicate. They may merely appear rare because traditionally, political parties tended to filter against them, for good reasons.
mw,
Getting banned from social media for spreading hatred of minorities or dismantling the power of billionaires is not the same as monarchic government or violent revolution. If we think about what democracy means, the only logical conclusion is that it is incompatible with the electorate being so mislead and kept so ignorant that it cannot make any informed decisions, and therefore that democracy is incompatible with a concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few strongly opinionated billionaires.
I note that you do not cite any liberal ways of defending democracy and human rights. I can only guess it would be saying to the likes of Zuckerberg, Musk, Murdoch, the Koch brothers, and thousands of right-wing influencers “pretty please don’t undermine our civil co-existence and future as a society by lying about everything constantly and encouraging people to scream at their neighbour to go home to where he came from, oh you don’t want to stop, okay, fine with me, do go on then, wouldn’t want to be illiberal”.
Apart from that, I guess there has been this sad discussion in recent weeks about a Joe Rogan of the left and that left-leaning billionaires should fund more leftist media influencers, which reveals a truly staggering misunderstanding of what ‘left’ means and what the class interests of billionaires are. But that’s it, everything else I can think of involves legislation, regulation, and redistribution, which is monarchy, it seems, and therefore not a liberal defense of democracy.
J-D 09.05.25 at 4:20 am
Treating both John Quiggin’s post and your initial comment purely as outlines for fictional stories about things which we are supposed to take it as read will not actually happen, yours is the less plausible story of the two.
Jolly Roger 09.05.25 at 6:56 am
“With their donors facing ruin, dozens of Republican Representatives and Senators switched sides”
Ah, so this is the point you started writing fiction.
mw 09.05.25 at 12:14 pm
Getting banned from social media for spreading hatred of minorities or dismantling the power of billionaires is not the same as monarchic government or violent revolution.
Of course it isn’t. There are degrees of everything. But banning ‘hate speech’ and arresting people for violating those bans and purging political parties and engaging in ‘censorship by proxy’ to suppress ideas that the government in power thinks are ‘dangerous’ (e.g. ones it currently disagrees with) are all authoritarian actions and definitely illiberal ones.
If we think about what democracy means, the only logical conclusion is that it is incompatible with the electorate being so mislead and kept so ignorant
I disagree 100%. There has never been a time when the the masses of people were only well and truly informed and never spread ‘lies’ and ‘rumors’ among themselves and did not have folk beliefs that differed significantly from elite credentialed experts. But there has also never been a government that could be trusted to ‘sanitize’ the information environment for those masses in a way that wasn’t self-serving for those in power. And there have been times when the ‘best and brightest’ credentialed elite believed and promoted truly monstrous things (e.g. the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century progressive movement).
I note that you do not cite any liberal ways of defending democracy and human rights.
As always, the liberal position is that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Liberals seek to persuade. Illiberals seek to suppress. The difference is clear. And human rights? Establish constitutional guarantees of rights, and enforce them. Basic stuff.
As for Zuckerberg, et al — of a course I would let them speak. They are not a new phenomenon — there have been those who ‘bought ink by the barrel’ for centuries. The fact that the ink is digital now does not change the dynamic. And, in fact, there has never been a time when common people were more able to express and disseminate their views. But now you are horrified by what many of them have to say. Many left illiberals (perhaps including you) would prefer to go back to the era when the masses were limited to writing ineffectual ‘dear sirs’ letters to the editor. But letting both the Zuckerbergs and the MAGA masses speak freely certainly does not mean saying ‘OK’ to what they have to say. Has the left forgotten Voltaire to the extent that it cannot even distinguish between ‘OK’ (you have the right to speak) vs ‘OK’ (you have the right to speak and therefore everything you say is fine)? The former certainly doesn’t imply the latter.
But that’s it, everything else I can think of involves legislation, regulation, and redistribution, which is monarchy
Monarchy? No — you seem to be really confused. The MAGAs are the modern monarchists. You’re in the ‘socialist’ camp way on the other side. Those early socialists wanted to overthrow the kings and establish a liberal constitution — but only as a temporary measure on the way to the left taking control by other means, not through the slow, patient persuading of the new electorate to adopt their schemes. And the MAGA masses now play the role of the frustratingly traditional, conservative peasant class that stubbornly refused to flock to the socialist banner.
SusanC 09.05.25 at 3:19 pm
Cryptocurrency is largely a vehicle for scams, and there is a looming question of who is legally liable for bad things done by AI; but there are solid uses for LLMs, albeit possibly not enough to repay the investment in building them..
(The Channel Tunnel comes to mind, but I haven’t bothered to actually check whether sales of train tickets paid off the investment in building the tunnel)
SusanC 09.05.25 at 3:24 pm
2004 article on the Channel Tunnel’s debt crisis:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2004/feb/10/uk.transport
I would not be at all surprised if OpenAI found themselves in a similar situation.
Aardvark Cheeselog 09.05.25 at 10:16 pm
Having read OP and skipped the thread, I will forbear reactions to the narrative on points other than style.
The stylistic problem with this is that it’s pure narrative. There are no characters. It’s fiction in the sense of being a narrative of things that have not happened, but what readers want is to read about things happening to people. We could have met the CyberTruck and bus drivers, and maybe one of the kids who would get killed. We could have gotten some peek at the life of somebody who went too long on Tesla stock and wound up without their life savings. We could have gotten a look into the C suite at NVidia as the people there realized the bottom was falling out of their world.
The kind of straight narrative of events in OP is a lot like early efforts at SF: Bellamy’s Looking Backward for example. Robert Heinlein’s nearly-unreadable first novel For Us, the Living is replete with this kind of exposition.
A really good example of how to tell the kind of the things in your narrative can be found in Robinson’s Ministry for the Future.
J-D 09.06.25 at 7:07 am
The way you use scare quotes is a massive giveaway. You write about banning ‘hate speech’ as if this is different from banning hate speech. But what could that difference be? This is the way people write when they want to signal indirectly, without coming right out and saying it, that there is no such thing as hate speech. But there is such a thing as hate speech. People do say hateful things about other people and there are contexts where it is appropriate and right to ban people from saying hateful things about other people. I am not allowed to say hateful things to my co-workers, and rightly so.
Here we are again with the scare quotes. There are such things as lies and rumours! Why would somebody want to pretend otherwise? This is the way people write when they want people (possibly but not necessarily themselves) to be able to get away with telling lies and spreading rumours without experiencing any negative consequences. But sometimes people should experience negative consequences for telling lies and spreading rumours.
Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. When people flood the zone with bad speech, responding with even more speech doesn’t remedy the problem; the result is total uproar, in which none of the speech can be heard. For speech to communicate any meaning, it must be heard, but in order for people to be heard, other people must be quiet. If nobody ever has to be quiet, any speec can always be drowned out.
Enforce them how? Enforcement of any kind is by definition suppressive. If you support any kind of enforcement, you are supporting some kind of suppression.
There have always been people saying horrifying things, not just now. Would you seriously say that there is nothing anybody ever has said or ever could say that would horrify you?
John Q 09.06.25 at 6:46 pm
Aardvark – that’s a good point. I really liked Ministry For The Future
A story with characters would be a lot longer, which is why I called this “a fiction”, and I don’t know if I have the skills to write one (AI gestures temptingly here). But I willl think about it
Shawn M 09.06.25 at 9:20 pm
I think this fiction still reads to me like wish-casting and seems a bit divorced from the similar situations we’ve already lived through. Starting off with the Tesla crash is particularly unbelievable because we’ve already witnessed how little the markets or regular consumers care about the realities that Tesla faces.
If the Cybertruck driver died in the crash, how does anyone find out that he had FSD engaged and was checking his stonks at the time? It’s a fine political narrative idea, but we’ve already seen how these investigations actually proceed. Nobody is going to dump TSLA shares afterward without plenty of people “buying the dip”, and Elon isn’t going to tweet something about the driver being a “crisis actor” before he tweets that the driver was at fault… also did the driver die or get injured in the crash? Are there other dash-cams that get played on national news?
I appreciate the effort to project our current situation into a future that makes some kind of sense, and I don’t want to be overly harsh to a first attempt at fictional writing, but I think this fiction preaches to the choir in a way that defeats the purprose.
My recommendations are to be less specific about the causes of the future collapse. The causes will be impossible to predict and any attempt to do so will ultimately fall flat and not be relatable to the real cause (unless one hits the Cassandra Lottery).
I do believe that our best chance at preventing a future collapse may be in someone bringing a believable future narrative to present… but I think the nature of the collapse narrative needs to be more relatable and accessible to a broader subset of the American public.
When it comes to a crypto collapse, I would suggest a more sinister plot origin by way of a foreign power and/or early adopting “black pilled” individual owner of coins which sees a Bitcoin collapse as a politically beneficial move and sells off millions of coins in response to some kind of Black Swan event.
Anyways, thanks for making the effort and creating a conversation around this, I very much appreciate it despite my criticism.
Alex SL 09.07.25 at 6:56 am
Just today people were sharing some AI-generated Youtube advertisements on BlueSky that were extremely bizarre but also clearly advertising some fraudulent ‘medication’ – they claims were just nonsensical. I have similarly seen ads for large amounts of “passive income” scams. Perhaps worst, I am regularly seeing Youtube spam videos showing the face of our Australian prime minister with various claims always to the effect of click here and the government will give you lots of money for some unspecified reason.
Would this kind of stuff have been legal on television when I was a teenager? Of course not.
But now in the age of getting our news mostly from social media, we are drowning in financial frauds, scams targeting the elderly or uneducated, lies about science and scientists, and hate propaganda against minorities… and all the governments of the world outside of maybe China (?) and North Korea seem to have completely abdicated all responsibility to regulate this. Either it is just too hard to do anything (nonsense), or they too think that fining a scammer or a liar or a hate-monger is too illiberal.
But what, exactly, is supposed to happen here? Unless we as consumers and voters are all experts in all fields and have the time at our disposal to go back to original sources of information (which we realistically do not and cannot), we need to be able to trust secondary sources of information. And of course, that is what a lot of people naively assume: surely that can’t all be lies, “they” wouldn’t allow them to do that! The victim of a fraud is justifiably frustrated why the government didn’t make it more difficult to be defrauded, and the victim of a political fraud will, in due course and if or when they ever get out of the cult, be frustrated that the influencers and politicians could just lie without any consequences.
Because, yes, lying having tangible repercussions for the liars is the only solution unless, again, we expect every single consumer and voter to be an expert in everything and spend 128 hours per day checking sources and verifying information.
Bringing this back to the topic of the fiction, I don’t see how any defeat of authoritarianism can every be more than a temporary set-back until there are consequences for liars and those enabling liars.
mw 09.07.25 at 9:45 am
J-D @70
The use of scare quotes was very much intentional — ‘hate speech’ and ‘lies’ and ‘disinformation’ are always amorphous categories that are defined and expanded to include what those in power disapprove at any given time.
“Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t.”
No — permitting full freedom of speech (yes, even scary ‘unfettered’ freedom of speech) is everywhere and always the liberal position. Suppression of speech is everywhere and always NOT liberal. So you’re not liberal. You think liberalism is perhaps naive or ineffectual in the face of evils you’ve identified — but why not argue for and fully own your position rather than try to shuffle and deflect?
Laban 09.07.25 at 12:03 pm
Are the States going back to the Monroe Doctrine? Would certainly explain “No Wars” Trump’s recent Venezuela moves.
(Though to be fair I seem to recall Obama droning actual American citizens in Yemen)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/05/pentagon-national-defense-strategy-china-homeland-western-hemisphere-00546310
C-S 09.07.25 at 3:25 pm
Such liberal thinkers as Mill (harm principle), Locke (protection of the commonwealth, and potentially, though admittedly less clearly, “furious vituperations”) and Popper (paradox of tolerance) have all famously argued for free speech with limitations.
Frankly speaking, this casts significant doubt on your value as an interlocuter.
C-S 09.07.25 at 4:24 pm
The notion that freedom (to whatever extent you believe it should be unfettered) is curtailed dramatically as soon as it interferes with someone else’s (“my freedom to swing my fist stops at your face”) is fairly fundamental to any functioning society for reasons (such as how to resolve when freedoms come into conflict) that I would hope would are self-evident.
Most people (including, AFAICT, the majority of liberals) seem comfortable with the notion that are some limits on freedom of speech, even if there is furious disagreement over where those limits should be (examples which readily spring to mind include bearing false witness against someone, shouting fire in a crowded theatre, etc.). Currently I cannot think of examples of places where freedom of speech has been absolute, though I certainly invite you to present any that you might have.
Personally, I am quite comfortable with the notion that some categories of speech (such as incitement to imminent violence, true threats, defamation, and child pornography) are unprotected, because I believe that the harm these cause justifies such limitations – you are, of course, welcome to present your argument to the contrary.
Finally, as a brief aside, I would note there is a considerable difference between the notion that corporations should have the same free speech as individuals (one I disagree with), that individuals should have free speech, and that the free speech of individuals translates to unfettered use of whatever platforms they may have – and I would say it is important to not slip between these (i.e. the notion that Scrooge McDuck should have freedom of speech is not the same as the notion that Scrooge McDuck should be able to control all media to promote his speech, which is not the same as the notion that McDuck Inc. should be able to do either of those things).
PeteW 09.07.25 at 6:13 pm
me @74
There is more than one definition of liberal. But I don’t think any of them encompass the kind of free speech absolutism that you claim.
Are you saying that if I urged a friend to stab a stranger in the street, and they did so, causing serious injury or death, that I should escape any legal sanction because I was merely exercising my freedom of speech? And that that is, in fact, ‘everywhere and always the liberal position’?
Seriously?
John Q 09.07.25 at 8:51 pm
Nothing more on the free speech thread derail, please
Comments on this entry are closed.