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Literature is a mirror that reflects where we are. Literature is a telescope that peers into possible futures.
In the face of political deception, social upheaval, and historical amnesia, literature is the record-keeper of truth. It is a force that resists manipulation. “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot,” Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz observed.
Literature allows people and societies to understand the consequences of their actions before it is too late. Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained that “one whole nation can be spared a superfluous, mistaken, or even disastrous course” through the experience captured in literature.
Literature is a force that can perform the miracle of making mankind learn from experiences not its own, sparing entire nations from repeating disastrous mistakes and curtailing the extremes of inhumanity that have scarred history. It is with this thought in mind that I post the following short sketch, “America Lost.” It is my hope that by daring to peer into a possible future at this time of great uncertainty and increasing tumult, that readers will better understand what is at stake, that choices have real consequences, that the time to speak out is now before silence is imposed by tyranny, and that we can still create a better future.
America Lost
We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.
—Ben Franklin, 1776
March 14, 2025:
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with Senators Cortez Masto, Durbin, Fetterman, Gillibrand, Hassan, Peters, Schatz, and Shaheen broke the opposition filibuster to support funding the Trump Administration. The legislation funded Voice of America. Hours later, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that silenced Voice of America.
10 Years Later:
The United States is a nation in slow collapse, suffocating under authoritarian rule and environmental devastation. Trump’s son, Donald Jr., now rules without limits on power or tenure.
Under the guise of “election integrity,” Trump dismantled American democracy. Elections became farcical rituals. Congress is a rubber stamp, and the Supreme Court is a tool for legitimizing autocracy. Education and culture are instruments of state propaganda. Scientists, the backbone of American innovation, have fled overseas. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign fueled a surge in childhood mortality and a sharp decline in life expectancy. Women are subordinate in society. Civil rights and due process are non-existent. An extreme form of Christianity is the de facto state religion. Truth is what power says it is.
A decade after the Trump transition, climate change denial reigns. Wildfires turn the West to ash, droughts ravage the Great Plains, and superstorms devastate the coasts. Yet oil rigs keep drilling, pipelines keep flowing, and refineries keep polluting.
At the start of 2025, America had full employment, a thriving economy, and global respect. It possessed an unsurpassed reservoir of human talent, driving innovation and growth. That is all gone. Trump and his allies consolidated power, siphoning public wealth into private hands. Elon Musk and other oligarchs harvested federal programs and hijacked public policy, enriching themselves while keeping Trump’s favor with lavish “donations.” Now, the United States is an economic and social wasteland.
On the world stage, America has become a pariah. After suffering much undeserved abuse, its allies abandoned it. Its threats carry no weight. China stands as the world’s sole superpower. The U.S. is now a second-rate nation, its influence a relic of the past.
Leadership failure, a pattern repeated throughout history when elites prioritize short-term power over long-term survival, proved fatal. Trump could have been stopped early on, but shortsighted timidity doomed the republic. Early on, many in a wide range of corporate, political, cultural, and other institutional leadership positions chose the path of silent complicity. They cowered as their peers and colleagues were picked off. Ultimately, their silence did not bring them protection. It made them easy targets.
None of this had to happen. The United States had many bright futures available to it. The once great nation—and global beacon of democracy and freedom—is now little more than a slowly decaying carcass.
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In my short story in the above blog entry, I wrote:
Early on, many in a wide range of corporate, political, cultural, and other institutional leadership positions chose the path of silent complicity. They cowered as their peers and colleagues were picked off. Ultimately, their silence did not bring them protection. It made them easy targets.
This dynamic where isolation leads to such an outcome played out in real life with the Paul Weiss law firm. The firm ultimately yielded to the Trump Administration’s demands. In explaining the firm’s decision, its chair Brad Karp wrote:
Only several days ago, our firm faced an existential crisis. The executive order could easily have destroyed our firm. It brought the full weight of the government down on our firm, our people, and our clients. In particular, it threatened our clients with the loss of their government contracts, and the loss of access to the government, if they continued to use the firm as their lawyers. And in an obvious effort to target all of you as well as the firm, it raised the specter that the government would not hire our employees.
We were hopeful that the legal industry would rally to our side, even though it had not done so in response to executive orders targeting other firms. We had tried to persuade other firms to come out in public support of Covington and Perkins Coie. And we waited for firms to support us in the wake of the President’s executive order targeting Paul, Weiss. Disappointingly, far from support, we learned that certain other firms were seeking to exploit our vulnerabilities by aggressively soliciting our clients and recruiting our attorneys.
As some of the nation’s most prominent colleges and universities are targeted, there has been no unified response by the Higher Education community. Columbia University has already capitulated, paying a steep entrance price for talks with the Trump Administration. Others face growing pressure. Without a unified response, one can expect the dynamic described above in my short story and in real life at the Paul Weiss law firm to play out over and over again.
Ultimately, the Higher Education profession could wind up in ruins, much as occurred in Hungary under Viktor Orbán. The cost of such an outcome to the nation in terms of foregone talent development, civic preparation, and innovation would be staggering.