What we get after the United States ends has been a staple of science fiction prognostication as long as there has been science fiction. My own book THE PONO WAY describes a balkanized United States, also another staple. There’s the New Confederacy, the Lone Star Republic, Deseret, the Cascade States, whose dissolution drives the action of the book, and the rump end of the old United States in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. I mean, you can see it happening, can’t you? Enough people decide to take a powder on the Union. I don’t know that we’ll fight another horrific war to save it.

Another staple is an American Empire, a paranoid, xenophobic military dictatorship where the President of the United States has the powers of a Caesar. This is positively hoary. I think the movie escape from New York features that. This, too, we can clearly visualize happening: a Potemkin democracy where citizens “vote,” Congress “passes laws,” but the outcomes are predetermined by The Powers That Be.

But I always wondered how we got to that point. When in these dystopias did the American people lose their freedom, and how?

Well now we know how. A corrupt, captured Supreme Court paves the way for it, dismantling the rule of law and the core principle that no man is above it. Stripping citizens of the rights that they enjoy. Forcing their fascist beliefs on the nation under color of law. It’s the consequence when Karl Popper’s Paradox is not heeded: the intolerant use the machinery of tolerance to dismantle a tolerant society. We’re seeing it happen right now in real time. Nobody is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.