Seven Future Americas

Elections are supposed to be an infinite game, where the loser regroups, licks its wounds, and makes a better pitch next time, or at least waits for the other side to have a scandal or screwup. But 2020 feels like a finite game. Both major political factions in the United States now increasingly believe they will never win again if they do not win this time. Democracy is not supposed to work this way. In fact, it cannot work this way. Toss in a Supreme Court vacancy, voter suppression, and a pandemic, and this poll feels existential.

And it might be. The United States is undergoing a demographic transition wherein the country’s historic power group, white Christians, will no longer have the numerical heft to maintain control of the national political machinery. Many polities have faced this kind of demographic and/or democratic political challenge to a historic power group’s dominion, and virtually all of them have had some hideous conflict and/or dissolution: Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Burundi, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, the Ottoman Empire, French Algeria, and Yugoslavia, to name just a few. Quite simply, I’m unaware of any polity that has ever peacefully navigated the river America is now on.

Because we’re not the first, we can look around the world to see what happened in other places. And so I present to you a list that categorizes most of the known ultimate outcomes (to date) that have happened in other places where people have faced the kind of moment that we are facing now. Here are seven possible future Americas that await us as we trundle up to the crest of this rickety rollercoaster.

1. The Rainbow Nation

Relevant Precedents: South Africa; Brazil

In this scenario, all of the different lineage-based identity groups who have historically received differentiated treatment agree to share their polity and grant each other nominally equal political rights. Like post-apartheid South Africa or post-junta Brazil, the Rainbow Nation is a feel-good story of justice, sacrifice, and ultimately of triumph. You think it is a good outcome, indeed the one you want. But it isn’t. It is quite literally a rainbow nation… a series of clearly delineated colors vertically stacked into unequal and inviolable bands. It is a caste system pretending not to be a caste system. The price of peace between groups is the voluntary surrender of any significant means of reform or redress of the structural and historic inequalities within the nation. The price of political equality is entrenched economic and social inequality.

In principle, the Rainbow Nation is inspiring but in practice it is jarringly unequal and unfair. Privilege violence is endemic. Corruption is a form of government. Gross and yawning inequalities and discrimination between individuals and groups are frozen in place. Elite urban centers and sprawling ranches and vineyards are juxtaposed against favelas and shantytowns. Half the population, overwhelmingly concentrated among historically marginalized identity groups, is effectively locked out of the economy while the rich play on exclusive beaches. The country’s bonds are junk. A few elite businessmen can effortlessly co-opt the political establishment. Rolling blackouts and brownouts are normal, and those of means buy generators. The threat of cities running out of water looms. Basically, the Rainbow Nation is every outstanding issue in the United States amplified dramatically. Soaring and moving rhetoric about equality and coexistence, coupled with a small elite of successful businesspeople and political leaders from otherwise economically marginalized identity groups, almost hides all of this, but not quite. (See the South African phrase “cappuccino society.”)

I consider this a suboptimal outcome, unfair and, in the long run, likely unstable. Nevertheless, there are far worse outcomes on the board, because at least in the Rainbow Nation everyone acknowledges every other group’s right to exist and share the same country and vote. This by itself is an unusually positive place to arrive at, difficult to replicate even in the best of times, and requiring both an optimal historical moment and far-sighted leadership. There’s a reason Nelson Mandela is a near-universally revered figure who has a statue in United Nations Headquarters. This is almost as good as it gets.

2. The Separation Without Divorce

Relevant Precedents: Bosnia & Herzegovina; Belgium

Ignore the ugly history of the word “confederate” in the United States and focus on the concept of “confederalism,” or a federal system where most power is devolved to sub-national entities. In countries like Bosnia & Herzegovina and Belgium, the totally segregated and mutually uncomprehending lineage-based factions have agreed to grant each other veto power over the federal government, ensuring the federal government does nothing. Instead, the state is governed at the sub-federal level, where the overwhelmingly segregated provinces completely govern their own affairs as they see fit and nominally share a country solely because formal divorce would be tough on the kids.

This is easier in a country like Belgium where there is no recent history of direct conflict between the groups, the wealth gaps between the main factions are not enormous, and virtually everyone lives in their respective half of the country. Belgium is a stable, prosperous nation that also, as of this writing, just reached the government formation stage after 486 days with no government at all. (In case you are wondering, no, this is not the record for a national parliament. It’s not even the record for Belgium, which a decade ago went a whopping 589 days sans government. That is the record.)

So if having a federal government that makes policy, passes legislation, and enacts needed reforms is important to you, the Separation Without Divorce is not for you. And many Belgians agree; the party with the most seats in Belgium’s last elections was a Flemish nationalist separatist party.

Things get thornier in Bosnia, where the segregated regions are the direct result of ethnic cleansing and even genocide that occurred within living memory. Bosnian Serbs overwhelmingly live in a bifurcated and thoroughly cleansed entity called Republika Srpska, which threatens to secede often and in the interim prevents Bosnia from being even remotely functional. The price of peace at Dayton was to effectively reward and codify the ethnic cleansing that took place during the war. (The Bosnian Muslims and Croats, for their part, also live segregated lives.) This allows each group a sense of quasi-self-ownership without actually breaking up the country.

Nobody is really happy with this outcome, but because the federal government can’t do anything, politics becomes less existentially zero-sum. In Bosnia, the presidency is a three-headed Cerberus representing the three major factions, guarding the gates of the underworld so that no dead-on-arrival legislation can make it to the land of the living. Applying this to America would sure turn down the temperature. Trump wins four more years? Don’t worry, the presidency has no real power, and in any case, every eight months he would cede the Oval Office to an African American or Hispanic president on a strict rotation system. A Supreme Court vacancy? No problem, the Court doesn’t have any real power either. Legislative elections? Don't worry, the legislature won’t even be able to form a government, let alone pass any legislation. On the other hand, if you want the government to, say, attend to the problem of more than a third of the population being unemployed… that can’t happen either.

So basically, if we Americans can swing the Separation Without Divorce, then we can relax and enjoy the free air knowing that our government will never do anything we don’t like… or anything at all, for that matter. Our state governments will provide the health care we want, the reproductive rights we want, the taxation system we want, the level of carbon emissions we want, and the degree of religion in public life we want. As time goes on, we will become ever more like the Belgians in that we quite literally will not understand each other’s languages.

Even if you think the other half of the country was founded in bigotry, its people exist, they have their own narrative, and they are legion. You can’t have peace in the country without their consent to whatever political arrangement is in order. You certainly don’t want to be ruled by them, nor they by you.

This may be America’s future. To Red America, a Republican Srpska. It’s exasperating, it’s demoralizing, and many people will ultimately leave this nonfunctional republic in favor of more dynamic places that actually work—Bosnia’s population has been falling for years—but it could be worse.

3. The Lingering Death

Relevant Precedent: Lebanon

A dreadful corollary of the Separation Without Divorce, the Lingering Death is a paralyzing of the government so that it can’t be weaponized by any one faction against other factions. The good news is that this ends or prevents your civil war from spiraling out of control and keeps the peace. The bad news: just like the Separation Without Divorce, the federal government can’t do anything, but unlike the Separation Without Divorce, there’s no formal provincial governments to pick up the slack. Rather, the country is left with an unworkable apportionment of national government powers to different factions.

The result is a gradual decay into failed statehood. Trash is not collected. Common defense is not ensured. Foreign powers back each faction, turning the nation into a proxy battleground. In the rare instance anyone attempts to do something controversial, assassination is used to prevent a parliamentary quorum. Factions may fight foreign wars without consulting the government. Ethnic militias replace state authority. The government is used as a piggy bank by ethnic big men with identity-based patronage networks. The currency is a Ponzi scheme. As with the Rainbow Nation, corruption becomes a form of government. Protesters are fun and creative but they can’t shake the regime from its torpor. Finally, the capital city is obliterated by a massive explosion, likely because the port authorities were unable to practice even basic safety precautions. A once-proud and hopeful nation is reduced to desperate poverty… a nation of broken glass.

It is not difficult to imagine this future in the United States. Lebanese will likely nod knowingly at the thought of a country headed by a sectarian-aligned billionaire real estate dynasty accused of corruption and complicated dealings with foreign powers. Sectarian militias? We’re the most heavily armed civilian population in history. Divided governance? Our Senate reflects the distribution of states, our House the distribution of people, each one heavily favors a different racial bloc, and they do not even consider each other’s legislative efforts. Degraded governance? Our formerly world class government institutions daily become more politicized and even stripped for parts and are not, sometimes rightly not, trusted by the population. Our economy is financialized for the benefit of a few. Our glitzy cities are billionaire playgrounds while the population falls into poverty. Our leaders enrich themselves at the expense of public safety. Impunity is rampant. Political violence is normalized and its perpetrators are glorified. Nothing, be it a border wall or anything else, ever actually gets built. Thus ends infrastructure week… forever.

4. The Midnight Furies

Relevant Precedents: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; Yugoslavia

This is where things get really ugly. If the parties believe their aspirations are irreconcilable with those of the other side, especially if there is a demographic imbalance between the parties, secession may be in order.

The name here comes from Nisid Hajari’s book “Midnight’s Furies” about the 1947 India-Pakistan split, which occurred when M.A. Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, concluded that the outnumbered Muslims would never get a fair shake in an independent India and would be at the mercy of Hindu nationalists, and therefore sought, and got, a Muslim homeland. This liberated Muslims and Hindus from each other’s rule. But it did so at enormous cost. Because in India, borders and people didn’t line up. There was no way to divide the territory and allow everyone to live in the state apportioned to their group—and the hastily departing British didn’t exactly give their all in trying. The result was a bloodbath and what might be the largest single ethnic cleansing episode in human history to date. Some 15 million people fled their homes in terror in mass population exchanges and an estimated 1-2 million people died, most in just a few months. On top of that, the new state of Pakistan was noncontiguous and after two tumultuous decades the Bengalis seceded and another 300,000 to 3 million people died. Pakistan, whose territory was nearly a quarter non-Muslim in 1947, is about 3% non-Muslim today. India is 80% Hindu. Bangladesh is 89% Muslim. Compared to pre-partition, these are cleansed countries.

Among the many terrifying things about the Midnight Furies is implied in the name. They are sudden. The subcontinent went from being one entity to being violently torn in two at the stroke of a clock. It sneaks up on you, like, “We aren’t really going to do this, right? I hear rumors but they wouldn’t, it would be impossible, we have lived together for centuries.” And then it happens, your neighbor is your mortal enemy, and life is never the same.

The other scary thing is how uncontrollable the events are once set in motion. As Hajari writes, neither Jinnah nor India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru planned at the outset for whole populations to be permanently cleansed off the land. Both insisted minorities would be welcomed, particularly Nehru, who didn’t want the partition at all. But the combination of dangerously misaligned demography, irreconcilable visions, and a virulent channeling of the most elemental fears of the popular will made the unthinkable inevitable. The same thing happened in 1990 in Yugoslavia, where free and fair elections brought ethnic nationalists to power who promptly tore the country to bits.

In both India and Yugoslavia, it was freedom that unleashed the whirlwind, the nation rent asunder once the local people got a say after extended rule by a totalitarian regime that disallowed ethnic or religious cleavages by subjugating everyone equally with an iron fist. In India, that was the Raj, in Yugoslavia it was Tito. This is why the “put a strongman in charge of everything” solution doesn’t even merit its own category here; it is usually but a stopgap on the way to the Midnight Furies.

Even bleaker than the Midnight Furies, in some ways, are the unsuccessful Midnight Furies, where ethnic separatists are defeated and partition is thwarted. A terrible toll was required to crush Biafra, Tamil Eelam, Chechnya, Ambazonia, and many others, and often the losers were left in a state of permanent subjugation.

America is far closer to India in 1947, or to Yugoslavia in 1990, than it is to Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Divorce” in 1993. Our borders and peoples don’t line up at all, certainly not along the borders of our 50 states. Instead, our diversity is mostly concentrated in urban centers and blue enclaves, which are scattered across blood red countryside like dice on the ground. Our red states have blue cities and our blue states have red countrysides. Who gets Wisconsin? Does Austin get stuck in Red America? Does western Pennsylvania get stuck in Blue America? In practice, as in India and Yugoslavia, there would be a counter-secession for every secession. We are a nation of dozens of Kashmirs and Krajinas and hundreds of Sarajevos. Everything would be disputed, and the logical conclusion of such wars over territory, as has been practiced the world over, is ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. And so, if history is any guide, the secession outcome would likely require an even greater involuntary population swap than India and Pakistan in 1947, with unknowable numbers of millions fleeing their homes and communities forever, and millions slain. Scoff if you want, but it’s not like we haven’t seen millions of Americans flee ethnic subjugation before. Partition in a country with America’s demographic distribution isn’t a “break glass in case of emergency” fire extinguisher. It is a nuclear weapon. Still, there is an even worse fate.

5. The Zero-Sum Ethno-Sectarian Death Match

Relevant Precedents: Syria; Iraq; Cote d’Ivoire

As bad as the Midnight Furies are, they are a one-and-done (unless you live in Kashmir) and everyone gets their own state at the end. Not so the Zero-Sum Ethno-Sectarian Death Match, where multiple groups fight for total control of the state until one side is crushed, its political aspirations utterly destroyed, or is cleansed by the millions to become permanently stateless peoples living in restive refugee camps along the border.

There are many examples here, but the most relevant recent example is Syria. A minority power group—the Alawites—refused to surrender power out of fear of what would happen to them if they did. (This fear was very real; ask the similarly outnumbered Sunni Arabs of Iraq, who fought and lost two civil wars and were cleansed and slaughtered after Saddam Hussein’s minority regime was overthrown.) Meanwhile, the majority feared, with good reason, what the merciless regime of Bashar al-Assad would do to them. The result was a winner-takes-all war for the state where only one side could hope to get what they wanted, and only at the total expense of the other side. Faced with these stakes, most of the factions used internal displacement as a weapon of war, seeking to secure as much territory as they could by ethnically cleansing or exterminating enemy populations. This would have been bad enough if the country had then been partitioned, but instead everyone insisted that Syria’s “unity” was “fundamental.” This stance was ridiculous, as there was no unity in sight and it’s unlikely there ever will be, and it irrevocably led to today’s outcome: a Syria in which the central government has engaged in systematic demographic engineering to remake the country in its preferred image. After the first half a million casualties—in a country of only 22 million people—the UN stopped counting. More than half of all Syrians were displaced, and millions became permanent refugees and will never have a home to go back to. The conflict isn’t even fully over, and the country is already in ruins, its GDP having declined by an eye-watering 75% and most of its cities firebombed into rubble.

Even this isn’t truly the worst case scenario; the worst case scenario is when your Zero-Sum Ethno-Sectarian Death Match tilts into genocide. Fortunately this is rare. Unfortunately, when it does happen, it usually happens in this kind of demographic configuration, with a historic power group deathly afraid of losing control of its homeland. (See the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Genocides; Srebrenica; Rwanda; and Daesh.)

The Zero-Sum Ethno-Sectarian Death Match is what will happen in America if we Americans decide that we must keep the country together but cannot abide the other faction controlling the central government. Remember, in the American Civil War 1861-1865, two percent of the country’s population died. Today, that would equal nearly seven million people.

There’s one more thing I should mention about this outcome. Often, it doesn’t end. Whenever the fighting stops, the defeated group still exists in some form. This isn’t Syria’s first Death Match, it’s the second—Bashar’s father Hafez crushed the first one in 1982. And even that doesn’t count the numerous military coups in the country’s early post-independence years. Meanwhile, Cote d’Ivoire, whose dynamics are eerily similar to America’s, now faces its third election crisis in the past four elections. The previous two led to civil wars. The first civil war was halted by the country’s heroic national soccer team qualifying for the World Cup. (True story.) The second was quickly scuttled by French intervention. Who will ride to the rescue this time if things unravel again? Who will ride to America’s rescue?

6. The Nationalization Campaign

Relevant Precedents: Italy; Russia; Germany; Indonesia; the Netherlands

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is a way by which diverse peoples have unified and become equal partners in their nation: the Nationalization Campaign. The trick is to convince the different groups that they are actually the same group.

In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s forces reunified Italy. This was the first time the peninsula had been ruled by a single domestic regime since the Roman Empire. And because so many different entities had existed for so long—Piedmont; the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies; the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Papal States; etc.—only two and a half percent of Italians spoke “Italian” and most had no common cause or history together. A lot of what is today Italy didn’t want to be. As late as 1847 Prince Metternich of Austria had dismissed Italy as “a geographical expression.” For this reason, Italian politician Massimo D’Azzeglio famously exclaimed in 1861, “We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians.”

Italy, of course, didn’t exactly have the racial hierarchy that has long existed in the United States, but it did have, and still has, deep inequalities between its wealthy northern regions and its much poorer southern ones. While north-south splits remain, Italy is a prosperous and stable country, the eighth largest economy in the world, with universal healthcare and social welfare, and even if Italy’s politics are a bit of a mess—the country has had nearly 70 postwar governments—the Italian identity is real, powerful, and firm. This was engineered.

Applying the Nationalization Campaign to America, sub-identities like race, ethnicity, country of national origin, mother tongue and religion or sect are deliberately de-emphasized in favor of a common national identity. Everyone uses the same post office. Everyone serves in the same army. Everyone is encouraged to speak the same language, be it their mother tongue or no, and interact equally with the same bureaucracy and national education system. Everyone rides the same national rail service and drives the same interstate highway. No one group is favored or disfavored, or indeed thought of primarily as a group at all. All ethnic, racial, and religious indicators are removed from the census, which simply becomes a head count of humans. Indeed, any suggestion that the census should ask your race or religion would be considered repugnant. The state doesn’t know or care what race or religion you are. It doesn’t record these things and it doesn’t alter its treatment of you for any reason. Public or prominent institutions don’t record lineage-based identity data, so no one knows or considers how many people of x or y background attend Harvard or the University of Southern California or work for a government agency. Universal public welfare programs are put in place instead of identity-based ones. Race-based affirmative action is replaced with class-based. Baby bonds, Medicare For All, or a universal basic income help demolish the racial wealth gap without ever mentioning or even acknowledging that race is a thing. It is considered divisive and in poor taste to even talk about race or ethnicity. If we followed Rwanda’s post-genocide example, it would be illegal to do so. We are Americans first, and anyone who says otherwise is regarded with some suspicion. If we have a rival nation to unite against in a friendly round of global geopolitical competition, or if we have a largely invented national narrative that can be forever expanded to include more and more of us, so much the better. “Hamilton” is considered a great and inclusive musical for this reason, and its liberties with the facts are a source of off-Broadway bemusement but are largely ignored. Humans are the story-telling animal, and we tell a great story to keep us together.

I understand, given the fraught history of racial and religious exclusion and subjugation in this country, that this vision is a tough sell, but there are precedents in a number of formerly polyglot and highly conflictual countries. “Dutch,” “Russian,” “Indonesian,” “German,” and “Italian” are all concepts that were created by hammering a diverse constellation of peoples and dialects and religions into a single overarching identity that is now firmly rooted and deeply meaningful to the folks therein. There is no reason “American” cannot join them. We know it can be done because it has been done. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “[w]hat united them was not blood but belief.”

And then there’s what we’re currently trying to do instead.

7. The Kumbaya

Relevant Precedent: None

In this outcome, the parties come together and create not just a negative peace that is an absence of conflict, but a positive peace, a truly equal society in which everyone gets to hold on tightly to, and publicly embrace, their cherished lineage-based identities—race, religion, language, tribe, sect, clan, country of national origin, etc.—but no one is discriminated against based on their background, there is no vertical hierarchy or caste system between the groups, historic injustices are all rectified and within a generation there is no significant difference in health, life, or wealth outcomes between different groups. Representation in public life is directly proportionate to percentage of the population, not because of quotas but simply because everyone is equally treated and so that’s the outcome you would expect, just as a coin toss is a roughly 50-50 proposition. Microaggressions don’t exist. Structural racism doesn’t exist. There is no racial wealth gap. Law enforcement both acknowledges everyone’s differences and treats everyone the same. The criminal justice system both acknowledges everyone’s differences and treats everyone the same. Nobody votes along straight identity-based lines, or would even think of doing so, and no one uses the government to favor or advance members of their group, and everyone is just totally chill, our relative demographic weights shifting with the years and no one caring, our identities mattering tremendously and at the same time not mattering at all.

I would tell you more about the Kumbaya, but I can’t… because there’s just one problem with this scenario: to my knowledge it doesn’t exist and has never existed. I am aware of no precedent for anything like it happening anywhere in the modern age, certainly not in a place where people can vote and where demography thus confers power. Lineage-based identities are so easily channelled by group narrative, so easily commandeered by demagogues, so built for intergroup rivalry, that it’s almost impossible for groups to think of themselves as truly distinct and yet share a polity together equally without friction or hierarchy, particularly when there are historic inequalities between said groups. There are a couple of promising almosts in Canada and Ghana, where relatively diverse populations largely coexist peacefully and democratically in part because the identities are cross-cutting, leading to different coalitions on different issues. (In Canada, race and language don’t line up; in Ghana, ethnicity and religion don’t.) But these are rare and still decidedly imperfect best-case scenarios.

So this is a noble and worthy idea, but it may not even be possible to achieve or maintain given the way human identities work. By contrast, there are many examples where, instead of the Kumbaya, one of the previously mentioned six outcomes transpired instead.

Which America will we choose?

This is my worry about the United States as we approach this pivotal election; its right flank, vanguard of a demographically challenged power group, is behaving (predictably, and directly in line with every relevant precedent) like we’re headed for a Zero-Sum Ethno-Sectarian Death Match, even as its left flank is insisting on nothing less than a Kumbaya outcome that is entirely hypothetical, runs directly counter to the worldview of almost half the country, and, if history is any guide at all, has little chance of coming to pass. Somebody is going to be deeply disappointed by November’s election results.

It is unlikely, in my view, that we can continue to emphasize our sub-identities as we have done and achieve anything near an equal, prosperous, and functional society. Admittedly, like Buttercup in The Princess Bride, I’m merely saying we’ll never survive because no one ever has. We could do that which has never been done. We could be exceptional. But as I write today, I rather suspect that, if we proceed down the current path, one of the more conflictual of the above outcomes is far more likely instead. (The Rainbow Nation, the Lingering Death, and the Ethno-Sectarian Death Match seem particularly plausible given our structure and distribution.)

For this reason, I favor the Nationalization Campaign, with perhaps an intermediate helping of the Separation Without Divorce, as the best, most viable, and most just and equal outcome available for the United States in this fragile moment. I favor this not because it is perfect, but because every likely achievable alternative is worse.

Will this vision have any popular support? We will find out soon enough.