Darkly Through a Mirror: 2020 to 2030

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!