Elections are the least of your worries.
Climate change is on track for maximum damage in the next
decade. Barring a catastrophic global war - not impossible - emissions will not
be reduced, arctic ice will continue to melt, and this global hot house will
get a lot hotter. So let's speculate on what's gonna get worse and what you can
do to survive.
1. War is Coming Back in Style.
Whether or not the Beltway insiders get their longed for
conflict with Iran or if all the armchair fascists will have to content
themselves with border bush wars, the trend in militarizing American culture is
due to accelerate. Trump already telegraphed this, unintentionally as he's more
autistic Cassandra than Machiavellian schemer, packing his first season White
House with generals. Democrats enable this, being just as if not more
deferential to the brass than the GOP. When the Pentagon launches its coup on a
President Sanders, plenty of professional liberals will cheer them on.
Meanwhile, regarding those border wars, they’ll be fed as
much by climate migration as the full blown fascism of white suburbanites. The
National Guard will eventually get involved which, depending on who they’re
ordered to side with and who they actually side with, could kick off a hot
civil war that all the alt-right violence has presaged in the past couple
years. What will surprise all the MAGA-sucking chuds is how it doesn’t break
down along a clean Mason-Dixon line or even the expected Democrat and
Republican divide but between urban and
suburban/rural. The rurals will make good fighters but they’re commitment to
the small business tyrants calling the shots will wax and wane with the
seasons. And as the parched and mismanaged countryside fails to keep the
supermarkets stocked, the suburbanites will realize their error and start
scrambling for the cities – though not after they’ve tried to ethnically
cleanse every cul de sac.
2. The New Feudalism.
The cities are where it’s at, for better and for worse.
Already logistically integrated for delivering food, power, and most important
of all water they will be able to outlast the dying howl of the suburbanites.
They’ll also win every straight out battle as they have just as many guns as
the NRA pickup truck squadrons but more people to man the barricades. War comes
down to people and American cities have them to spare.
Once the Y’allqaeda attacks cease, the cities can benefit
from real green innovations in solar power and rooftop gardens. They won’t have
to defer to the hippie-hating Reaganites in the retirement exurbs and as anyone
who’s spent real time in Brooklyn or Philadelphia can tell you, urban
conservatives are much more agreeable to welfare programs and public works than
their nominally ideological cousins haunting the outer strip malls.
But it won’t be all wine and DSA roses. These same cities
also host the financial and corporate powers that brought us to this wretched
state of affairs in the first place. So while you should flee to a city now,
you should be very careful about which city. Some of them are just broken:
Baltimore, Gary, Milwaukee – all ravaged by
opiates and austerity. You’d stand a better chance tramping it with the rurals
– who won’t all be white nationalists, as that’s a strictly suburban middle
class phenomenon. Others will be too technocratic and oligarchic to be livable,
especially New York City which will let Brooklyn drown in the rising seas as it
extracts Brooklynite taxes to build a wall around Lower Manhattan. Wall Street
is too sure of its own importance to consider moving, even as the waters come
in. And the promise of all that wealth trickling down will keep a steady stream
of migrant workers flowing into ever more cramped proletariat blocks and
squats, their simmering rebellion kept in check by an NYPD that would already
qualify as a standing army. Imagine the Mega-City One of Judge Dredd, just with
trash everywhere and worse humidity than Atlanta.
3. Socialism and Barbarism.
The worst of both worlds will be SoCal and Denver. Not
because they’re saturated with old money power but because outside their
respective downtowns it’s all suburbs and strip malls. This will be where the
bloodiest battles will be fought, along explicitly racist lines throughout
SoCal and in a nihilistic war of all against all in the Mile High City, which
already leads the nation in mass shootings. Boulder might survive, being more
left than San Francisco and more armed than Texas.
The best – all things considered – will be the Twin Cities
and Great Lakes. Beyond escaping the worst of the rising temperatures, these
regions boast generous fresh water (I can’t emphasize water enough), much more
leftish leanings than the East and West Coast sprawls – especially Minneapolis
– and get you closer to the true mid-century goal: Canada. This is not to
idealize the Great Northern Frontier – you’ll find just as many reactionaries
polluting the Toronto and Vancouver suburbs – but northward is the only
sensible option as the Colorado River runs dry, hurricanes batter down even New
England, and fires spread from California into the Pacific Northwest. Get there
now, before they militarize their own border!
