What Shaped My Parents

 

My mother died in 2007 and my father in 2010. I had plenty of time to ask them questions. I did ask some, and got some answers. Perhaps some of the questions I consider now are ones they didn't even know the answers to themselves.

My father was born in 1920 and raised in a rather devout Northern Baptist family. They were not well off, and he attended Bates College on scholarship. He reports that at some point in college he realized God didn't exist; it just didn't make sense. He went into biology, following in his big brother's footsteps, and was working towards a PhD at Harvard in roughly 1942. My mother's story is that he avoided the draft because of either a physical deferment (flat feet?) or being in an essential occupation (teaching anatomy and physiology to medical students). Sometimes one, sometimes the other. There was a sense that he was too sensitive to have been suitable for the army, but I'm not sure I ever heard that idea really supported. It is a bit hard to picture him in basic training but I imagine this was true of a lot of draftees. I don't recall anyone saying he volunteered and was disappointed he couldn't serve his country in that way. I asked if he had made any sacrifices on account of the war, and he said he did teach some extra sections way beyond what would have been the usual load, I guess. I think his thesis work was on hormonal cycles of the frog. Getting jobs and getting tenure in the late 1940s was very easy due to the extreme shortage of professors to teach the many students who enrolled under the GI Bill.

At some point around 1961, as a tenured professor at University of New Hampshire, he noticed that the college students were woefully uninformed about the basic facts of human sexuality, and he started teaching the course Human Reproductive Biology. He was qualified to do this from a scientific perspective because of his work in endocrinology. This course became very popular, especially when it met a science distribution requirement. But it was also a subject that the students cared about a lot on a practical level. At one point three lecture halls were required to accommodate all his students -- he lectured live in one and the other two saw closed-circuit TV images of him. At its peak he enrolled 2,000 students a semester. New Hampshire was then a very conservative state, and there was a lot of backlash against teaching sex to college students -- that was up to parents! Yet this man who shied away from conflict in most aspects of life did not shy away here. He kept teaching the course despite the fierce criticism.

Later in his career some woman (foreign student, I think) was arrested for walking through Durham naked, to make some political point. Against the advice of his attorney, he testified for the defense, saying that especially as she had never bent over, she had not displayed any sex organs, so the law did not apply. Why did he volunteer? A sense that the local climate was too prudish about sexual matters?

A stor of a different kind:. Natural childbirth was not a common idea in the early 1960s, and some students showed him a film on the subject, hoping he would show it to his class. He declined, noting that the women in question were obviously in a lot of pain, and he was afraid that women who had that to look forward to would never want to become mothers.

But returning to the big picture, what inspired a retiring, conflict-avoidant professor who was deemed too sensitive for the army to start a course on sex education and keep at it in the face of intense criticism?

My mother was born in 1921 into a family that was prosperous due to ownership of a prestigious wholesale drug company (BO and GC Wilson). But when the depression hit it wiped out the company, so she too attended Bates College on scholarship. Her parents were Republicans. My grandfather in his diary underlined election day of 1932 with "Voted for HOOVER!" My grandmother was later very much on the Joe McCarthy bandwagon, genuinely concerned about the alleged armies of communists that had infiltrated the land. In the era of the Vietnam War, my mother was doing anything she could to help me and my two brothers avoid the draft, but my grandmother thought it was a cowardly dereliction of duty to country. From this conservative background my mother joined up in the human potential movement of the 1960s, including such things as Encounter Groups. What made her adopt values so different from her parents? For her it was less of a change, perhaps, as there was a movement arising that she could become part of.. Becoming atheist was a smaller step, because while her parents were heavily involved in the FUSN church as workers in the organization, neither was particularly devout.

My mother was a valued counselor to high school students (more or less a therapist), and a few of them became friends in her personal life. This would be strongly discouraged today but was not considered a problem back then. One "Curt" visited at our house frequently on weekends. They developed such a rapport that they traveled around New England together showing a human potential slideshow they had devised, "Child of Clay". He also traveled with our family to Europe a couple times. My father had no use for human potential issues, and Curt was a companion to help my mother accommodate those interests.

I did not know at that time that he was gay -- I only figured that out in college. Suddenly (roughly 1974) it all made sense -- they could have this close relationship emotionally, but there would be no sexual tension to tempt her to be untrue to my father. Except then it suddenly didn't make sense, because I discovered (around 2009, I think) she was in fact having sex with Curt at that time. It was a common view at that time that homosexuality could be cured by heterosexual experience, and she wanted to help cure her friend. My father was fully aware of this. However, surely most women did not choose to have sex with gay men unless they themselves felt considerable desire in that direction. It all stopped when Curt decided to embrace his gay identity and started having sex with men.

It was an interesting situation regarding the secrecy involved. It was not an illicit affair in that my father knew (though I do not think he was at all happy about it). But we boys were not informed, which was a sensible choice because of the extreme stigma Curt would have faced had it been known he was gay. To her credit, my mother was largely consistent and adopted a liberal attitude towards sexuality with us boys. Sex was OK as long as both partners were willing and there was the use of reliable contraception. She also adopted the view that statutory rape shouldn't be a crime when girls were willing participants, and definitely felt it was at an entirely different level of offense from "ordinary" rape.

She had definitely non-liberal views on some key questions. She agreed with many thinkers of the time that overpopulation was a catastrophic problem, but laid the blame squarely at the feet of ill-disiplined poor people who did not limit their family sizes, and I think also feared that the higher reproduction rate of these same poor people would weaken the gene pool. Shadows of eugenics.

My mother was widely agreed to be self-centered, and her parents and husband cooperated in having her emotional needs and moods be at the center of life of the extended family. But one incident stuck with me. She was trying to earn her PhD at Boston University in psychology. She wanted to study homosexuality in men. Confidants at the department told her privately that she shouldn't do that, because the senior faculty just couldn't deal with that topic. She felt it was her right to do her thesis on the topic she chose anyway, and the lesson imparted to me was how terribly unfair it was of the BU department to put obstacles in her way (she never got the PhD). I accepted her version of events. In more recent years I parse it differently -- often you have to compromise to get what you want in life. She was unwilling to compromise, and just felt wronged when she was stopped. My father also later confided that he thought she rather panicked at the prospect of doing a PhD thesis, so perhaps that muddies the lesson somewhat.

Conservative grandparents, and quite liberal parents at a time (on issues of sexuality, largely?) when they were rare... What caused the shift?

Societal Incoherence About Death

Here I go writing about death again. I guess I have written about taxes, but that's not on the docket for today. However inevitable taxes may be, they really aren't quite as profound an issue.

I'll start with capital punishment. I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I don't have the sort of emotional revulsion against it that characterizes a lot of death penalty opponents. The government decides someone has done something so horrible that they deserve to die, and the government sees to it that they do. Why the strong reaction?

I think it is because whatever they might believe intellectually if pressed, emotionally the opponents feel life goes on indefinitely (emotional reading: forever) so the government has cut short an emotionally infinite life by ending it. (Quite likely death penalty proponents have the same view but feel good about that aspect instead of bad about it.) As far as I can tell, questions about whether the execution method meant a person died in pain are basically a manufactured concern. If there is any truth to the idea that an execution victim died in pain, it is only because the medical establishment refuses to cooperate -- there are ample ways that medicine can help someone die without pain if that is their goal. I don't mind their decision, but it would seem more honest if they said so plainly.

The time before an apparently unnecessary death can also count as pain and suffering. Notably, if someone is in an airplane that stops flying at a high altittude and descends in a free fall and crashes, the passengers might have a minute or more before they actually hit the ground and die. This entitles the survivors to more money in a financial settlement. When the space shuttles exploded, there was great interest in whether they died instantly or were conscious long enough to know they were dying.

The incoherence comes from the contrast with deaths that are unavoidable - an aged person has a terminal illness. In that case, the person dying is doing the right thing if they are peaceful and accepting. A death notice might say that someone died peacefully, surrounded by friends and family. The notice never says they died in great pain, or that up until the end they were angry and frantic that they were about to die, or that they were bitterly disappointed that their loved ones were not there. Why the difference? I submit that at that point people have discarded this emotional illusion that people might live forever if no one kills them.

I also have this hunch that great concern about a person's last days or hours or minutes rely on the notion of an afterlife -- even among those who would deny that they believe in an afterlife. If consciousness is forever extinguished at death, there is no special significance to the last bit. But in contrast, suppose we are dealing with a case where you are about to leave your homeland forever and go to a foreign land, in an era when there would be no further communication. In that case, you might care a lot what your last experiences of your homeland were. How the story in one land ended matters a lot if you are going to a new land where you can contemplate the old. If your best friend says they really hated you or your wife reveals that the children you thought were yours were fathered by somebody else, then those revelations will stick with you for the rest of your life in the new land -- and those who are left behind will know it. On the positive side, reconciliation with people you were on bad terms with will make your future life more peaceful. The people you left behind will be much happier if you leave seemingly content rather than perhaps totally distraught, as they will think (perhaps correctly) that that will influence your life in the new land -- that you did not leave gracefully.

Returning to the case of death rather than emigration, those who go on living who retain emotionally the idea of an afterlife (even if they don't believe it intellectually) will be happier if the person dies peaceful and accepting.

The alternative that the death penalty opponents want for the perpetrator of a heinous crime is a life sentence in a harsh prison environment. The quality of their life there is not of great concern -- at least they were not killed. Their distress, day to day, is finite, while if they were executed, the distress would be infinite.

If I remember correctly (I'm not going to look it up again), the guillotine did not get its name from the inventor, but from a French legislator of the time who argued for its use because a death sentence's purpose was to deprive someone of life, not to torture them. Apparently standard methods of execution before then included a variety of torture implicit in "breaking on the wheel". Burning at the stake also qualifies as torture. Apparently beheading with an axe wielded by hand is an iffy proposition, and if botched can amount to torture, while a guillotine was reliable in beheading without botching. So that was an issue being debated in the late 1700s, while at some point in the 1900s the terms of the debate shifted to no execution at all as opposed to no torture. I fully support an end to torture, whether at the end of life or any other time.

I don't know if death penalty opponents care greatly whether the victim was frantic and distraught just before the execution or peaceful and accepting, but they do care a great deal about this with regard to an unavoidable death. Sometimes I get the sense that joyous celebration of someone's life starts with the idea that they died peacefully and accepting. Survivors seem to be celebrating the death itself, since as we all really know, death is inevitable. I'm aware of this reaction in myself, though not proud of it. If some very old celebrity dies, I am often not aware of even one moment of grief, but with a sort of relief. They were bound to die, so now it's happened, and I can check off my list another of life's expected events that happened. If we actually actively mourned each death (say, if you read the obits regularly) you would rapidly be swamped by compassion fatigue.

But if you have a uniform sense that there is no afterlife -- no way, no how -- then someone dying early at someone else's hand isn't inherently a cause of more horror than the inevitability that they will die within a matter of decades in any event. If you're aware for a minute in a falling airplane that you're about to die, well, bummer! If they execute the wrong person, then... Oops! They still didn't end a life that was emotionally infinite -- they cut it short by at most a few decades.

I'm still staunchly opposed to the death penalty, but it doesn't make my top hundred list of things to be passionately concerned about. I suppose for me its importance derives from how important it is to other people. I also don't think that the mindset that leads to celebrating the execution of a hated person is a good thing, but exploring that would be another topic.

The warp in time from the year 2000

 The numbers of the years we live in are just numbers. The religiously neutral way to refer to the year is "C.E." or "common era". Although the hypothetical "year 1" came from a Christian calculation, that was long ago, and (likely because of cultural dominance) that's what has stuck. People realize there is no other, more logical place to start. Older cultures that reset the year each time a new emporer ascended to the throne were surely nightmares if you cared about history.

As the millenium approached, there were arguments about whether the true millenium might be a year earlier or later based on whether the first year was "year one". One quote that dismissed that whole issue that I thought was exactly right was, "It's all arbitrary, and I'm in it for the zeros".

But I've noticed a certain warping in my notion of time, a sort of distortion in time caused by that number 2000 and its properties. In 1980 it was just 20 years to the millenium. In 1990 it was just 10 years away. In 1997 it was just 3 years away. All those numbers about a significant future event were small. 1997 was notably later than 1994 because it was only 3 years to the millenium instead of 6.

And then -- it happened. Y2K. Nothing major broke. But starting on January 1, 2000, how do we think of years? Well, the next millenium will be the year 3000, and that's a fair amount of time away. Maybe a reasonable milestone on the way will be 10% of the way, which will happen in 2100. It's 100 years from now... Wait! 100 years from now is a LONG time from now! Even though all those zeros showed up at once, to live on a human scale we have to ignore a couple of them. A century is a long time, and that happens in 2100. Decades happen in the meantime. Stunningly, 22% of that first post-millenial century has gone by already. "Turn of the century" when I was growing up referred to 1900 and nothing else. If someone used it to refer to 2000 in the first few years after 2000, I certainly would have thought it odd. Now, 22 years later, we have to ask which turn over the century? Perhaps some disambiguate by calling it the turn of the millenium, but that risks expanding our time horizons to a much bigger scale than intended or desired.

Frozen history in our own lifetimes

 

When we first become aware of the existence of history in a meaningful way, we learn that our life has been very short and history has been very long. I remember that the idea of years passing somehow got through to me at a certain level in 1963. For a while I thought 1962 was long ago and anything in 1963 or later was recent. I remember looking up in the local college bookstore at things you could buy related to the class of 1971 or 1972 -- perhaps this was 1968 or so. Those years seemed impossibly far in the future. A "7"in the tens place? Hard to imagine! Initial correct observation when young: Our individual life is very short and history is very long.

Perhaps this is a partial explanation of a phenomenon I've observed in myself. Everything that has happened since I was a teen is recent history, but before that point history is to be measured out in the real decades that make it up and stretch into the distant past.

As one example, I was pretty firmly plugged in to current events starting in 1968, when I was 13 years old. That is 54 years ago. If I think of the history involved in the previous 54 years, it covers enormous ground -- 1914 to 1968. Two world wars and a depression. The availability of nuclear weapons to both sides in the Cold War gave rise to a "nuclear peace". Everything that has happened since then is to me recent history because it was part of my awareness as it happened. But 1914 seems a year from the far distant past, and 1968 seems recent. Emotionally considered, perhaps 80% of the time from 1914 to now happened before 1968, and the other 20% since then! As the decades of my life have gone by, that original idea that "I've lived a very short while and history is very long" persists even as it becomes less true all the time. I'm curious if others experience this.

You could argue that in fact less has happened in these latest 54 years compared to the 54 that came before. That would be true in terms of wholesale destruction, perhaps, but is not true in a great many other areas. The internet looms large. Even cell phones do. An enormous reduction in poverty happened along with dramatically better medical care. Technological miracles are cheap and abundant.

In my home town of Durham, New Hampshire, my oldest brother went to his first year of high school arranged in split shifts, because there simply was not enough space to fit all the high school students in the building at one time. In 1965 a new high school opened that relieved that problem. I went to this brand new high school, graduating in 1972. It was several years ago that someone remarked that the Durham high school was definitely old and needed replacing. Wait, it's brand new! But not actually, when I do the math. If I heard this in 2016, it was 51 years old, which I guess is getting on for a high school.

Within the course of my life, time also speeds up. The attacks of 9/11/2001 that seem liked recent history were more than 20 years ago. Twenty years before that was when Ronald Reagan was elected. That seems far more than twice as long ago as 9/11. This, however feels like a more common observation.

There is no such thing as a dead person

 

Humans are gifted with the ability to imagine and plan for the future. And we are part of those plans. Our presence is the source of agency in the world, to get things done for whatever purposes we want to get things done, typically starting with the welfare of our descendants. But we are also cursed to know that not long into that future, we will die. The future will no longer contain us, but it will contain the things and people we care about.

I remember being troubled by the prospect of death in the past. The ones I remember are -- as a child of 8 or 9, as a teenager, and at some point in the early "decade starting in 2000". I was troubled enough to write this post: http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2007/11/cosmic-subtraction-problem.html, which still captures a lot of truth as I see it. It suggests thinking about the issue of death a bit, and then putting your analysis on the shelf. Indeed in the last 15-odd years I have largely ignored the issue. I do not recall it troubling me on the eve of my heart surgery in November of 2020. It has come up now once again -- perhaps in conjunction with some minor health scares.

I once read an explanation of how death figures in our lives. No matter how happy we are, no matter how successful or loved or at the peak of whatever we think of as the good life, there is that little worm gnawing away at the core: We will die someday. It's associated with a feeling: a little strand of dread if we think about it. That resonated with me.

So I write, "There is no such thing as a dead person." What could I mean? Be patient.

There surely is such a thing as a dead body. One way to feel bad about death is to imagine yourself as with your body -- bored, cold, alone, underground in a cemetery. Imagining yourself cremated might be a bit easier, as past the imagined traumatic even of incineration, there is less to imagine? But those who have examined a body that has been dead for any length of time can plainly see that there is no person left. I find it fairly easy in feeling as well as thought to dismiss the idea of us as dead people having any location in the world such as a graveyard. In part that's because what we mean by "person" is some entity with the same memories and thought processes as we have now -- our mind.

A distressing idea of death that I think arises naturally is imagining ourselves in silent darkness, as time ticks along, knowing things are happening that we will never be aware of, with nothing but infinite boredom. Those are both possibilities that I think arise just from feelings, with little rationale but still perhaps power.

Another vital ingredient of the situation is that the living must have some theory about what happens to their loved ones when they die. Religions would imagine heaven, hell, or reincarnation. I would suggest that sober people who look hard at reality rather than being guided by vague realms of hope and feelings will understand those are just not true.

Yet even those who accept that perspective have images of the dead. Our respected forebears in particular we can imagine looking over our shoulders at us, and they can inspire us to act according to our better nature as opposed to our lower instincts. In some cases (particularly true in the past, say around 1700), people traveled long distances and might well have no communication at all with those left behind. They might well not know whether their parents were dead or not, and if your parent in the flesh might appear to judge your life, you might be motivated to have lived a life they would approve of. It might be adaptive to think that way even if you know they are dead.

When we imagine our dead ancestors perhaps judging us, we envision them as immaterial observers of reality as it unfolds. I suppose this is one of the better ways you can imagine being dead, though again I think a sober person would say this is unrealistic. And there are problems. How long does this state last? Have we pushed off to the future the same problem of what happens after death when this dead person dies again?

One natural objection to death is, "But I want to see how it all turns out!" It's hard to address that one, to the extent it's our current, perhaps terminallly ill, self that is thinking it. We can reflect that over time "how it turns out" will be less and less relevant to our imagined dead self observing the world. When everyone we care about, and their descendants, die, and the world is concerned with new things we never even considered, we would care less. One future milestone is that scientists say it is certain that our planet will be incinerated when our sun becomes a red giant, in 5 billion years or so.

I guess my key point (if I have one) is that while it's natural and sensible for the living to imagine the dead as continuing to exist somewhere, this is no help at all as an individual person approaches death. Then it is time to throw off that idea, and emphasize the reality that when the living imagine the dead living on, this is happening in one place only -- inside of their living heads.

The sober reality is that none of these things will happen when we die. We will not even be in sweet oblivion. We simply no longer will be. There will in no sense be an "I' to be anywhere.

One way to possibly get a handle on this is to look at the other end of life. If we see a living, breathing baby, do we wonder where they were before they were born? Did they live in boredom through the eons, hoping some day to be born, to inhabit a body, and have a time in the world of life? No, they simply did not exist, in any sense of the word. They as a conscious being came into existence through the interplay of extremely complicated biochemical events that we are nowhere near understanding. One's nonexistence after death is just as complete and unmysterious as the nonexistence of a baby before conception.

Phrases like "Mr. Jones passed in July" are harmful in suggesting that Mr. Jones went from here to somewhere else. They presume an afterlife. "Mr. Jones passed away in July" is better, because "away" at least allows for the possibility that "away" is nothingness. "Mr. Jones died" is better still, though it leaves open the question of what happened to him. "Mr. Jones ceased to exist" might be best of all.

Corpses, ancestors who judge us, entities that hang around to find out how it turns out -- they are all natural thoughts. But when we face our own demise with the natural anxiety that comes with it, we do better to discard those ideas completely. We will cease to be. There will be no clock ticking to measure our nonexistence. There is no way to measure nonexistence. Nonexistence is... How do I finish that sentene? Nonexistence isn't. For me, entertaining this thought makes my emotional self calmer as I consider death. There is no seuch thing as a dead person.

Note: I've probably never had an original thought in my life, but that is especially clear on a subject like this, which has been debated by great minds for millenia.

Astronomically speaking, there is no "up"

 

Of course when we think about our immediate surroundings, the meaning of "up" is entirely clear. If you let something go and it falls, "up" is the other way. But suppose you back up and imagine yourself looking at the earth, the solar system, and what's beyond. Do you have an "up" in mind? I think most of us do. In diagrams, the solar system is always portrayed with the earth's north being up. There is no geophysical or or astronimical reason for thinking of things this way. Thinking of south being up makes just as much sense. The European cultures that dominated when we were standardizing our thinking about the geography of the earth and discovering details of the solar system were quite far north of the equator ("Greenwich mean time" is clearly UK-centric). North as up is a cultural decision. The fact that 90% of world population is estimated to live in the northern hemisphere would be a strong force against reversing that decision, but I suspect it did not actually have much influence on why it was chosen in the first place.

For me that is all old news. But I was surprised it took me so long to think of this next part... When you see a picture of some galaxy or other astronomical object, which way is "up"? Why is it oriented the way it is? It is not its relationship to the earth's north pole. The actual answer is that it is whatever direction the photographer chooses. It was one more tiny support for the reality of our planet being at an unremarkable spot in an unremarkable galaxy, and even "up" and "down" are arbitrary, even when we are looking out from our own particular world.

How might US political gridlock end?

 

Gridlock in US politics has been with us for twenty-odd years now, and there is no sign that it is going away any time soon. I googled for all of 15 seconds before concluding that this issue hadn't been addressed in a way I found interesting.

The gridlock could end with a series of constitutional amendments, or a constitutional convention, but surely both parties would ensure gridlock continues in that process, and even if one side got a sizable advantage they would be unable to muster approval from the required 3/4 of the states -- the ultimate supermajority.

Another way political systems change is after defeat in a war. The prospect of the US being defeated in a war seem quite remote. Our geographic isolation on our own continent, sharing borders with only the much weaker Canada and Mexico make that highly unlikely.

One way it could end is by demographic shifts that gradually bring one party to power consistently. Democrats are the candidate. But some traditional Democratic groups have significant numbers becoming Republicans, and birth rates are falling among all demographic groups, not just white people. If Republicans do see this change coming, it lends an urgency to their efforts to achieve a sufficient corruption of the democratic process that they can retain power.

The other way gridlock could end is basically a coup d'etat. Democrats are on the whole too committed to the rule of law to initiate such a thing, but as we have seen lately, notably on January 6th, the Republicans are not. If Donald Trump is re-elected without major election fraud in 2024 (as seems likely), he is likely to continue from where he left off in terms of undermining democracy. The constitution limits him to just four more years, but he could put forth his son Donald or daughter Ivanka for President, with the understanding that Donald Senior would remain firmly in charge. His Republicans could continue to impose voter registration requirements weeding out more and more of the likely Democratic voters. He could enable Republican legislatures or governors in actually submitting alternative or fraudulent vote counts in major elections. Last time around, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell had enough integrity that they would not overturn the results of an election, but there are other Republicans waiting in the wings, likely selected by Donald Trump by way of "primarying" away moderate Republicans, who would. Trump could subtly and not so subtly intimidate the press until it is not a free press any more. The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 majority, might not invalidate any of this. If they did, Trump might simply declare that he is not bound by decisions of that Court. Would 2/3 of the Senate convict him if he was impeached for that? Surely not.

Who is left? The US military. The officer corps is (last I knew) rather firmly anti-Trump or at least pro-Constitution, and after January 6th there were purges of white supremacist officers. But if the Trump takeover happens slowly, what would provide the impetus for the military to move? The idea of a junta ruling the US for any period of time would offend just about everybody. Suppose Trump's son Donald says he won the election of 2028, when independent observers (who may be in short supply) say he didn't, by a considerable margin. Perhaps the military could decree that the Democrat actually won and see that he is installed as President. But what about Congress, which could also well be Republican, perhaps legitimately or perhaps because of the devious changes to voter eligibility? Surely the military can't simply declare the Democrats winners in all of those elections. What about the state legislatures? Trying to fairly sort out winners and losers in all those contests would be a nightmare.

With Trump in power for 4 years or more, you can imagine him starting his own purge of the military, removing officers who are not loyal to him, or at least those show any sign of taking their oath to the Constitution as meaning something beyond being loyal to their Commander-in-Chief. So then, how does the Trump family lock on power ever end?

Democrats may take to the streets in mass demonstrations at any point, but until Trump supporters change, it will not sweep the country. I think the key lies with the moderate Trump supporters. People grow tired of their leaders, and Trump would probably put in place initiatives they didn't like. Some might realize they actually have lost the power they thought they had gained by way of Trump. They may see in tangible terms that they are worse off than they were 4 years ago. If the Trump supporters in red-state America split, a substantial minority might join with the substantial Democratic minorities in (temporary, at least) support of Democratic nominees. If they can see that their candidates for Congress actually won the majority in an election and the Trump functionaries have declared for the Republican, they might take to the streets. And if people take to the streets in large enough numbers in the heartland as well as on the coasts, that is when the government might fall. I tend to think that the US military is unlikely to slaughter their countrymen in large numbers.

The US Constitution is so venerable that the pressure to keep that form of government might be intense, but if post-Trump majorities are large enough, they could put through amendments that could help solve the problem. They could vest all power in a majority in the House of Representatives -- the way a great many other democracies in the world work. They could do this by reducing the Senate to a ceremonial body, and giving the House the power to remove the President by a simple majority vote. They could seriously limit the power of the Supreme Court. Then we could have largely solved the problem of gridlock, and restored a working democracy to the US.

If the Trump operatives are sneaky enough, they might keep their fingers on the pulse of the people and do enough to placate moderate Trump voters so that this scenario would not play out. If the Trump forces gave only limited resistance to popular pressure, then the result of a reversal might be Democratic control -- for a while -- within the current Constitutional system, leading to further gridlock. It would be only the removal of a government very widely perceived to be illegitimate that could give the huge supermajorities needed for constitutional amendments.

I feel like I have just pained a very unlikely scenario. A series of steps have to happen, and you could argue that many of them are unlikely, and the entire sequence especially so.

What is the alternative? A government that proceeds by inertia, keeping pretty much the same policies as it has now. There will be no major new initiatives. We will keep funding a huge and largely useless military. No infrastructure repair. China will dominate the world stage, offset to some extent by Germany and other key European Union members. The US will get poorer and shabbier. The Republican heartland is already getting poor and shabby, and it will spread to the areas that are now fairly prosperous and well-maintained. But the rich will keep getting richer.

That's how I see the political future in the US. Any alternative ideas for how things might go?