Ways the Country Could Go to Hell

May you live in interesting times. (Ancient Chinese curse invented in the 20^th century, probably in America)

One thing you have to credit to Trump: He has made things more interesting. One consequence is to start me thinking about ways in which things in America might get much worse and possible exit strategies in case it does. Of the three dystopian futures that occur to me, Trump is the immediate cause of one, the proximate cause of another, and a contributor along with his predecessors to the third. I am not counting ways in which the whole world might get much worse; given current and near future technologies, there are no exit options.

The obvious dystopia is a right wing-populist takeover of the political system, Trump or his successor getting enough power, enough popular, political, and military support to ignore customary and constitutional limits on his power, ignore or control the court system. Doing that will not be easy, given how much of the formal and informal machinery is controlled by people, judges, teachers, professors, military officers, reporters, government officials, who would oppose it. But it might be possible with twelve years control of Congress and the Presidency in which to appoint judges, push the careers of officers, restaff the federal bureaucracy with loyalists, end up with the necessary machinery under control.

One thing that makes it more possible is the effect of technological change. Getting the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal on your side will be less necessary if their role in forming public opinion has been usurped by influencers, bloggers, podcasters most of whom nobody had heard of ten years ago.

It still requires control of political power. As things are now going the Republicans look likely to lose the house in 2026. The Supreme Court has a conservative majority but not a Trumpist majority, a situation that will require replacing several justices; defying its rulings is unlikely to be doable until the process has gone much further. Getting to a right wing dystopia will require a lot of political wins.

The less obvious dystopia is a left-wing, possibly progressive, one, driven in part by reaction to Trump’s excesses. The left already has most of the old media, the universities, teachers, much of the federal bureaucracy, a substantial minority of the judiciary. If everyone left of center becomes convinced that the proper response to Trump’s willingness to try anything he has a reasonable chance to get away with is to imitate it, to use all the power from control of congress and the presidency to maintain that control, they will face fewer constraints than the right now does, when and if that control shifts. Lawfare against Trump and his supporters in the past few years provides a disturbing portent of what could happen.

Lawfare by either party is an obvious weapon to establish control. It may not be literally true that everyone commits three felonies a day but it is close enough to true that an unscrupulous prosecutor in a friendly jurisdiction can impose large costs on someone he wants to hurt at no risk to himself save in reputation. If the reputation that matters to him is with political allies more concerned with results than with justice, getting an enemy will be a plus, however dubious the legal justification. If the consequence of being a visible supporter of the party out of power is a serious risk of jail or a crippling fine or damage payment — Rudolf Giuliani ended up paying 148 million dollars for defamation of two Georgia electoral workers and Trump himself was fined 355 million dollars for what seems to have been ordinary commercial puffery in valuing real estate and convicted of 34 felonies for a single offense of falsifying business records on which the statute of limitations had run.

Trump’s legal problems in New York suggest one path for collapse, right or left. The president can pardon anyone, including himself, for federal crimes. He cannot pardon anyone, including himself, for state crimes.

… Judge Juan Merchan granted the president-elect what's called an unconditional discharge, a sentence that affirms he is a convicted felon, but faces no further penalties, fines or any time in jail.

…

But because Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States again, that comes with the enormous protections, the judge said. Those are granted by the Constitution, many other courts, and most recently interpreted again by the Supreme Court last year.

So Merchan argued this was the only course he could really take. (PBS)

Suppose the judge had declined to interpret the Constitution and precedents as protecting a president from the enforcement of state criminal penalties, as a future judge in a future where both sides were trying to take advantage of any interpretation of the law they could get away with might, a Republican president and a California judge or a Democrat and a Texan judge.

What happens when state police show up at the White House?

The Debt Bomb

The US national debt is currently over 36 trillion dollars, increasing and likely to continue to increase under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Interest on the national debt for last year, at an interest rate of between two and three percent, was 881 billion dollars, about 18% of federal tax revenue for the year.

Every one percent increase in the probability of default can be expected to raise the interest required to borrow money by about one percent. Every increase in the interest rate raises the fraction of tax revenue going to pay interest on the debt, which increases the probability of default, which increases the interest rate. Positive feedback.

At about 12 percent, corresponding to a perceived probability of default of about ten percent, a hundred percent of tax revenue goes to pay interest with nothing left to fund the federal government and serious problems with borrowing more. At that point, probably before that point, something has to break. The federal government stops paying the interest it has contracted to pay or pays it via the printing press, creating a massive inflation and sharply reducing the ability to borrow in the future — default is a balanced budget rule with teeth. The government either sharply increases taxes, sharply cuts expenditure, or both, or finds some other way of increasing revenue, possibly a capital levy, possible seizure of property whose owners are in the current political outgroup. All happening in the context of a seriously polarized political system and electorate.

I don’t know what happens at that point and would prefer to observe the process from a safe distance.