What is America's Future?

This post is full of spoilers from The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver.

The election of Donald Trump sucked away my optimism for the country's future. It isn't just his election that did this to me, but the spotlight it shines on the fact that we have an electorate willing to accept him as president. If not Trump in 2016, what kind of person might be elected in 2020 or 2014?

Chuck Marohn's mention of The Mandibles in his Strong Towns podcast pulled me in: In the near future, the United States defaults on its debt and the economy collapses. The Mandible family fortune, along with any members' expectation of a big inheritance, is wiped out.

Increasing poverty hits the Mandible family hard. Several units of the extended family are forced to live under one roof with scarce food. Willing Darkly-Mandible, a precocious scion, is wired for these times, foreseeing the increasing hardships and creatively supporting his family's difficult adaptations. When the cramped household is removed from the house by gun-wielding squatters, Willing guides the family hundreds of miles out of the city to an uncles farm.

The United States becomes too poor to continue asserting itself internationally. China reclaims Taiwan and annexes Japan. Indonesia invades Australia. There is genocide in Madagascar. But America is impotent to intervene.

There a history between present day and the novel's opening in 2029. America was involved at some point in a military quagmire in New Zealand of the likes of Vietnam and Iraq. The United States is temporarily hacked back to the stone age, with an uncertain foreign entity shutting down all electronic devices and communications for an extended period. And with the US over-leveraged in debt, Russia, China, and other collaborators establish a new world currency that knocks the legs out from under the US dollar.

I've never been much of a doomer before. I suppose I've always understood that things could go very wrong and our complex society could fall apart. Some kind of nuclear mess is always a possibility, but I've always thought enough cool heads in charge will steer us away from such a calamity. But after the recent election I have no confidence that our federal government will be wisely managed. I worry that the economic collapse described in The Mandibles is possible.

I suppose I'm not going to worry about this enough to prepare. In the novel's scenario, cash, savings, and abstract investments become worthless. Tangibles, especially property, remain valuable. The nation doesn't fall as far as it does in Kunstler's World Made by Hand series. American civilization endures in The Mandibles, only much poorer. Cities are destitute, but livable--perhaps more so with fewer cars.