Why the Year 2025 Might Be the Last for America as We Know It

Chaos following the ’24 election could trigger the downfall; I just hope Uncle Sam doesn’t go out like a cowboy and take the entire planet with him

Photo by Tito Texidor III on Unsplash

It doesn’t get more doomscroll-y than that title of hyperbolic clickbait predicting a looming era of darkness and the downfall of the Stars and Stripes. But anyone who writes and even semi-pays attention to politics knows that these pieces write themselves.

After fifty years of steady decline and the one-two punch of Trump and COVID, America and Americans are barely hanging on. Pull on just about any societal thread in my home country and one could be led to a fall-of-the-nation-as-we-know-it level event.

Be it the near third-world level social and poverty scores, the general political despondency, and anger mixed with 390,000,000 guns, extreme weather from climate change and its continued denial, surging fascism, right-wing militias’ war games in the forest coming to the streets, Christian theocratic authoritarianism imposed by fundamentalist stacked courts with lifetime appointments, or nuclear war triggered by the over-aggressive foreign policy of an arrogant dying empire determined to keep its neocolonial exploitative grip on the throat of the world.

Again, these pieces write themselves. My family keeps telling me to channel my years of daily meditation into some positive essays — maybe I should and maybe I will.

But there’s a lot to be pissed off, worried, and freaked out about. The outlook is bleak and half of Medium feels like Paul Revere banging a bell and screaming our heads off — I hope others are channeling it into more action than I am over here sipping Czech pilsners.

Obviously, predicting the future is a fool’s errand. I am that fool and am going to go out on a limb and say that the 2024 election, no matter who wins it, might be the catalyst for the rapid end of America as we know it.

Here’s why…

Regardless of who wins the next presidential election, half of the country is going to be convinced it was stolen.