Ten Predictions:
2006 to 2035
(1) I’m going to start with an odd one. John McCain will be elected the 44th President of the United States … as an independent. The Republicans will nominate a right-wing nutcase (Frist, Santorum, Brownback, etc.) over McCain. This nominee might have a more welcome foreign policy, but would seek to turn this country into a borderline theocracy. The Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton — against all reason. Hillary wins the nomination despite having a platform that changes radically depending on who she is talking to. Looking at a country disgruntled with two incredibly bad candidates, McCain will jump back into the race late in the summer of 2008. He will largely sweep the Midwest and West Coast and carry enough Northeastern and Southern states to pull off the first third party presidential win since … ever. Political analysts will scratch their head the day after and wonder how a pro-war candidate won the presidency when the vast majority of Americans oppose the war.
(2) Speaking of which … think the Middle East is bad now? Just wait. As soon as American troops start leaving Iraq (which will happen next year), the house of cards will collapse and the country will be plunged into civil war. The best case scenario would be a partitioning along ethnic lines, while the worst case scenario … well, you don’t want to know. Meanwhile, sometime this decade, a large Muslim nation led by a secular government will be overthrown by extremists. Egypt or Syria, perhaps … if it’s Pakistan, then we’re all in trouble, because they’ve got nukes. Iran will too, soon enough, because diplomatic pressure is not going to work. Sometime in the next decade, Israel is going to be in another war for its survival — and it will go nuclear. The Middle East will be to the second decade of the 21st century what the Balkans were to the second decade of the 20th: the powderkeg that launches a series of World Wars that will produce previously inconceivable levels of horror. The American people will wax nostalgic about the 1990s as long as there is an American nation.
(3) As America: The Book famously proclaimed, “The Latinos: Like the Kool-Aid Man, no wall can contain them.” Immigration is not going to stop no matter what Congress comes up with because we’re the United States of America, which means the rest of the world (a) hates us and (b) wants to live here. In twenty-odd years, most of this country will look like the North Brunswick Wal-Mart that is five miles from my apartment. I’m fairly certain that I am the only white person who ever goes there. White people don’t seem to go to graduate school either (with the exception of business schools), which will be the measure of vocational skill in a country where a college degree is nowhere near as special as it was twenty-five years ago. The fact of the matter is that we just don’t want it enough any more. Whites will not lose their cultural identity (whatever that may be — is it bland music and bland food?), but they will become a minority in their own country and voluntarily place themselves below Asians (both East and South) in an informal ethno-economic caste system. Meanwhile, the vast Latino population within our borders and the economic interconnectedness with our southern neighbor will force us into a kind of North American Union that establishes an EU-like entity on our own continent. (Speaking of which, the EU will finally put a constitution together, expand to cover every consequential nation in Europe, sans Switzerland, and finally get around to issuing a loud, but ineffective, challenge to the United States on every front imaginable.) Eventually, there will not be enough white-collar jobs to go around as computing technology becomes more and more sophisticated, so unemployment among what is now the American middle class will increase dramatically. (Like, say, by a factor of five.) Some will become day laborers, while most simply protest and wait for a government handout, in the long-standing tradition of white middle-class Americans.
(4) Oil will keep getting more expensive which, combined with the budget and trade deficits that show no signs of falling, the United States will fall into an economic depression in the 2020s. We’re going to turn around one day and see that China and India will have larger economies than ours and produce superior goods in almost every manufacturing field. Such a collapse will be the death knell for the already flimsy economy in most of “flyover country,” especially the Rust Belt. Millions of people will load up their possessions and move to greener pastures on the coasts or isolated pockets of prosperity elsewhere (e.g. Austin, Texas) in a modern-day re-run of The Grapes of Wrath (but without the horrifyingly interminable narration). Meanwhile, another round of social unrest will grip the nation as the numerous jobless hordes, along with idealistic students, attempt a Bolshevik-style revolution, only to be brutally put down by draftee soldiers (Kent State redux, anyone?) in a series of massacres across the country. This century will not be another American century … and perhaps comeuppance will do us some good. Regardless, I don’t plan on being around for it, because — unless things change in this country rather radically in the next five years — I’m moving to the Emerald Isle as soon as I get my doctorate, perhaps to teach at the school I attended last year.
(5) Liberty in this country will, obviously, continue to be slaughtered. “Unhealthy” food will be taxed and regulated like cigarettes — and yes, that means that minors won’t be able to buy ice cream or pizza. Socialized health care will finally happen, depriving Americans of the ability to get the drugs and treatment that they want. The public schools will, piece by piece, be unconstitutionally comandeered by the federal government, opening the next generation of youth up to horrifying levels of indoctrination and incompetent instruction. In the name of fighting terrorism, our country will see ever more horrifying invasions of our privacy: surveillance cameras will be placed on every street, the Information Awareness Office will return from bureaucratic oblivion and compile all data imaginable on every American (from DNA records to commuting patterns to credit card bills), transportation facilities will fall under control of the active-duty military (which will see its ranks swell greatly in the wake of a draft), whatever is left of the Fourth Amendment will be seen as a quaint peacetime luxury, and the FCC will see its purview expanded not only to the low-hanging fruit of cable TV and satellite radio, but also — hold onto your horses — literature and the Internet. (They’re forms of communication, right?) The government will finally finish the job of becoming your parents.
(6) Cleveland sports teams will never win a championship. The Cavaliers will move to Las Vegas once LeBron James leaves via free agency. Incompetence by the remaining two teams will be even more unbelievable after the Los Angeles Clippers and Arizona Cardinals win championships in 2009, followed by the Chicago Cubs in 2015 (just like Back to the Future Part II predicted). Indians fans, all twenty-three of them, will at least get the privilege of seeing the Hall of Fame career of Travis Hafner, who plays in Cleveland until his retirement in 2019, after which the team moves to Greensboro, North Carolina.
2036 to 2099
(7) There will be two great technological advances in the first half of the 21st century. One of these will be the emergence of medical nanotechnology, which will cure the vast majority of illnesses that cripple us today. L
ife expectancies will skyrocket, transforming the human experience in ways that are impossible to imagine — for those who can afford it. This technology bankrupts the socialized health care system, returning the country to a pre-20th century system of (shocker!) paying for things with your own money. The production of these nanodevices will place a great strain on both energy and natural resource supplies, which will be relieved in two ways: the colonization of space (finally!) and the development of cold fusion technology through some as-yet unknown process by 2075.
(8) The second advance will be the development of virtual reality technology that can reflect almost every element of the human experience. Combined with the constantly increasing speed of the Internet and its successor networks, comprehensive VR will lead to a significant number of people to permanently live in an environment not unlike the holodecks of Star Trek. The popularity of so-called massive multi-player online role playing games (MMORPGs) will transform into the creation of entirely unforeseen fantastical societal constructs (as well as constructs from our past) that would seem wholly foreign to us today, molded by thinkers unbound by our concept of the physical world. Nations, corporations, and societies that exist only in cyberspace will be (very reluctantly) recognized by the international community in the mid-21st century.
(9) By the end of this century, human beings will achieve immortality by transcending the brain’s attachment to the body. In essence, the minds of individuals who no longer wish to be tied to the physical world will be downloaded into the electronic network that society inhabits, able to exist indefinitely in this way. At this point, terrestrial governments will exist only to maintain this hyper-Internet and to govern the small remaining population that lacks the means or desire to join the second phase of human existence. Liberty will finally return to humanity as leave our parental governments behind.
(10) None of these predictions, except this one, will come true.
