What Will America Look Like in 10 Years?

With the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and, especially, again in 2024, the adjacent possible of American society has shifted dramatically. For the Washington Post, Philip Bump asked a number of people who study systems of government and the erosion of democracy the following question: “Given the country’s trajectory and what’s unfolded in other countries, what can we expect the United States to look like in five or 10 years’ time?”

Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die (Bookshop) and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (Bookshop):

I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long.

But also (emphasis mine):

I think it’s possible the flurry of abuses and attacks, first of all, and secondly, the incredibly weak response by civil society, suggests that the Trump administration can get away with much more than I think almost any of us anticipated. I would have thought it highly unlikely that the Trump administration could really seriously tilt the playing field in terms of media access and resource access, given the wealth and the diversity of the private sector in this country. A Hungary-like tilting of the playing field seemed really unlikely. Now, I think it’s possible.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Bookshop):

Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.

Thomas Zimmer, author of Democracy Americana:

A little over two months after Trump returned to power, it seems undeniable that even critical observers underestimated the speed and scope of the Trumpist assault and overestimated democratic resilience in both the political system as well as civil society. In mere weeks, Trumpists have managed to push America into that space somewhere between (no longer) democracy and full-scale autocracy. That means we must recalibrate our expectations. “They are not going to go *that* far” has been proved wrong over and over again. The idea that “they won’t be able to do this” seems similarly unfounded. Let’s finally discard whatever notion of “it cannot happen here” that is still floating around.

God, the “it cannot happen here” argument was so stupid even back in 2016 when people were debating whether Trump was a fascist. If nothing else, it was clarifying to be able to stick anyone who was chastising others for worrying too much into the “I’m highly skeptical of anything you write now” box.

Anyway, the whole piece is worth a read.

• 2025 Coup
• Donald Trump
• Philip Bump
• politics
• Ruth Ben-Ghiat
• Steven Levitsky
• Thomas Zimmer
• USA

A Hand-Drawn Visualization of the US Economy from 1861 to 1935

In 1936, former director of research at the Cleveland Federal Reserve L. Merle Hostetler published 75 Yrs. of American Finance, a hand-drawn chart of the economic health of the US from 1861 to 1935. The chart, which is horizontally oriented, shows a trending business activity index (which measures productivity) along with other financial data, indicates when Congress is in session, lists notable news events, and shows the high and low of the DJIA (starting in 1898). The graphic at the top shows Hostetler’s chart from 1929-1931, aka the beginning of the Great Depression.

The copy of this chart hosted by the St. Louis Fed goes to 1938…it must have been updated at some point. Also, if you go into the “»” menu in the upper-right corner of the in-page document viewer, you can set it to “horizontal scrolling” for easier viewing. (thx, andy)

Update: Philip Bump made a horizontally scrolling B&W version of Hostetler’s chart. This is a lot easier to navigate than St. Louis Fed version.

• economics
• finance
• Great Depression
• infoviz
• L. Merle Hostetler
• Philip Bump

Regulate the bullets

Philip Bump for The Atlantic:

But there are two things that are needed for a gun to work: the gun and the ammunition. Limiting guns may be hopeless. So why don’t we focus on the bullets?

People have made their own guns for a long time. A ZIP gun, a crude device used in prisons and by street gangs, can be cobbled together with only a little more effort than Defense Distributed’s plastic offering. A gun can be made from any number of common household objects. But making bullets is much, much trickier. A bullet needs much more specific consideration of materials and weight and requires something that is much harder to come by: a propellant. You can make your own gunpowder, of course, but refining the process to create effective munitions is as tricky as building a simple bomb. Doable, but dangerous.

• guns
• Philip Bump