The Fall of the Second American Republic

History from the Future

Northwest Sunset - R R Pozos, 2023

Author’s Note: Today’s events are part of a matrix of probabilities. This scenario reflects one constellation of events. Other scenarios will follow.

The year 2024 was the pivotal year that determined the fate of the Second Republic of the United States. Scholars dispute the actual date of the fall of the 1789 Constitutional Republic which had replaced the First Republic under the Articles of Confederation of 1781. Many attribute the fall of the Second Republic to the pressures of globalism, massive migrations, and climate change. Perhaps it was the failure of American civic religion. Sociologists have said that people simply lost faith in their political institutions.

While Trumpism has been labeled as another wave of American populism, it was a tsunami generated by a massive earthquake of political plate tectonics deep in the country’s social foundations. Some have speculated that if Donald J. Trump had not appeared on the scene, someone like him would have been produced by the vagaries of the digital revolution. Although the Constitution of 1789 was a framework for the allocation of power and the balance of interests among 18th century landowners and mercantile trade interests, it nevertheless proved durable beyond the agrarian state. The 1789 Constitution supported the creation of a unitary state - the Union - out of the federation of states in the mid-19th century Civil war and still served as the bedrock of the global industrial superpower of the 20th century.

The coming of the digital revolution in the first quarter of the 21st century created a supernova of information and power constellations that resulted in the demise of the working class and the semi-public spaces of retail shopping, retail worship, and community service groups. Local and regional newspapers disappeared or shrank into gossamer websites as their ad revenue was vacuumed up by Google and Facebook. From 2008 to 2020 newspaper newsroom employment fell from 71,000 jobs to about 31,000. Local voices and views vanished. The disappearance of small town and downtown America’s interpersonal cohesion gave way to epidemics of physical and social isolation. The national lock down of the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020 left people more isolated, as all public life constricted for three years. Within their bubbles of social class, people retreated further into their custom designed echo chambers of cable TV, online streaming, and mindless warrens of social media. Political tribes and clans were created by late 20th and early 21st talk radio and cable television.

The consensus among historians – which was dictated by the mandated national school curriculum - is that Tucker Carlson was the dominant factor in assembling the popular forces of the revolution in his nightly broadcasts on Fox News from 2016 to 2023. Several scholars attribute the fall of the Second Republic to Rupert Murdoch, an Australian tabloid news magnate who became the master of American news and information.  Fox News, the dominant news outlet began as a Republican partisan effort by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch in 1996 to counter the more liberal CNN. The only documentaries that survived the Cyber Civil War from 2025 to 2031 focused on the futile efforts of decadent liberal elites to counter Carlson and hailed his vision for the new society.

By 2002 Fox surpassed CNN and held the number one spot for the next 20 years. Studies at the time showed that almost all Republicans depended on Fox News and local Fox TV stations for their news and political information. Talk radio and cable TV’s programing hardened differences over class, race, immigration, gender, the environment, and religion into digital tribes and clans that highjacked political parties and set the stage for the protracted Culture Wars. The rise of Facebook and Twitter drastically reduced the cost and increased the effectiveness of political organizing in real time. As social media and email marketing consolidated retail consumer markets, they amped up the environment of the hardening of political tribes into which they were born. The positive forces of social life, cohesion and political détente which had sustained the 1789 Constitution weakened in the ebb tide of public life in the deep currents of information flows.

The shift to working remotely became permanent for most knowledge workers. Urban centers with their daily social bustle reduced to homelessness, drugs, and mental illness, remained hollow and forlorn. After the closure of shopping malls and small retailers, the urban core, which had been the last outpost of public life shrank into lifelessness. The banking crisis of 2024 came about as the big city commercial real estate markets collapsed as their skylines were only partially filled.

Some historians think that the Second Republic had served its purpose and was no longer tenable in a time of instantaneous communication which eliminated the cohesion provided by monopolies of print and radio and resurrected disruptive groups and ideas - racism, misogyny, and sedition - that had been suppressed. Most fatal was the breakdown in a shared notion of objective truth that disabled communication and consensus. Students of revitalization movements that occur during times of conquest or rapid change found that the flourishing of conspiracy theories reflected an active attack on government as a malevolent or at least as a threatening force.

The Golden Age of the Second Republic can be dated from the turning point of World War II - the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany at the Battle of Stalingrad on February 2, 1943 - to the debut of the World Wide Web on April 30, 1993. This half century was an economically prosperous time of upheaval in culture and society. It was a time of global economic and military power for the United States under the constant threat of global nuclear annihilation. With the demise of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, the Cold War met its final end and the United States lost it greatest source of common resolve.

The opening salvo of the Second Revolution was fired on the airwaves of Trinity Broadcasting - the largest Evangelical Christian network, with over a million followers on Facebook and over 10 million views on You Tube. Michael Huckabee, a Baptist minister, and the former governor of Arkansas from 1996 to 2007, issued a call to arms. Many are familiar with the words of September 26, 2023, which are now carved on the monument to the Second Revolution, “If these tactics end up working to keep Trump from winning or even running in 2024, it is going to be the last American election that will be decided by ballots rather than bullets,”

By mid-21^st century the federally licensed professoriate, focused on the inevitability of the revolution. They cited the work of Otto Spengler (1880-1936) in The Decline of the West published in 1918. In a vast oversimplification of Spengler’s view of history, they focused on his notion of cycles. Civilizations went from feudalism to aristocracy to the bourgeois to the masses and then to the rise of the new Caesars. In the official view of American history, the new Caesars: Gates, Zuckerberg, Musk, De Santis, and Hawley had been pre-ordained.

Reducing Spengler’s work to a series of sound bites of misinformation and propaganda was not uncommon. Using Chinese artificial intelligence scholarship suppression technology, focused attacks on mid-century cloud servers and the Eurasian War had done much to erase previous scholarship not in line with emerging authoritarian systems. Librarians saved large sections of learning often as double agents in government ministries of knowledge and science. Many paid the ultimate price.

They devised artificial intelligence methods to translate the material into Mandarin while keeping the original as coded meta data. Using default censorship settings in the software, they overwrote it with agricultural quotas and reports in Hungarian. The extent of the loss only began to come clear after the Global Eco-Collapse of 2096 when new and surviving governments began to look for information suppressed by climate optimism policies of the Second Republic regarding climate cooling and aquaculture for survival.

Many feel that the events of 2023 and 2024 did not, of themselves, cause the fall of the Second Republic. Many historians paraphrased Shakespeare - the fault was not in our stars but in our selves.

… To be continued.