So… what now? Where do we go from here?

For the last several months, I’ve struggled to put my thoughts together into something that I felt was appropriate for this blog. Even though I allow myself to be political here, I’m also keenly aware that I have many readers who might enjoy my books and yet disagree with my politics. I don’t want my politics to become a stumbling block or a litmus test for them, and yet, with all that’s happened since November 3rd (and indeed, is still happening), it’s been very difficult to figure out how to put those thoughts into words.

First there was the election. I expected voting irregularities, but not on such an incredible scale. Then, the Great National Gaslighting, which has been ongoing ever since. To be fair, there was also a great deal of conspiratorial nonsense spewed out by the Qanon folks on the Right, which only served to obfuscate and confuse the issue (for that reason, I tend to believe that Qanon was a psyop from the beginning).

And then, the mostly peaceful protest* at the Capitol changed everything.

I was disappointed by the storming of the Capitol, but not surprised. Disappointed, because tactically, it was the stupidest possible thing that the folks on Team Red could have done. It accomplished nothing of lasting political value, completely sabotaged the lawful and legitimate efforts to question the legitimacy of the election, and gave Team Blue all the ammunition they needed to close the Overton window on the election irregularities, weaponize the surveillance state against their political enemies, and bring the War on Terror to American shores.

I wasn’t surprised, though. From November 3rd to January 6th, the news cycle was filled with the sort of stuff that color revolutions are made of. The mostly peaceful protest* at the Capitol fit the script perfectly—almost too perfectly. Anyone who keeps an ear to conservative media could have told you that the MAGA folks weren’t going to simply bend the knee—not with all of the voting irregularities and other shenanigans.

(*And I use the phrase “mostly peaceful protest” deliberately—not to excuse the storming of the Capitol in any way, but to point out the hypocrisy and Orwellian doublethink of those who unironically used that phrase to describe the George Floyd riots over the summer, and who now call the riot at the Capitol “sedition” and “insurrection” perpetrated by “domestic terrorists.” 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual!)

And then, Big Tech cynically took advantage of the moment to crush Parler, silencing and deplatforming the conservatives who had migrated their from Twitter. “If you don’t like what we’re doing, build your own platform,” they said. So we did, and then… this.

You know, I’m actually not all that concerned about Joe Biden taking the White House and the Democrats controlling the House and Senate for at least the next two years. Am I happy with that arrangement? No, of course not—but on a certain level, the hyperbolic rhetoric on both the Right and on the Left is all just part of the same grift. Politics is what got us into this mess—it’s not what’s going to get us out of it.

But the crap that Big Tech is currently pulling? That stuff genuinely scares me, not the least because my livelihood depends on it. Without Amazon, there would be no indie publishing right now. So for AWS to take down Parler on woke ideological grounds, while flagrantly violating contract law and antitrust—and now, for the chief of that department to replace Jeff Bezos himself—yeah, that doesn’t bode well for authors like me.

I do have some hope for remedy in the courts, but not much. If we do get recourse through the law, it will take years or even decades to get it, and an ugly, uphill battle against corrupt, partisan judges in every level of the judicial system. Ultimately, I think the only thing that will take down Big Tech will be a majority of Americans simply refusing to use their services, deleting their social media accounts and getting smart about their personal data. But I don’t have much hope for that, either.

So what can we expect in the short to medium term? Where do we go from here?

First, if the storming of the Capitol genuinely surprised you, buckle up. When people feel that they have no recourse through peaceful, democratic means—that no one on the other side is listening to them, even as their way of life is being systematically destroyed—they turn to violence. But where the Left sees political violence as a dial that they can gradually turn up, the Right sees political violence as a switch that gets turned on. A lot of people on the Right are now thinking about flipping that switch.

It will start with a series of high-profile political assassinations. I do not condone or encourage this in any way, but I expect that many prominent Democrats will not survive the year. If the violence continues to escalate, we will see more unrest and chaos, ultimately culminating in either a mutiny of the nation’s armed forces, or the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Possibly both.

The “sanctuary state” phenomenon will expand dramatically as red state governors challenge the unconstitutional dictates of the Biden administration. To put it bluntly, red state America is going to become ungovernable. There will also be calls for secession, at first just to extract certain political concessions, but depending on how things go it could become a serious movement.

The migration from blue cities and states to red parts of the country will accelerate dramatically, and may turn violent. States like New York and California are trapped in a death spiral, where rising taxes are causing the rich to flee, which causes the politicians to raise taxes even more. The pandemic has made this much worse. I don’t think New York City is going to survive the coronapocalypse, and will go the way of New Orleans or possibly even Detroit. This will have interesting implications for the traditional side of the publishing industry, which is New York centric to a fault.

At some point in the next two years, I think the other shoe of the economic collapse is finally going to drop, and all of the cans we’ve been kicking since 2008 are going to hit the end of the road. In response, I expect the Biden (or at that point, probably the Harris) administration to make a hamfisted attempt at turning our Economic Impact Payments into some sort of permanent UBI, but it will either be too little, or it will lead to the sort of runaway hyperinflation that I wrote about in my short story “Payday.”

Ultimately, I see only three ways that all of this insanity ends:

1) A peaceful (if messy) divorce. Red states go their way, blue states go theirs, and the Great American Experiment comes to an end with a minimum of bloodshed. I consider this the least likely outcome, and not a very desireable one.

2) A civil war or revolution of some kind. We may already be in the opening phases of this, where the starting factions vie for position before the shooting begins in earnest. We may be reaching the end of the opening phase right now.

3) Everyday Americans from across the political divide join together to reconcile their differences and oppose the social and cultural forces driving us apart. I want to believe that this is the most likely outcome, but it requires that people leave their echo chambers and genuinely listen to those they see as the enemy, and I don’t think that’s going to happen unless something changes dramatically with Big Tech. It wasn’t just politics that got us into this mess: social media played a role in it, too.

What does all of this mean for our family and my writing? I’m trying to work that out right now. Even in a worst case scenario, I think that where we live here in Utah is a good place to weather the coming storm. And in a best case scenario, I would like to be a part of the reconciliation that brings this country back together. But in the meantime, I expect that I’m going to have to find alternative platforms to publish and sell my books, because the ban lists are coming, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that I’m already on one of those lists.

In the long term, though, I’m grimly optimistic that things will work out. I’m not quite sure how they will work out, but I know that the forces driving this chaos will ultimately be undone by their own pathologies. The important thing is to find the strength to get through this moment without falling into any of those pathologies yourself. Even with all of this talk of violence and civil war, I have hope that the Great American Experiment is more resilient than anyone gives it credit, and great faith in the goodness of the American people, regardless of political affiliation.