R.W.W. Greene's Blog

On a recent weekday commute, hoping to escape Donald Trump’s voice on NPR, I hit the scan button on the radio and fell into the past courtesy of New Hampshire’s Country music station 93.3 The Wolf.

The Wolf seems to play 2005 on a loop, looking neither back nor forward, eyes and ears fixed on the days of Toby Keith’s “As Good as I Once Was.”

The station’s listeners are not Country’s traditional working-class heroes. According to its own website, The Wolf’s pack are affluent suburban homeowners (70% own homes, 61% earn over $75k) who are college-educated (59%) and between 25-64 (84%) -- comfortable professionals cosplaying nostalgia.

That they are trapped in this way is a sign—a return trip to Denial after years of the stages-of-grief playlist Country has been offering up since the assumption that Americans were one people moving forward together fully collapsed. Country music, which has always claimed to represent the American heartland, has spent the past 35 years weeping in confusion.

If you track the month of November’s top Country songs across four decades, you can see the genre move through the stages of grief—denial, bargaining, depression, anger—never quite reaching acceptance, and finally fragmenting so hard the Grammy Awards had to draw a white line across the playroom floor. Starting in 2026, there will be two separate awards -- Best Contemporary Country Album and Best Traditional Country Album -- and never the twain shall meet.

This isn’t about music getting worse (although it did, but some of it’s getting better again). It’s about a genre reflecting the death of the perception of a shared American identity—and the economic gap that killed it.

In the 1970s, we still shared roughly similar economic realities. A union autoworker, a small business owner, a teacher, and a farmer had different incomes but similar security. Most could afford houses, raise families, retire with dignity. They inhabited the same economic world and that created the foundation for shared culture. After all, the Energy Crisis — and the draft — came for all of us.

Conway Twitty’s “Hello Darlin’” (1970), Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978), Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” (1981) told working-class stories that resonated across economic lines because that class still existed as a coherent category.

Somewhere between 1980 and 1990, that changed. (I’m not going to say it was Reagan, but … it was Reagan.) Income inequality, relatively stable through the 1970s, exploded. Union membership collapsed. Real wages stagnated. The top 1% captured larger shares of national income. The middle class hollowed out. By 1990, the idea of We the People was dying because the shared economic reality that sustained it was crumbling. You can’t have common culture when working people and the wealthy inhabit different economic universes.

The hits: George Strait’s “Love Without End, Amen,” Randy Travis’s “Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart,” Garth Brooks’s “Unanswered Prayers”

The message: Nothing has died. The old ways still work. This is how life should be lived.

The songs of this time period made declarations. They told complete stories with clear morals about how fathers should love, how faith should work, how life should unfold. They said life has rules. Faith provides answers. Traditional wisdom works.

The Cold War had just ended. America seemed triumphant, unified, but beneath the surface, the economic foundation that sustained shared identity was cracking. The middle class was still viable, but barely. Working-class jobs still provided dignity, but unions were fading and real wages were stagnating.

The hits: Tim McGraw’s “I Like It, I Love It,” Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine,” Alan Jackson’s “Gone Country”

The message: Things are changing, but we can control it. We get to choose. We can adapt on our own terms.

Tim McGraw’s hit was pure personal preference over collective prescription: “I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.” Shania Twain wasn’t accepting what she was offered—she was listing requirements. Alan Jackson celebrated wholesale reinvention: anyone could become anything.

This was the neoliberal bargain rendered as country music. You don’t need unions or collective institutions, just make good individual choices. Work hard. Reinvent yourself. The tech boom masked inequality. “Get rich” narratives were everywhere. Individual entrepreneurship replaced collective bargaining.

The Clinton boom created an illusion that rising inequality didn’t matter if the overall economy was growing. We traded economic solidarity for individual opportunity, collective security for personal freedom. Country music bargained too: forget prescription, embrace permission. Everyone writes their own story. It’s gonna be fine.

The hits: Craig Morgan’s “That’s What I Love About Sunday,” Keith Urban’s “Better Life,” Toby Keith’s “As Good as I Once Was”

The message: We’ve lost something irreplaceable. We can’t get it back. All we can do is remember.

Craig Morgan’s hit cataloged small-town Sunday rituals: sleeping late, church, football, family dinner. But it wasn’t prescriptive—it was mourning the days when working people could afford not to work on Sunday, when one job was enough, when economic security allowed for leisure and community. When housing was affordable.

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs had gone overseas. Real wages stagnated. The middle class collapsed. The top 1% captured larger shares of national income. Working harder yielded less security.

Post-9/11 America was at war, culturally fractured and economically anxious. Bargaining hadn’t worked. Individual opportunity hadn’t replaced collective security. Working harder didn’t guarantee stability. Red America and Blue America were becoming economic identities—coastal elites and rural workers, college-educated professionals and high-school-educated laborers. Two Americas, different economic realities, different futures.

The hits: Thomas Rhett’s “Die a Happy Man,” Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” Sam Hunt’s “Take Your Time”

The message: Nothing makes sense. The economy is rigged. All I have left is what I feel, and at least that’s real.

Thomas Rhett’s hit was pure emotional declaration: if my life amounts to nothing but this moment, I’d die happy. No story, no moral, no broader economic hope. No path to prosperity, no promise of security—just personal feeling because that’s all that’s left. When the economic system offers no hope, emotion becomes the only refuge.

Post-Great Recession. Wealth concentrated at the top. Gig economy replacing stable jobs. Working three jobs to survive. The top 1% owned 40% of wealth. Two separate economic Americas. The promise that hard work leads to prosperity revealed as complete fiction.

This was anger turned inward—not at the system that failed, but at our own inability to succeed within it. Country music couldn’t teach (the old economic lessons didn’t work anymore), couldn’t empower (what power against a rigged economy?), couldn’t even preserve memory (remembering security just hurts). All it could do was validate raw feeling. Working people—country music’s core audience—were economically crushed, politically enraged, offered no economic solutions, only therapeutic validation of pain.

The hits: Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Morgan Wallen and Tate McRae’s “What I Want,” Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help,” BigXthaPlug and Ella Langley’s “Hell At Night”

The grief response: We can’t even agree on what we lost or what country music is or what America is.

This isn’t acceptance. This the failure to complete grief, resulting in dissolution of coherent identity.

Extreme inequality. Billionaires and gig workers. Two completely separate economic realities sharing no common ground. Rich and poor Americans don’t share neighborhoods, schools, experiences, or futures. Economic segregation complete.

The songs have no complete narratives (like 1990), no confident self-determination (like 1995), no nostalgic preservation (like 2005), not even emotional intensity (like 2015). Just hooks—but hooks that sample hip-hop and blend R&B with steel guitar, that bring rappers and country singers together, that break every boundary traditional country once policed. Collaborations. Genre confusion. Fragments that can’t cohere because the economic experiences they’re built on share nothing. Which one is the REAL country?

While Country grieved, the other music genres faced the same reality.

And, so, Rock dissolved. By the 1990s, Rock became so inclusive it stopped meaning anything. Grunge, Alternative, Pop-Punk, Nu-Metal, Indie, Classic Rock—all called “Rock” while having nothing in common. In 2016, The Who’s Roger Daltrey declared: “Rock has reached a dead end. The only people saying things that matter are the rappers.” Rock gave up on coherent identity, became cultural wallpaper, faded from relevance.

It was OK for Rock to dissolve because it never claimed to represent permanent American identity or economic solidarity. It was about the moment, youth, rebellion. When its moment passed, when the kids grew up, it diffused into irrelevance.

And Hip-hop integrated. From the get go, Hip-Hop contained multitudes: East Coast vs. West Coast, Conscious Rap vs. Trap, Boom-bap vs. Drill. Regional sounds were wildly different. Generational shifts brought radical changes, yet Hip-hop never fragmented.

Why? Hip-hop maintained thematic coherence while celebrating musical diversity. The core stayed constant—Black experience, urban reality, economic struggle, verbal innovation—while allowing infinite variation. Hip-hop has always been music of economic struggle, by and for people locked out of prosperity. When inequality exploded, Hip-hop already had the vocabulary and cultural framework to address it. Economic divergence didn’t shatter Hip-hop’s identity because economic struggle had always been central to it.

Country couldn’t dissolve like Rock because it claimed to represent enduring values and working-class dignity. It couldn’t integrate like Hip-hop because it had built an identity on an economic solidarity that didn’t exist. So Country did what working-class Americans did: moved through grief as economic solidarity collapsed, never reached the acceptance stage, and fragmented into pieces that can’t recognize each other or agree on what they lost.

The genre that confidently prescribed how Americans should live has broken into incompatible pieces. Traditional, contemporary, frozen in nostalgia. All claiming authenticity, none recognizable as what Country music once was. Because the America it once represented no longer exists.

Which brings us back to The Wolf, playing 2005 on repeat for suburban professionals earning $75k+ in their owned homes. What’s with that? They’re refusing to move ahead to Stage Five’s fragmentation, where at least there’s genre-bending creativity and cultural mixing. They won’t even get angry like 2015. They’re just... frozen. Stuck in Stage Three, depression, endlessly mourning a version of America that was itself already in mourning.

And that’s just fucking sad.

A Little Writer’s Note: This is a weird essay. I knew I wanted to write something about the changes over time in Country music, and I decided to try the Stages of Grief as a framing device because it works on so many, many things. I like using it when I teach Journalism. It works when talking about higher-education. Lo and behold, it works pretty well on Country music, too.
Also, when this essay talks about America, it’s really talking about the Culture of Power, AKA White people. Sure there’s a little nod to Hip-hop, but it’s mostly COP. And interesting that the acronym of Culture of Power is COP and that the reverse of that acronym is POC (Person of Color). I promise not to blow 1,600 words considering that.

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Political organizations, no matter what they were formed to do, eventually evolve into bodies of elites that exist only to perpetuate themselves. There’s a phrase for that, the iron law of oligarchy, and I had to look it up because it’s been a long time since my last poli-sci class.

Whatever it’s called, the Democratic Party has reached that terminal stage. What once enlisted as a coalition to win elections and enact progressive policy has transformed into a self-protecting apparatus terrified of its own obsolescence — and that terror is causing it to make tactically insane decisions that guarantee the very future it fears.

The pattern is playing out right now in Maine, where the party establishment is working harder to destroy its own insurgent candidate than to defeat the Republican incumbent.

Graham Platner — a 41-year-old oysterman, Marine combat veteran, and political newcomer — announced his Senate candidacy in August 2025 with Bernie Sanders’s endorsement. He drew massive crowds. He raised millions in small-dollar donations.

The establishment response? Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (yes, that far-seeing, clear-seeing Chuck Schumer) recruited two-term Governor Janet Mills to enter the race — not because polling showed she could win, but because Platner represented an existential threat to the party’s control. By October, a University of New Hampshire poll showed Platner leading Mills 58% to 24% in the Democratic primary, despite (or perhaps because of) controversies over old Reddit posts and a Nazi-adjacent tattoo he’s since covered up. And when Mills failed to gain traction (there’s been “little sign of a Mills Senate campaign in Maine,” according to one observer), the establishment deployed a different weapon: EMILYs List commissioned a poll designed not to show Mills could beat Republican Senator Susan Collins, but to prove Platner could not.

The poll never tested Mills at all. It only measured Platner against Collins — specifically after feeding respondents negative information about Platner’s past. The conclusion: Platner would lose. The subtext: Kill the insurgency.

Meanwhile, independent polling told a different story. The Maine People’s Resource Center found Platner leading Collins 45-41% in the general election, while Mills trailed Collins 46-42%. In the primary, Platner led Mills 41-39%.

The establishment isn’t trying to win with Mills; they’re trying to destroy Platner. They would rather hand the seat to Collins than prove a Bernie-backed outsider can succeed without their blessing, their bundlers, their consultant class, their entire fundraising apparatus.

This isn’t isolated to Maine.

Manchester’s Mirror

In 2023, Manchester, New Hampshire — the state’s largest city where all the presidential candidates come for the First in the Nation Primary — had a competitive open-seat mayoral race. Two young-ish Democrats announced their candidacies early: Will Stewart (Ward 2 alderman, former journalist and community organizer with business and economic development background) and June Trisciani (at-large alderman, small business owner, rising star with an EMILYs List endorsement who’d run a credible state senate race in a tough district).

Then the Democratic establishment made its move. Party leaders recruited a third candidate to enter the race: Kevin Cavanaugh, former state senator, labor leader, eight-year alderman. The safe choice. The insider. He received endorsements from outgoing Mayor Joyce Craig (who was leaving to run for governor), Senator Maggie Hassan, labor unions, and state party chair Ray Buckley. (And don’t get me started on fucking Ray Buckley.)

The Sept. 19, 2023 primary was officially nonpartisan, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the general election. The results told the story:

Jay Ruais (Republican): 4,296 votes (42%)

Kevin Cavanaugh: 2,570 votes (25%)

Will Stewart: 1,987 votes (19%)

June Trisciani: 1,455 votes (14%)

The three Democrats combined for 6,012 votes — 58% of the total. Ruais, as the sole Republican, advanced with just 42%. The establishment’s intervention had split the Democratic vote three ways, allowing a Republican to advance despite Democrats holding a clear majority. Republican strategist Michael Biundo saw it immediately: “The fact the Democrats got a combined majority is a cautionary tale for the GOP.” If Cav had stayed out, it could have been an all-Dem race.

In the Nov. 7 general election that year, Ruais defeated Cavanaugh 9,392 to 8,904 — a margin of just 488 votes out of over 18,000 cast. He won 51% to 49%.

The math is undeniable: Democrats should have won Manchester. They had 58% support in the primary. But the establishment’s decision to recruit Cavanaugh -- to block Stewart and Trisciani -- meant no Democrat could consolidate that support. By the time it came down to Ruais vs. Cavanaugh in the general, it was too late. The damage was done.

The 2025 Aftermath

Two years later, the consequences became even more clear. When Ruais ran for reelection in 2025, the Democratic establishment failed to field a serious challenger. School board member Jessica Spillers entered the race just 24 hours before the filing deadline with no campaign website, no infrastructure, and no real chance. Even so, she only lost 59% to 41%.

Kevin Cavanaugh — the man the establishment recruited to “save” the mayor’s office in 2023 — ran for his old Ward 1 Alderman seat. He lost to challenger Bryce Kaw-uh, 1,362 to 1,064.

And June Trisciani? The rising star the establishment froze out? She ran for At-Large Alderman and won with 9,506 votes, nearly as many as Mayor Ruais himself received (9,618) and more than any other aldermanic candidate. What happened there, friends? What happened there?

Trisciani says establishment Dems remain hostile to her. Not because she left the party or became a Republican. Not because she attacked them publicly. But because she had the audacity to run without kissing the ring.

The party would rather lose the mayor’s office — and keep losing it — than validate a candidate who didn’t wait her turn.

(I also have anecdotal evidence of Democratic establishment figures refusing to sign ballot petitions for youngish progressive candidates (WHO IS YOUNG ANYMORE? NONE OF US!!) — not because they oppose their policies, but because these progressives weren’t registered Democrats. Purity tests matter more than good policy.)

The National Pattern

This isn’t incompetence; it’s fear. It’s institutional self-preservation playing out as a doom loop:

Bernie Sanders (2016, 2020): The establishment cleared the field for Hillary Clinton in 2016, then rallied around Joe Biden in 2020. Bernie’s small-dollar fundraising model and grassroots energy proved you didn’t need the traditional donor class. That made him dangerous regardless of his electability.

Joe Biden’s second term: Biden’s decision to run again despite age and approval concerns reflected classic Founder’s Syndrome -- the belief that only he could do the job, that the institution couldn’t function without its established leadership. When he finally stepped aside, it was too late to run a proper primary.

Zohran Mamdani and similar progressives: Rising stars who build grassroots movements get frozen out, not embraced, because they threaten to prove the establishment is optional.

Obama (2008): The exception that created the terror. Obama proved an outsider could bypass the establishment, build a small-dollar fundraising juggernaut, and win decisively. The party has spent the last 17 years ensuring it never happens again.

The Terror from the Top

At the top, the Democratic establishment isn’t about protecting democracy or even Democratic voters. They’re protecting a business model: the consultant fees, the bundler relationships, the donor access, the entire ecosystem that lives off campaign dollars and party control.

When candidates like Platner, Stewart, Trisciani, Bernie, or AOC prove they can win (or threaten to win) without the traditional apparatus — without hiring the approved consultants, without routing money through established channels, without waiting for permission — they expose the establishment as obsolete.

That terror filters down through party ranks, transforming at each level:

At the Top: “We need to protect our fundraising infrastructure and donor relationships”

In the Middle:“We need electable candidates who can win swing voters”

At the Local Level: “We need party loyalty and proper credentials”

Each level believes their own bullshit. The local Democrat refusing to sign a petition genuinely thinks they’re protecting the party from unreliable allies (or she’s just being nasty). The state party chair recruiting Cavanaugh or Mills genuinely believes they’re fielding more electable candidate (or they’re just following orders). But the structural effect is the same: protecting the establishment’s control over money, messaging, and candidate selection.

The Fatal Contradiction

The establishment is absolutely correct that voters often make terrible decisions. Voters as a group are reactionary and have poor long-term memory. They’re gullible and getting more so. The Dems’ solution -- institutional control, gatekeeping, clearing the field for “safe” candidates -- makes the problem exponentially worse.

Every intervention confirms what voters already suspect: The system is rigged. Your voice doesn’t matter. The decision has already been made.

This is especially toxic for the left, where the entire ideological basis is democratic participation and challenging entrenched power. When your party apparatus embodies what you’re supposed to be fighting against, the cognitive dissonance is unbearable. (Republicans are OK with being snowed, as long as the right people keep getting fucked over.)

The result:

Bernie voters going to Trump or Jill Stein

Young progressives sitting out elections

Democratic votes splitting in Manchester while Republicans unify

Platner supporters who’d rather burn it down than accept Mills

The Democrat’s establishment’s response? “See? Voters are irrational. We need MORE control.” Meanwhile, Republicans figured out letting the base pick — even when they pick a maniac -- means the base shows up and fights. Energy and ownership matter more than strategic wisdom.

The Endgame

Organizations that exist only to perpetuate themselves eventually lose their original purpose entirely. The Democratic Party was formed to win elections and enact policy. It has evolved into an entity whose primary function is maintaining the institutional hierarchy, protecting the fundraising apparatus, and ensuring that power flows through approved channels.

Nationally, they’ve alienated an entire generation of progressives who’ve learned that the party will never let them lead. Locally, very locally, they’ve made a 36-year-Democrat think really hard about exiting the tent.

The tragedy is that Platner, Stewart, Trisciani, Bernie, and the Squad represent exactly what the party claims it needs: fresh, energetic, grassroots-funded candidates who can mobilize voters the establishment can’t reach. But those candidates threaten the establishment’s reason to exist.

So the establishment fights them harder than they fight Republicans.

And voters watch, learn, and stay home.

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A pen name is a brand more than anything else. My pseudonym, “R.W.W. Greene,” was created for search-engine optimization. There are umpteen Rob, Bob, and Roberts Greene in the writing world, and my full name, Robert William Wright Greene, is too long for a book cover. So, when I decided to get serious about fiction, I went with the initials.

The scheme worked. When you Google “R.W.W. Greene” -- Go, go, Gadget SEO! -- my info is right there at the top. Rob Greene and Rob W. Greene wish their lives were so easy.

I’ve never tried to hide the fact that R.W.W. Greene is me and me is he. I’ve never worried that my leftist, atheist opinions will affect The Brand. Anyone who reads one of my books or short stories is likely not in the dark regarding the various leanings of the creator. Give or take, I write about ordinary people in mad circumstances, found families and communities, societal collapse and climate change, the mess we’ve made of everything, and the pursuit of a more dangerous but authentic and free human life. I don’t vote Republican, and I don’t believe anyone is illegal.

But if anything, I’ve a developing interest in protecting my non-fiction, just-for-fun writing from The Brand. I created twenty-first-century blues as part of a platform -- working in tandem with my website, social-media, YouTube channel and etcetera -- designed to get you to buy my books. I’ve no real evidence the platform works as intended, and I don’t know that I want to jump through the hoops required to make it work. I’m not interested in playing algorithms. I just want to think about weird things, read about them, and use my Best Trick (my writing) to touch the world.

To that end, I’m taking The Brand off the blues (to the extent that I can without burning the site). I feel like if I stop worrying about the “R.W.W. Greene” hat (or that you might think I want you to buy the hat all the time), I might be less tired and more able to write just for the sake of the project.

There may come a time when the ‘R.W.W. Greene’ brand loses its luster and goes into the drawer with its unpublished manuscripts. I’d like to think Rob Greene (this one) is more permanent—the teacher, the journalist, the person who can’t stop thinking about political systems, social constructs, books, Star Wars, music, technology, fashion, and what titles should replace Gatsby in high schools. He’s the one writing twenty-first-century blues.

In the pipeline now are essays about country music, book-marketing scams, Fink’s Taxonomy, and the evolutionary benefit of getting drunk. The book stuff will still show up, too. If R.W.W. gets a deal, a publication date, or plans to attend a convention, I’ll let you know.

I’d love it if you stuck around.

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According to a November 2025 POLITICO poll, 59 percent of Americans say political polarization is worse than it was five years ago. Nearly half — 49 percent — say the country’s best times are behind us. Fifty-two percent say “radical change” is necessary to make life better in America.

When the government shuts down over budget impasses we blame polarization. We blame tribalism.

We’re looking in the wrong place. The problem isn’t who’s in charge (even when it’s That Fucking Guy) — it’s the math. Binary systems don’t fail because people are unreasonable. They fail because two is structurally insufficient for productive governance.

Consider how many fundamental frameworks of conscience require three elements, not two. Sigmund Freud’s structural model of the psyche, detailed in “The Ego and the Id”, divides the mind into Id, Ego, and Superego — impulsive desire, moral conscience, and the mediating reality principle that navigates between them. Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” written in the 4th century B.C., identifies three modes of persuasion (which is where this article started!): Pathos, Logos, and Ethos — emotional appeal, logical argument, and ethical credibility working in concert. The Christian Trinity solved the theological problem of unity-in-multiplicity with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The American founders designed government with Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches (Three, count ‘em three!) to check each other’s power.

And I’d be remiss as a sci-fi guy if I didn’t bring up Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis, in which it is shown that “The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart” - arguing that capital and labor need a third force to broker between them.

This reflects a structural principle: two creates opposition, three creates negotiation. Binary systems offer only conflict or stalemate. Add a third element and suddenly coalition-building becomes possible. Any two elements can outvote the third, but no single element can dominate alone. Three is polarization proof!

The mathematics is unforgiving. In any decision-making system with three participants, you need two for a majority. This incentivizes alliance-building and compromise. The Ego must sometimes ally with the Id against the Superego’s harsh judgment, sometimes with the Superego against the Id’s destructive impulses. Effective rhetoric combines emotional resonance with logical structure, or ethical authority with passionate appeal. Each element holds potential swing-vote power. Five or seven work mathematically but sacrifice the cognitive elegance that makes three so powerful. Three hits the sweet spot: complex enough to enable coalition dynamics, simple enough to see at a glance.

In spite of what you learned from Schoolhouse Rock, there’s nothing magic about three. It’s simply the minimum non-binary system. What matters isn’t achieving exactly three forces, but escaping the paralysis of two. Parliamentary democracies with four or five viable parties function because coalition requirements force negotiation. According to political scientists G. Bingham Powell Jr. and Arend Lijphart, multiparty proportional representation systems typically produce more stable policy outcomes and higher citizen satisfaction than two-party majoritarian systems. No single party commands a majority; governing requires assembling support across factional lines. This prevents both permanent deadlock and unchecked dominance.

American politics has exactly two stable positions today. According to Pew Research Center analysis from 2022, there are zero Republicans in Congress more liberal than the most conservative Democrat, and zero Democrats more conservative than the most liberal Republican — complete partisan sorting unprecedented in modern American history. Every issue becomes binary: our side versus their side, win or lose, zero-sum conflict.

This wasn’t always true. When President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill negotiated the Social Security reforms of 1983, they were able to build coalitions because their parties weren’t ideologically pure. The 1983 amendments passed with significant bipartisan support: 243-102 in the House and 58-14 in the Senate. Conservative Southern Democrats could defect to support Republican initiatives; moderate Northern Republicans could vote with Democrats. Neither party leader commanded a uniform bloc. Political scientists call this era’s Congress “cross-pressured,” with four, five, six meaningful factions that could form different coalitions on different issues, as documented by Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s DW-NOMINATE scoring system. That wasn’t a trinity, but it was non-binary, which is what mattered.

The ideological sorting of parties eliminated this flexibility. As political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal document in “Polarized America” (2006), the Civil Rights Act realignment, geographic sorting, nationalization of politics, and primary systems rewarding ideological purity have created two internally homogeneous parties. The structure that once enabled cross-party coalition-building has collapsed into pure binary opposition.

And binary systems, when governing high-stakes questions, produce predictable pathology. There’s no swing vote, no coalition incentive, no escape valve. When power splits between parties, nothing moves. When one party controls all branches, they maximize extraction before inevitable loss—dominance. Both states are dysfunctional. A non-binary system would naturally prevent both through coalition requirements.

Winner-take-all electoral rules, combined with what political scientist Maurice Duverger called “Duverger’s Law”—the principle that plurality-rule elections tend to favor two-party systems — create structural barriers to third parties. Ballot access restrictions, debate participation thresholds requiring 15% polling support (set by the Commission on Presidential Debates), and campaign finance structures all prevent third parties from emerging. The two parties have every incentive to maintain their duopoly and sufficient power to enforce it. Fixing the problem requires the cooperation of those who benefit from it. So, tough luck.

The Founders designed a government of threes—three branches checking each other through institutional loyalty. What they got was a government of twos — two parties capturing all three branches, collapsing institutional checks into team loyalty. They assumed diverse regional and economic interests would create cross-cutting allegiances, as Madison argued in Federalist No. 10. They never imagined such complete binary sorting.

We keep constructing binary systems and wondering why they produce paralysis. The mathematics is clear: two creates deadlock, more than two creates motion. American politics doesn’t need three parties; it just needs release from exactly two.

Rob Greene was a poli-sci major in under-grad, where he wrote such brilliant papers as, “What Would Spider-Man Do?” concerning the Supreme Court, and “Leadership According to Rob and Rost.”

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There’s a scene in the animated series Drawn Together that cuts through the bullshit around masculinity. Captain Hero, desperate to prove his heterosexuality, engages in this exchange with the Terminator, who’s been sent to the past to stop a kids’ TV show from turning the world gay.

Captain Hero: “Hey, bro. What do you think about vagina?”

Terminator: “Dude, I love the vagina.”

CH: “What do you like to do to the vagina?”

T: “What do you think you like to do to the vagina?”

CH: “I think you like to fuck it.”

T:“I’m straight. I totally like to fuck the vagina.”[^1]

It’s ridiculous, but brilliant. Watch the panic underneath. Notice how Captain Hero needs the other guy to tell him what he’s supposed to like, then immediately parrots it back. Women — or rather, “the vagina” — exist only as a concept to be bragged about, proof of straightness performed for another man’s validation.

Flash forward to 2025. The “performative male” has become a recognizable archetype: Labubu plushies dangling from carabiners, tote bags with feminist slogans, a well-worn copy of The Bell Jar, matcha latte in hand. Wired headphones playing Clairo. Tampons, just in case any woman needs one. Universities across North America now hold “Performative Male Contests” where guys compete to most authentically embody this archetype—which is its own beautiful irony.[^2]

These two performances — crude bro culture and enlightened feminist ally — appear opposite. But they’re two versions of the same problem: when masculinity becomes performative, women disappear as people and become props in men’s ongoing theater of gender anxiety.

The research backs this up.

In 2011, doctoral student Kathryn Gallagher and Prof. Dominic Parrott studied 338 heterosexual men, examining how adherence to hegemonic masculine norms relates to hostility toward women.[^3] They found a straight line: men who rigidly adhere to masculine norms — status (needing to win), toughness (never showing weakness), and antifemininity (distancing from anything feminine or gay) — experience “masculine gender role stress” (MGRS).

That stress creates hostility toward women. MGRS “reflects men’s tendency to experience the insecurity, defensiveness, personal weakness, and stressful discontent that may be a central motivation for hostility and aggression toward women.”[^4]

‘Toughness’ showed a direct relationship with hostility. But ‘status’ and ‘antifemininity’ worked through stress: men performing masculinity, stressed out by that performance, directed hostility toward women as a result.

This isn’t about individual bad actors. It’s structural. Hegemonic masculinity — emphasizing male dominance over women and “lesser” men — creates a system where performative masculinity is both compulsory and impossible. You’re always being watched, assessed, at risk of failure. When the performance fails, hostility emerges.

That Drawn Together clip diagnoses the desperate anxiety of the antifemininity norm. The character is so panicked about appearing gay that he performs absurdly exaggerated heterosexuality. The audience isn’t women; it’s another man. Women exist only as a means to prove Captain Hero’s straightness.

Take Dennis Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his D.E.N.N.I.S. System — an acronym for his scripted seduction technique.[^5] The show satirizes how women must be predictable, controllable props for the masculine performance to work. When women don’t follow the script, Dennis explodes. That rage is what the research predicts.

Women aren’t present as people. They’re concepts, systems, objects. The performance is for other men, to establish status and prove antifemininity. Women are the medium through which masculinity is performed, not the audience, and certainly not participants.

Now we have the 2025 performative male. On the surface, progress. The modern SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy). Dr. Ashley Morgan, a masculinities expert, notes that where performative masculinity used to mean fast cars to impress other men, the contemporary version “looked more inclusive.”[^6] He’s read the feminist literature. He knows the language. He’s visibly rejecting toxic masculinity.

But trend forecaster J’Nae Phillips says it’s an act: “A performative male is less about who someone is than about how they curate and project masculinity in public — usually online. He is someone acutely aware that manhood is being watched, assessed, and consumed, and so he stages it.”[^7]

Watched, assessed, consumed. This is still performance under observation, still masculinity as something requiring constant proof. The stress hasn’t gone away — it’s just taken a different form.

Greg in Succession constantly code-switches between traditional power bro and sensitive ally, never certain which performance will work, using women as validators. That’s MGRS in an expensive suit.

Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal takes this to its extreme: scripting and rehearsing authentic human connection. The show becomes a meditation on the impossibility of performed authenticity, masculine-control anxiety rendered as art.

Women now openly satirize this. The “guys who read Sally Rooney” TikTok trend mocks men who’ve learned that Sally Rooney is the new prop.[^8]

Performative Male Contests on college campuses are perhaps the most honest expression. Contestants are judged on how well they can perform inauthenticity. It’s masculinity eating itself.

This isn’t new. I went to Wheaton College in Massachusetts in the early ‘90s after it had just gone co-ed, wrapping up a century as an all-women’s college. The ratio was five to one, women to men, with an emphasis on being “differently coeducational” — recognizing how women lead, working with upperclass women as mentors, basically not being a male chauvinist pig. I saw early incarnations there, guys who’d learned exactly which tokens to deploy. I recall the Gentleman Callers, the male acapella group, performing “Sensitive New Age Guy” by Christine Lavin (1990). There’s a line — “Who cares about women’s orgasms?” — played for laughs with awkward silence. Even then, we knew the performance was a performance. We just didn’t have the language to diagnose why it was a problem.

I may have been guilty in those days of being a performative male myself. But here’s the complicated part: I suspect that acting the part, faking it until I made it, may have actually turned me into a decent human being who likes women. Which raises a question: is performance always a problem, or can it sometimes be the bridge? More on that later.

Both versions of masculine performance are fundamentally about what men can get from women, but also — maybe primarily — about proving something to other men.

This is what hegemonic masculinity actually means: not just male dominance over women, but establishing hierarchy among men. As R.W. Connell argues, hegemonic masculinity establishes “the dominance of men over women and other, less powerful men.”[^12] The performance is bidirectional — proving yourself to women while establishing position among men.

Performative Male Contests illustrate this perfectly. Women judge, but so do men. Winners gain masculine status — crowned the most performative, which becomes its own dominance. Even satirizing performative masculinity, men compete for recognition and status.

This explains the stress. Men aren’t just managing women’s responses — they’re managing other men’s assessments. The antifemininity norm isn’t just about distancing from women; it’s about avoiding subordination in the male hierarchy. Being seen as feminine or gay means relegation to the bottom. That’s why “Dude, I love the vagina” is so panicked.

For the traditional bro, sex with women is the currency of male status. For the contemporary performative male, enlightened sensitivity is currency, because it could lead to sex with women. Both are exchanged in an economy of masculine hierarchy. Women remain the medium through which men establish position.

Kristen Roupenious’s “Cat Person” became a phenomenon because it named something women recognized.[^10] Robert performs as the considerate, quirky guy. When Margot extracts herself, his performance collapses and hostility floods out: “Whore.”

Here’s the transactional logic: Robert performed consideration. He was nice. He put in the tokens for which the woman-machine is supposed to dispense sex. When Margot reveals herself as a person with agency rather than a vending machine, Robert experiences it as violation. He put in his good-guy tokens. Where’s his reward?

Both bros and performative males share a fundamentally transactional view. The bro is honest — he’ll tell you he’s owed sex for drinks. The performative male has learned this sounds bad, so he developed a more sophisticated token system: reading the right books, saying the right things about feminism, carrying tampons, performing emotional availability. Same logic. Insert enough good-guy tokens, receive sex. When the transaction doesn’t complete, both respond with hostility — just expressed differently.

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman ups the stakes.[^11] Jerry, the “good one,” has the most sophisticated token system. Years of good-guy tokens — the loyal friend, the nice guy, the one who wasn’t actively participating in the assault. He believes this ledger should protect him. When it doesn’t, when Cassie reveals she’s kept a different ledger, his mask drops. The transaction he thought he’d completed was void from the start.

You don’t need to actually like women to use them as currency in the masculine status economy. In fact, liking women as people — recognizing their full humanity, autonomy, right to be unpredictable — would interfere with the performance.

If women are vending machines dispensing sex and affection in response to correct tokens, they can’t also be full people with complex desires and unpredictable responses. The transactional framework requires predictability — insert good-guy tokens, receive sex. But humans aren’t predictable. They have bad days. They change their minds. They’re attracted to some people and not others for reasons having nothing to do with tokens deposited.

Whether you’re inserting crude bro tokens (drinks, compliments) or sophisticated progressive tokens (Sally Rooney, tampons, correct pronouns), you’re operating on the assumption that correct inputs yield predictable outputs. You’re treating women as machines rather than people.

The traditional bro needs women conquerable to prove himself to other men. The contemporary performative male needs women to validate his enlightened status, but that validation is tallied in masculine competition with other men. He can’t afford for women to reject the performance, because that means losing status in the hierarchy of who’s most evolved. When a woman rejects you, you’re experiencing a status threat in the male hierarchy. Especially when other men witness your failure.[^9]

The most depressing implication: men may not like women as people because genuinely liking women as people would require abandoning the performance that establishes status among men. For many men, that status — that position in the masculine hierarchy — feels more essential than any individual relationship.

Here’s where I complicate my ruminations on performance. I attended Wheaton at a five-to-one female-to-male ratio, in an environment explicitly “differently coeducational.” I might have been guilty of being a performative male myself. But I suspect that acting the part, faking it until I made it, may have actually helped me become a good person.

So maybe the question isn’t whether performance is always bad. Maybe it’s about what happens next. Does the performance remain a calculated strategy for status and sex, or does it become a bridge to something more genuine? Is there a difference between a man still counting good-guy tokens and tallying what he’s owed, versus a man who performed long enough that the performance dissolved into actual respect and empathy?

I don’t have a clean answer. What I know: if performance is going to be a bridge rather than a trap, it can’t be performed for an outcome. You can’t perform sensitivity as a strategy to get laid and expect it to transform you into someone who sees women as people. The transaction itself prevents the transformation.

The alternative isn’t a better performance. It’s sitting with the discomfort of not knowing if you’re “doing it right.” It’s accepting that there’s no correct way to prove your masculinity because maybe masculinity doesn’t need constant proof. It’s engaging with women not as audiences or validators but as people — which includes accepting when they’re not interested, when they’re having their own shit going on, when they find you annoying or wrong or unattractive.

Women’s approval is not the goal. Mutual recognition is. That’s not something you can perform your way into. You can’t rehearse it, script it, or accessorize your way there.

But maybe you can stumble toward it by performing in an environment that doesn’t reward the performance with what toxic masculinity promises: sexual conquest as status currency, dominance over other men, protection from vulnerability. Maybe where the performance explicitly isn’t supposed to get you those things, it might slowly become something else.

But that transformation requires giving up the ledger. Accepting that tokens put in — crude or enlightened — don’t entitle you to anything. Recognizing when women see through the performance and being willing to let them call it out. Eventually, forgetting you’re performing at all.

Reducing MGRS requires actually challenging hegemonic masculinity, not performing a more palatable version. That means examining why masculine status feels like something requiring constant establishment through dominance and competition. It means asking why antifemininity is so central that the mere suggestion of femininity or gayness creates panic — because it threatens your position among men. It means questioning toughness.

And it means confronting that masculine competition uses women as the medium of exchange. As long as men primarily perform for each other, using women as currency in status competitions, women will be treated as props. The bro and the sensitive guy aren’t really different — they’re just competing in different masculine markets, but women are the commodity traded in both.

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Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Created by Rob McElhenney. FX, 2005–present.

Gallagher, Kathryn E., and Dominic J. Parrott. “What Accounts for Men’s Hostile Attitudes Toward Women? The Influence of Hegemonic Male Role Norms and Masculine Gender Role Stress.” Violence Against Women 17, no. 5 (2011): 568-583.

“Guys Who Read Sally Rooney.” TikTok trend. 2024-2025.

“Labubus, The Bell Jar and Tampons: The ‘Performative Male’ Attracts Attention.” The Guardian, August 22, 2025.

“Wooldoor Sockbat’s Giggle-Wiggle Funny Tickle Non-Traditional Progressive Multicultural Roundtable!” Drawn Together, season 3, episode 2, Comedy Central, October 12, 2006.

Promising Young Woman. Directed by Emerald Fennell. Focus Features, 2020.

The Rehearsal. Created by Nathan Fielder. HBO, 2022–present.

Roupenian, Kristen. “Cat Person.” The New Yorker, December 4, 2017.

Succession. Created by Jesse Armstrong. HBO, 2018–2023.

“Wooldoor Sockbat’s Giggle-Wiggle Funny Tickle Non-Traditional Progressive Multicultural Roundtable!” Drawn Together, season 3, episode 2, Comedy Central, October 12, 2006.

“Labubus, The Bell Jar and Tampons: The ‘Performative Male’ Attracts Attention,” The Guardian, August 22, 2025.

Kathryn E. Gallagher and Dominic J. Parrott, “What Accounts for Men’s Hostile Attitudes Toward Women? The Influence of Hegemonic Male Role Norms and Masculine Gender Role Stress,” Violence Against Women 17, no. 5 (2011): 568-583.

Gallagher and Parrott, “What Accounts for Men’s Hostile Attitudes,” 570.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, created by Rob McElhenney, FX, 2005–present.

Ashley Morgan, quoted in “Labubus, The Bell Jar and Tampons,” The Guardian.

J’Nae Phillips, quoted in “Labubus, The Bell Jar and Tampons,” The Guardian.

“Guys Who Read Sally Rooney,” TikTok trend, 2024-2025.

R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 77.

Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person,” The New Yorker, December 4, 2017.

Promising Young Woman, directed by Emerald Fennell, Focus Features, 2020.

Gallagher and Parrott, “What Accounts for Men’s Hostile Attitudes,” 572.

Ginny Hogan, a comedian I follow on Instagram, recently posted something to the effect of, “If there is a civil war, the only ones who will notice are those directly involved or terminally online.” Of course, I can’t find the post now, but it stuck with me.

I am semi-terminally online, and I believe we’re already in a civil war, albeit a cold one. The Trump presidencies have pummeled America. Most opposed to him are hiding in various bunkers holding out for re-enforcements via the Mid-Term elections. Assuming, of course, they happen. In Trump’s Shitty Facism (I call it that because no one in the administration, save perhaps Steven Miller, is willing to work hard enough to make it Real Facism), the options are open.

See, I’m starting to believe we’re fucked. This is it for the American Experiment; it’s the Fall of Empire. And even if it’s not, considering what’s happened in other countries that experienced ‘democratic backsliding’, we’re looking at decades, not years, of recovery.

You don’t have to take my word for it, but researchers at the Carnegie Endowment agree. They looked at four countries that successfully made it back from authoritarianism—Poland, Brazil, Zambia, and Senegal, and said the challenges they faced were “daunting” and took years to address (Carothers and Carrier).

Recovery happens in phases. The first phase is the easiest. In one or two years, you can stop the bleeding. New leadership can achieve what researchers call “quick wins” by simply stopping “the torrent of polarizing, anti-democratic messaging and behavior” (Carothers and Carrier). Basic freedoms improve almost immediately. People can breathe again. This was the Biden administration. You can argue (successfully) that it and he didn’t go far enough, but the Forces for Good breathed a little easier while he was applying Band-Aids.

The second phase—actual institutional rebuilding—takes five to ten years of sustained effort. The Roosevelt Institute says that “democracy cannot withstand immense concentrations of power for long” (”Restoring Democratic Institutions”). You need comprehensive reforms to restore proper functioning, and those reforms require political will across multiple election cycles. That’s hard to maintain, especially when guys like Trump reset the clock.

The third phase is the hardest: deep institutional reform. This is a ten-to-twenty-year project of rebuilding trust, restoring professional norms, and replacing lost institutional knowledge. As researchers put it, “achieving the necessary deep-reaching institutional reforms takes years and presents vexing tactical choices” (Carothers and Carrier).

The civil service damage cuts particularly deep. Trump’s appointees “decimated the ranks of the civil service,” and it’s “going to take years to fix that problem and replace the institutional knowledge that was lost” (Campbell). It’s not just about rehiring people—it’s about rebuilding expertise that took decades to accumulate. Meanwhile, the current attacks on federal workers “erode public trust in government institutions across the political spectrum” (Xu). When half the country thinks government workers are lazy bureaucrats and the other half fears they’re being turned into partisan operatives, trust doesn’t come back quickly.

Even after an autocrat loses power, “the political forces represented by those leaders are usually able to assert significant pushback against democratic recovery” (Carothers and Carrier). They don’t just disappear. They regroup, fundraise, and wait for another chance. Recovery requires “vigilance and continued pressure” from civil society (Carothers and Carrier). In other words: constant effort, no breaks, decades of work. China has that kind of long-term perspective. They still think in dynasties. We don’t.

So here’s the timeline. Short-term (two-to-five years): we can restore basic democratic functioning. Medium-term (five to fifteen years): we can rebuild institutional capacity and professional civil service. Long-term (fifteen to twenty-five years): we might—might—recover to pre-Trump institutional strength and public trust levels. That’s a generation. My students’ kids will be learning about this in history class before the damage is fully repaired. If there are history classes.

And what if polarization gets worse instead of better? Understanding the alternatives helps us see what we’d lose. I’m a sci-fi guy, and I’ve written before about the Post-American world. I’ve been playing with five scenarios for how America might fall apart and what comes after. The first three are analytical models. The fourth comes from geopolitical speculation. The fifth shows what complete failure looks like.

If you were putting three countries together from the rubble of America using pure economics, you’d create the Atlantic Seaboard, the Pacific Corridor, and the Heartland.

The Atlantic Seaboard would run from Maine to Virginia, anchored by New York’s $2.3 trillion economy and Massachusetts’s high-GDP per capita (”List of U.S. States”). You’d get the financial center (New York), the medical research hub (Boston), and the political capital (D.C.). Dense population, extensive infrastructure, educated workforce. This region works.

The Pacific Corridor would stretch from California to Washington, with outposts in the Mountain West. California alone has a $4.1 trillion economy—larger than most countries (”List of U.S. States”). You’d control Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and major Pacific trade routes. Add technology, entertainment, agriculture, and natural resources, plus Washington state’s aerospace and tech sectors, and you’ve got an economic powerhouse.

The Heartland would be everything else, anchored by Texas and its $2.7 trillion economy (”List of U.S. States”). Energy (Texas oil), agriculture (Midwest farming), manufacturing (Great Lakes industry), and transportation corridors connecting it all with the natural resources to back it up.

Research on American commuter patterns shows that “the northeastern seaboard, the Great Lakes, and California are heavily interlinked” within their regions but have natural breaks between them (Garrett et al.). Some economic analysts already describe America this way: Atlantic East, Pacific West, and the Heartland in between (”Regions of the USA”).

But here’s the problem: economics isn’t everything. Partition scholarship shows that splitting countries “has been closely linked to violence” and typically just gives conflicts “a new dimension” rather than solving them (O’Leary). The U.S. benefits enormously from integrated infrastructure—shared power grids, interstate highways, unified supply chains (”Economy of the United States”). Untangling that would be a nightmare. More importantly, this economic division cuts across the actual political divide. Austin has more in common politically with San Francisco than with rural East Texas. Atlanta is closer in spirit to Boston than to rural Georgia. You can’t draw clean lines based on state boundaries when the real divide is urban versus rural.

The second scenario follows lines we’ve actually killed each other over: a Deep South conservative bloc, a Pacific progressive coalition, and all else sticking with the Union.

The first time around, South Carolina was secessionist number-one, Dec. 20, 1860, followed by the Deep South states that formed the Confederacy (”Confederate States of America”). We have yet to get over these divisions. “[Fifty-two’ percent of Trump voters and 41% of Biden voters support partitioning the United States into multiple countries based on political party lines” (”Political Polarization”). That’s a lot of grudge holders.

Regional support is even higher. In the South, “44% of Americans favored secession, with Republican support at 66%” (”Political Polarization”). In the Pacific states, 47% of Democrats support it (”Political Polarization”). California has active movements pushing for independence: “32% of Californians, and 44% of California Democrats” supported it in 2017 (”Secession in the United States”). These aren’t fringe positions anymore.

Political scientist Paul Starr argues that “Americans appear to be choosing where to live on the basis of economic and social criteria that are highly correlated with their political views” (Starr). We’re self-sorting into red and blue regions, making the divides deeper and more geographic. The culture war has a map. I played with this idea in my story, “The Wedding of Hope Garrison and Chevrolet Dodge Ford”. It didn’t turn out great.

Political scientist Ryan Griffiths, who literally wrote the book on this, agrees.”Red and Blue America are not neatly sorted and geographically concentrated” (Griffiths). That’s the fatal flaw. States look red or blue on electoral maps only because of “winner-take-all” systems (”Red States and Blue States”). Every state is actually purple when you zoom in. Remember, the real divide is “urban-rural,” not North-South or East-West.

Border states like Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were “deeply divided” and remained contested throughout the Civil War (”Border States”). A modern partition would create the same problem, but worse. Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Arizona—all would experience “significant internal division” (”Border States”). Cities would want to join one country, rural areas another. You’d have territorial disputes, population displacement, and potential violence. The partition that’s supposed to reduce conflict would spark more of it.

Let’s get crazy. What if we kept the physical country intact but created virtual nations with digital governance? Four Americas, same territory, different governments depending on your choice.

This isn’t science fiction anymore. Estonia launched e-Residency in 2014, allowing anyone in the world to get a digital ID and access Estonian government services without living there (”E-Residency of Estonia”). Over 100,000 people have done it, becoming “e-residents” with access to “Estonia’s trusted digital ecosystem” (”e-Residency”). They can start companies, sign contracts, access banking—all through digital identity, from anywhere on Earth.

Some e-residents see it as purely transactional—just a useful service platform. But others experience what researchers call a “mode of (digital) belonging” to Estonia (Tammpuu et al.). They feel connected to the country, even from thousands of miles away. They describe “perceived openness and inclusiveness...rather exceptional in the current ‘age of restrictionism’” (Tammpuu et al.). Digital citizenship creates real emotional bonds.

So, scale this up. Use blockchain technology to create four virtual nations: Pacifica (progressive governance, physically centered on the West Coast), Confederacy 2.0 (conservative governance, physically centered on the Deep South), Atlantic Union (moderate governance, physically centered on the Northeast), and UN Citizenship (international governance, coordinated through the United Nations). Every American chooses which virtual nation they want to join, regardless of where they physically live.

Blockchain makes this technically feasible. The technology offers “potential benefits that institutions and governments can leverage...to support democratic governance” (”Analyzing the Role of Blockchain Technology”). Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)—basically online communities that govern themselves through smart contracts—already demonstrate that you can have “online [communities] aligning around a common goal...using blockchain technology to coordinate their actions” (Ziolkowski et al.). DAOs are the “governance tool of Web3” (De Filippi and Wright).

In this scenario, you’d register as a citizen of Pacifica, Confederacy 2.0, Atlantic Union, or the UN. Your taxes would route automatically to your chosen virtual nation through smart contracts. You’d vote in that nation’s elections, follow its regulations for your business, access its social services. Your physical neighbor might be a citizen of a different virtual nation entirely. Urban progressives in Texas join Pacifica. Rural conservatives in California join Confederacy 2.0. Everyone gets the government they want without moving.

The UN option adds something the three American virtual nations can’t provide: a practical mechanism for managing climate refugees. UN citizens agree to accept climate-refugee resettlement in their communities in exchange for international support and coordination. You’re a UN citizen in upstate New York, where there’s fresh water, arable land, and infrastructure capacity? Your town gets matched with climate refugees from disappearing Pacific islands or drought-stricken regions. The UN coordinates the logistics—movement, settlement support, integration services. In return, your community gets international funding for infrastructure expansion, technical assistance, and economic development.

This solves several problems at once. It creates an actual service that UN citizenship provides—something tangible beyond abstract commitment to human rights. It gives the UN a genuine governance function with real stakes and real resources. And it creates geographic patterns that make sense. The Great Lakes region, upstate New York, parts of the Pacific Northwest, the northern Great Plains—these are areas that could support climate refugee settlement. They’re also areas with declining industrial cities and small towns that have lost population and economic base. Climate refugee settlement, coordinated and funded internationally, becomes economic revitalization.

So, Pacifica appeals to progressives who want that political tradition but are relatively insulated from climate refugee flows—the West Coast stays comfortable. Confederacy 2.0 appeals to conservatives actively resistant to climate-refugee settlement—the Sun Belt takes care of its own. Atlantic Union attracts moderates conflicted about what to do—the East Coast waffles. UN Citizenship appeals to people in the Great Lakes and northern tier who see opportunity in internationalism and are willing to do the hard work of climate-refugee integration.

No forced population transfers. No partition violence. Physical infrastructure stays shared—we all use the same roads, power grid, and supply chains. Economic integration continues. But political separation happens at the individual level. You get governance aligned with your values. Your community becomes virtual rather than geographic.

The challenges are just as real. Who enforces laws when your neighbor lives under different rules? Who maintains interstate highways? What happens to military bases—do they split into four separate armed forces (or do you put all the big weapons under UN control)? Environmental regulations can’t work if one virtual nation decides to ignore them and another enforces them strictly. As University of Amsterdam researchers note, “digital platforms reinforce...undesired effects and control consumption in new ways” (”Digital Citizenship”). Algorithmic governance isn’t neutral—someone controls the algorithms.

There’s also a legitimacy problem. Can “online-only governance be truly democratic” when it’s vulnerable to “manipulation through algorithms or platform control” (Müller)? DAO research shows that actual decentralized organizations struggle with this. They promise democracy but often concentrate power in the hands of whoever controls the most tokens (Bellavitis et al.). The digital divide would exclude people without reliable internet—mostly rural and poor Americans, who’d have the least voice in a system supposedly designed to give everyone choice.

And there’s a new class divide: UN citizens in the Great Lakes and northern tier managing the hard work of climate -efugee integration, with international support but also bearing the costs and challenges. Pacifica and Confederacy 2.0 citizens in their respective regions, insulated from the worst of it. Atlantic Union citizens split between those who want to help and those who want to pretend it’s not happening. The resentment could be intense. “We’re doing the hard work of saving humanity while you coast in your comfortable enclaves” versus “You chose to opt out of being American, so don’t complain about the consequences.”

But here’s what makes this scenario worth considering: it solves the geographic problem and addresses climate change simultaneously. Partition fails because Americans are mixed together—you can’t draw clean lines. Virtual governance lets you sort by values instead of location. And the UN option tests something important: when faced with a global crisis that requires international cooperation, do you choose a version of American politics, or do you choose to be part of the global solution?

It uses technology to address what researchers call citizens’ desire for “active roles in navigating...opportunities and risks presented by digital technologies across all life spheres” (Dignum et al.). We’re already living partially digital lives. Why not make governance match? And if climate refugee settlement becomes the functional test of whether UN citizenship is real governance or just symbolic posturing, then we’d find out quickly whether this whole experiment works or not.

The first three scenarios assume Americans get to choose how we split. The fourth scenario—drawn from the speculative fiction of my book Twenty-Five to Life—asks: what if we don’t get to choose? What if external creditors and internal dysfunction make the choice for us (Me, Twenty-Five)?

Picture this: Texas declares independence. California does the same. Both have economies large enough to function as sovereign nations—Texas at $2.7 trillion and California at $4.1 trillion (”List of U.S. States”). They’re tired of subsidizing dysfunction in Washington and tired of federal policies that don’t serve their interests. They split.

That’s the easy part. The hard part is what happens to America’s $30+ trillion in debt. With the two largest state economies gone, the remaining United States can’t service it. Default becomes inevitable. China, holding over a trillion dollars in Treasury bonds, demands payment.

But there’s no money. So China takes payment in land (Me, Twenty-Five).

The Midwest—from the Dakotas down through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and into parts of surrounding states—becomes Chinese territory. Not a lease. Not a special economic zone. Sovereign Chinese land on the North American continent. China uses it to resettle climate refugees from regions their industrial development helped destroy (Me, Twenty-Five). New cities rise on the Great Plains, populated by people displaced from Pacific islands, coastal Bangladesh, drought-stricken regions of Africa. The American farmers who lived there? Some stay, now minorities in a Chinese-administered territory. Most leave, becoming internal refugees themselves.

What’s left calls itself the United States of America. The East Coast, the South (minus Texas), whatever fragments of the Midwest China didn’t take. They keep the name. They keep the flag. They keep the Capitol building. But they can’t elect a president. Political divisions and lawsuits paralyze the system (Me, Twenty-Five). Different factions claim electoral victories. Courts issue contradictory rulings. The federal government exists in name only—collecting some taxes, providing some services, but incapable of coordinated action. State governors become the real power centers. The Senate still meets, but no one’s sure what authority it actually has.

Cross-country travel becomes nearly impossible. If you want to drive from the East Coast to California, you have one option: the Oklahoma panhandle, the narrow strip of land that serves as the only remaining American corridor between the coasts (Me, Twenty-Five). Chinese Midwest to the north, independent Texas to the south. It’s a land bridge, heavily trafficked, poorly maintained, and increasingly dangerous. Most people fly instead, but very, very few can afford it.

This scenario differs from the others in crucial ways. First, it’s not chosen—it’s forced by economic collapse and geopolitical reality. Second, it includes external actors. China matters. The international community matters. American partition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Third, it accounts for human displacement on a massive scale—both climate refugees resettling the Midwest and American refugees leaving it. Fourth, it shows dysfunction rather than clean separation. The remaining United States doesn’t work. It’s not a successful nation-state. It’s a failed state that kept the name.

And here’s the scary part: this scenario is frighteningly plausible. America’s debt is real. China’s creditor status is real. Climate refugees are real and increasing. Texas and California independence movements are real. Political dysfunction preventing basic governance is real. We’re not far from this now. We’re just pretending the bill won’t come due.

But there’s a darker possibility than managed partition or forced fragmentation. What if the systems don’t just fail politically—what if they fail completely? What if America doesn’t split into functioning successor states, but regresses to pre-industrial conditions following a catastrophic conflict that destroys the infrastructure holding modern civilization together?

This is the world I depicted in “The Wedding of Hope Garrison and Chevrolet Dodge Ford”—America decades after the “Red-Blue War,” when “the missiles started flying” and “the emps brought everyone back to the early 1900s and left them there” (Me, “Wedding”). No functioning federal government. No power grid. No industrial base. Just scattered farming communities where people cobble together technology from salvage, where a working turntable becomes valuable enough to make a living as a traveling wedding DJ, and where a young man’s greatest achievement is getting a thirty-year-old computer to briefly flicker to life.

The story depicts what post-collapse scholars call “selective technological regression.” People haven’t forgotten how things worked, but knowledge without infrastructure means nothing. Power grids collapse. Water systems fail. Supply chains break. And once complex systems collapse, they’re extraordinarily difficult to rebuild. You need working power plants to manufacture the components to repair power plants. You need functioning supply chains to rebuild supply chains. You need industrial capacity to create the tools to restore industrial capacity.

The social regression would be equally severe. In the story, the Messy Middle—the central states where Blue and Red territories met—never recovered clear governance. “The boundaries of propriety” became “muddy,” and regional identities hardened into something closer to tribal affiliation than citizenship (Me, “Wedding”). Decades after the war, the conflict’s divisions still define identity and spark violence. People haven’t moved past it. They can’t, because there’s no broader American identity to move back to. There’s just Red and Blue, winners and losers, and the messy middle where they meet. Generations grow up with dramatically reduced access to recorded culture, formal education, and the accumulated knowledge of previous centuries. The regression isn’t just technological—it’s intellectual and cultural.

This fifth scenario differs from all the others in a crucial way: there are no functioning successor states. No one wins. The Economic Model assumes regions that can sustain themselves. The Historical Model assumes states that can govern. The Virtual Model assumes technology that still works. The Geopolitical Model assumes foreign powers interested in American territory. The Collapse Model shows what happens when all of that fails—when the conflict is so destructive that it takes down the systems needed for modern civilization, leaving survivors to scratch out existence in the ruins.

The realistic element here is that this has happened before, elsewhere. Complex civilizations have collapsed throughout history when warfare destroyed the infrastructure necessary to sustain them. The Bronze Age collapse. The fall of Rome. These weren’t chosen partitions or managed transitions. They were catastrophic failures where knowledge and capability that took centuries to build was lost in decades of conflict and couldn’t be recovered for generations.

The Collapse Model is the scenario where we don’t just lose America as a unified country—we lose the accumulated capability and infrastructure that made modern American life possible.

The path forward splits here. Either we commit to recovery— 15 to 20 years of short-term stabilization, medium-term rebuilding, long-term institutional repair—or we continue fracturing until something breaks. Recovery requires sustained effort across decades and “vigilance and continued pressure” from citizens who care about democracy (Carothers and Carrier). That’s a hard ask in a society with short attention spans and four-year election cycles.

We joke about civil war. We talk casually about red states and blue states splitting up. We argue about whether America is worth saving. History offers warnings. Civilizations have collapsed before. People have watched their grandparents’ world of prosperity and technology fade into their parents’ world of scarcity and salvage, then into their own world where the old achievements seem almost mythical. It happens slowly enough that each generation adapts, but fast enough that knowledge gets lost, capabilities disappear, and the path back becomes harder with each passing year.

The work of prevention is boring. It’s decades of institutional rebuilding, civil service professionalism, trust restoration, and democratic norm reinforcement. It doesn’t make good television. It requires sustained attention on unglamorous problems. But it’s the only alternative to scenarios where we lose control of our own futures—whether that’s violent partition along historical lines, chaotic virtual governance, watching our creditors carve up the map while we argue about who gets to be president of what’s left, or fighting so destructively that our children grow up in a world where working computers are artifacts and recorded music is a luxury.

It’s better to do the work. But I kind of doubt we will. We’re pretty terrible.

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Is anyone writing about the connection between Trump’s Gaza “peace plan” and his February 2025 statements about seeing the territory as a real-estate opportunity?

The September proposal is essentially the same vision Trump outlined in February when he said the US would “take over” and “own” Gaza, calling it a “big real estate site” that could become “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

The current plan positions Trump as chair of the “Board of Peace” overseeing Gaza’s redevelopment, and explicitly includes a “Trump economic development plan” with “investment proposals and exciting development ideas.” This isn’t theoretical—Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has repeatedly praised Gaza’s “very valuable” Mediterranean “waterfront property” and discussed its development potential.

A leaked document from earlier this year outlined the “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust,” which would lease 30% of Gaza’s public land for up to 99 years while facilitating “voluntary” relocation of a quarter of the population. This comes as Trump actively expands his hotel and resort business throughout the Middle East, with projects underway in Dubai, Doha, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

The peace plan’s core demands — complete Hamas disarmament while Israel gets indefinite security control — create the exact conditions Trump described in February. The main difference is presentation: what was previously framed as clearing Gaza for redevelopment is now described as helping Gazans “build a better future.” The development vision remains intact, just wrapped in more palatable language about international oversight and voluntary participation.

In other words, friends, this is bullshit.

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The loss of nearly 3,000 innocent lives and the heroism of first responders and ordinary citizens who rushed to help others.

The surge in hate crimes, prejudice, and discrimination against Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, and others who were scapegoated for the actions of extremists. This included systemic surveillance of mosques, discriminatory policies, and treating entire communities as inherently suspect.

How fear was used to push through legislation like the PATRIOT Act that expanded government surveillance powers with insufficient debate or oversight.

Two decades of military interventions justified by 9/11 that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, displaced millions, destabilized entire regions, and cost trillions of dollars.

How defense contractors and connected companies made enormous profits from prolonged conflicts while others paid the human costs.

The use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" at places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and CIA black sites, plus indefinite detention without trial of many later found innocent.

Programs like NSA bulk data collection that used 9/11 to justify unprecedented domestic spying on U.S. citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security and expansion of the surveillance state that normalized intrusive security measures in daily life.

Beyond individual hate crimes, this included systemic surveillance of mosques, discriminatory policies, and treating entire communities as inherently suspect.

Establishing the idea of a permanent "War on Terror" that can justify military action anywhere with minimal oversight.

Policies that made it harder for people fleeing conflicts we helped create to find safety.

Using national security to justify expanded presidential powers and reduced congressional oversight.

How legitimate trauma and anger were channeled into policies that often served interests beyond justice for the victims.

And don't get me started on the damage done to the men and women we put in harm's way. (I'm about to get started; I've waited all year for this.)

Nearly 7,000 killed.

PTSD, depression, anxiety, and other psychological trauma from multiple deployments in combat zones, often with inadequate mental health support.

Veteran suicide rates far exceeding civilian rates, with estimates of 20+ veteran suicides per day at peak periods.

Hundreds of thousands wounded, including traumatic brain injuries from IEDs, amputations, and other life-altering injuries.

Overwhelmed Veterans Affairs hospitals, long wait times, substandard care, and bureaucratic obstacles to getting treatment.

Significant numbers of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans ending up homeless due to untreated mental health issues, unemployment, and lack of support systems.

High rates of divorce, domestic violence, and family dysfunction among military families stressed by repeated deployments.

Health problems from burn pits and other environmental hazards, often with the government initially denying connections.

Difficulty translating military skills to civilian jobs, contributing to higher unemployment rates among veterans.

Self-medication for untreated trauma leading to addiction problems.

If you're going to remember it, remember it all, chums.

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ReaderCon 34 — an annual literary speculative-fiction convention — ran this past weekend, and I was fortunate to attend. Among the panels I took part in (The International Imagination in a Time of Nationalism, Bisexuals in Science Fiction: Still Hip After All These Years?, We Need to Talk About Gaiman, and my first kaffeeklatsch), I moderated one titled The Next Great Gatsby.

The description of the panel was as follows: At Readercon 33, Max Gladstone mentioned that The Great Gatsby flopped upon publication—and therefore was cheap to send to American soldiers abroad in WWII, which resulted its revival. He asked the audience to imagine how great a world would be in which, for some reason, copies of Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered [1981] were suddenly everywhere. What other books ought to be suddenly ubiquitous?

With an hour to fill and the panelists’ concerns that the event not become a listicle, I wrote the following essay to wrestle the discussion onto a new track. The original essay, not the two-minute version I read at the start of the panel, is printed here.

In 1943, something remarkable happened. The Council on Books in Wartime (a nonprofit organization) launched the Armed Services Editions (ASE) —122 million books (1,322 distinct titles) — and distributed them to soldiers overseas. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was included not because it was great, but because, being fairly unsuccessful at launch, it was cheap.

The troops treasured these pocket-sized paperbacks making them 'as popular as pin-up girls.' They recommended them to each other, wrote fan letters to authors, and read everything from westerns to Shakespeare, technical manuals to romance novels. Two-hundred and fifty of these books were written by women, not a huge number but considering the times…

The ASE was deliberate social engineering. The program was created to send the following messages:

This is what we're fighting for - The heavy emphasis on American classics (Twain, Whitman, Steinbeck), frontier stories, and books about American places and people reinforced that soldiers were defending a rich, diverse cultural heritage worth preserving.

Democracy means access to all knowledge - By including everything from Shakespeare and Dickens to popular westerns and romance novels, the Council rejected cultural elitism. High literature sat alongside pulp fiction, science texts next to humor collections, suggesting that in a democracy, all reading has value and everyone deserves access to the full spectrum of human knowledge and entertainment.

We are a people of both action and reflection - The mix of adventure stories, practical guides, and contemplative literature suggested Americans were not just warriors but thinkers, dreamers, and builders who could handle both Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and technical manuals about electronics.

Escapism and engagement are both necessary - By providing both pure entertainment (detective stories, fantasies) and serious contemporary analysis (war correspondents' accounts, political treatises), the Council acknowledged that fighting men and women needed both mental relief and intellectual tools to understand their historical moment.

American culture is inclusive and cosmopolitan - The presence of translated works, books about other cultures, and authors from diverse backgrounds (including women and minorities) projected an image of America as open to the world's best ideas while confident in its own values.

The overarching message was profoundly democratic: We are fighting for a civilization where every person has the right to think, dream, laugh, and learn freely.

The warriors came home from the conflict addicted to coffee, cigarettes, and reading.

Now fast-forward to today. Only 29% of men read fiction, compared to a higher-but-not-much-higher 49% of women. Recent press have described men browsing bookstores alone, struggling to find books that speak to them, abandoning novels for digital entertainment. Books are no longer social connectors.

Meanwhile, Gatsby — the accidental survivor now a century old — has spent seventy years dominating high-school curricula, teaching fatalism with its 'borne back ceaselessly into the past,' promoting cynicism over constructive engagement, reducing complex social issues to simple symbols and moralistic judgments. (Gatsby’s secondary-school takeover was also largely an accident, due its brevity and easy fit within the New Criticism popular in the day. )

But those WWII soldiers proved something crucial: when books serve as tools for emotional processing and social connection — not just entertainment — people embrace them eagerly. The program worked because it had clear democratic values and treated reading as essential for navigating difficult times.

So today we're asking: if we could deliberately canonize books the way we accidentally did with Gatsby, what should those books be? What messages do we want to send? What books could counter fatalism with hope, gatekeeping with inclusion, cynicism with constructive engagement?

What books ought to be suddenly ubiquitous?

Among the questions I created for the panel were:

What book would create the most positive chaos if it suddenly appeared in every American household? (My answer was Chuck Tingle’s Camp Damascus.)

If you could magically replace Gatsby as the universal high school text, what would you choose and what cultural messages would it send?

What book changed your perspective on genre’s potential for serious cultural work?

If you were designing a new book-distribution program for today’s challenges — climate change, polarization, technological disruption, nationalism — what would be your first five titles?

Beyond individual titles, what would need to change about how we discover, discuss, and distribute books to replicate the ASE program’s democratic impact?

Any thoughts?

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The obelisk thrust into the sky about a hundred yards ahead. Thirty-feet tall, it stood alone on the rise, a memorial to an ages-old shipwreck, all hands lost. Two flashlight beams flirted over its smooth surface.

D-Too stopped walking and held out his hand. “I need to be way drunker than this.”

The paper bag crunched as Rob handed over the bottle of cheap whiskey he’d carried from the parking lot. They’d already drunk it down to the top of the label. D-Too fumbled the cap open. “Here’s to stupid ideas.” He took a swig and handed the bottle back.

“The Sarge won’t do us wrong.” Rob drank the whisky a half inch lower and screwed the cap back on. “Onwards!”

The moonlight went into overdrive as they approached the memorial, reflecting off the gray stone and making the flashlights feel insecure.

“Took you long enough!” Tim boomed. He flicked his flashlight beam into D-Too’s face. “It’s only twelve minutes to midnight.”

“Don’t listen to him. We just got here, too,” said Darren, the thin man beside Tim.

Rob flipped a salute at Tim. “Sarge.” He nodded at Darren. “Darren One. Nice night.” He offered up his bottle.

“Let’s get this started,” Tim said. “We miss our window we can’t try again for another year. Circle up.”

The four men stumbled into a rough oval and faced each other.

“There’s no way candles are going to work in this wind,” D-Too said.

“We’ll just use a flashlight,” Tim said. “It won’t matter. Somebody hold one so I can see.” Tim opened a leather-bound book. Darren spilled his flashlight’s beam onto the yellowing pages.

“This something one of your buddies in Special Forces found, Sarge?” Rob said.

Darren snorted. “Tim was in Intelligence. He read maps and looked at pictures.”

Tim scowled. “The guy who sold it to me is in Special Forces. Now shut up. I need to time this right.” He cleared his throat and read a line from the page.

“Is that Arabic?” Rob said. “What’s it mean?”

“It’s Old Norse,” Tim growled. “And if I stop to translate everything we’ll never get it done in time.” He read the rest of the page carefully. Following instructions scribbled in the margins of the book, the men marched in place and took two steps to the right. They turned in circles and shouted “Heya!” Tim read another page and pricked each man’s thumb with sterile lancets. They mingled their blood on the page of the old book.

“Okay,” Tim said. “It says here we need to put our dicks together. Unzip.”

“What the hell?” D-Too backed away.

“It says, ‘Bring that which makes you men together’,” Tim said.

Rob fumbled at his fly. “Do they need to, like, cross or just touch?”

D-Too shook his head. “Not doing it.”

Darren sighed. “Just get it over with. Sergeant Rock will never let us hear the end of it.” He unzipped his pants.

The oval distorted as the men tried to get into position. “They need to touch at the stroke of midnight,” Tim said.

“Heh.” Darren chuckled. “He said ‘stroke.’”

Rob struggled to peer over his stomach. “Are they touching?”

“Thrust your hips forward and learn your shoulders back,” Tim said.

The men pushed closer together, eyes on the sky.

“Should I pull my foreskin back?” Rob said.

“Shut up!” D-Too hissed.

The heads of their penises made contact. “Hold it there!” Tim shouted the last line of the spell. Their muscles locked as the power built.

“Something’s happening!” Rob said. “Something’s--.”

###

“How was your weekend?” Angela said.

“Hmm?” Darren stopped playing with the bandages on his fingers.

“The long weekend.” She put her elbows on the cubicle wall between them. “What did you do?”

“Saw some old friends. Guys I’ve known forever. I’ve told you about them.” Darren pointed at the picture on his desk. He, Rob, and Tim had been friends since middle school. The other Darren, D-Too, had come along sophomore year.

“Beer and bad decisions?” she said.

“Something like that. You?”

“Went to Cleveland to see Carl’s parents.”

Darren hid a wince. “How’s that going?”

She made a noncommittal noise. “I understand him better now that I’ve met his mother.”

“I told you.”

She nodded. “I should have listened.”

Darren carefully lined his pen up with his keyboard. “It’s not too late to ditch him.”

“He’s not a bad guy. He’s just --.” She sighed. “He’s soft. You know?”

“Mmm.”

“Are you heading home soon?” she said.

“Just about. Why?”

“My car won’t start. I was hoping you could take a look at it.”

Darren shrugged into his jacket and followed her out to the parking lot. Back when she worked in the cubicle next to his she’d driven an aging Honda Civic. The promotion that moved her to the other side of the building had merited a silver Audi Quattro. It shone impotently in a reserved parking spot near the building’s entrance.

“Did you leave the lights on?” Darren said.

“They’re supposed to turn off automatically.” She handed him the keys.

Darren slid behind the wheel. The starter cranked gamely. He tried to remember what he’d yawned through in shop class so many years before. Cars needed both fire and fuel to run. If the battery had enough charge to crank--. He popped the hood and bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to make it bleed. He lifted the hood.

“Heya,” he said.

“What?” Angela said.

“Nothing.”

Rob showed up first, a cheerful presence inside Darren’s head. Missing us already?

D-Too’s thoughts tasted sour. This is not a good time.

Tim, as ever, took charge. What’s going on?

Darren blinked at the snarl of wires and tubing inside the Audi’s engine compartment. Angela’s car won’t start.

THE Angela? Rob crowed.

Darren nodded and looked over to where Angela shivered hopefully.

She lit a cigarette. “Can you do anything?”

“Maybe.” Darren found the battery and jiggled the cables attached to it. He could check the oil, and that was about where his automotive knowledge ended. What do I do?

So, we’re going to use this to impress girlfriends, D-Too said. That’s what we’re going to do with it.

She’s not my girlfriend, Darren said

D-Too’s derision came through clearly. I didn’t spend five-hundred bucks to impress some chick who put out for you –

Darren’s thoughts turned red. Can you help me or not?

Did she leave the lights on? Rob said.

I don’t know anything about Japanese cars, Tim said.

I think Audis are Swedish, Rob said.

They’re German, Darren said. You all are useless. “Heya.” The other presences in his head faded.

“Did you get it?” Angela said.

Darren closed the hood. “I’ve no idea what to do.”

“Thanks for looking at it.” She said. “I guess I’ll just text Carl for a ride and get a tow.”

###

“Heya!” Rob struck a dramatic pose, arms raised above his head. His fingertip trickled fresh blood.

What’s the problem? Darren said.

Rob pointed. “I can’t get that jar open.”

Pickles! D-Too said. Now we’re using it for pickles!

Did you try hitting the bottom of the jar with a spoon? Tim said.

“I also ran it under cold water.” Rob picked the jar up. “I tried everything I could think of. I need the Might of the Four.”

Alright, Tim said. Grab hold. On the count of three. One. Two. Three!

Their strength combined, and the lid came right off.

###

Heya.

Darren had been deep in REM sleep. One moment he’d been dreaming about riding a vacuum cleaner down the street, the next a thick-set man with onion breath was yelling in his face. What…?

D-Too’s about to kick someone’s ass, Rob said.

D-Too’s fists were clenched, and he was blinking furiously. His lip was bleeding.

“I know plenty of little shits like you!” The thick-set man jabbed his finger into D-Too’s narrow chest. “I work down at the prison. Go ahead. Try me.”

Elaine’s here, Tim said. He’s been looking for her all night. She just slapped him.

“Please come home.” D-Too looked past the yelling man to Elaine. “I’ll sleep on the couch. We can talk in the morning.”

The thick-set man got in D-Too’s face again. “You just try it! Just try it!”

Elaine put her hand on the man’s meaty arm. “He won’t hurt me.”

Watch his right, D, Tim said. You see how he’s moved his left foot ahead?

Deck him! Rob said. You have the strength and speed of the four of us! Put him down!

Get ready to slip under his punch, Tim said. He’s going to loop it. Get inside it, and put your left forearm in his throat.

Get out of here, Darren said. You’re not going to help anything by hitting this guy and getting arrested.

“Just go home!” Elaine said. The stress was clearing away her buzz. She was crying and her face was blotchy. “This isn’t about you!”

A well-muscled bald man in a black T-shirt approached them from the left. “Hope we’re not having any trouble here.”

“No trouble.” D-Too’s gut was churning. “I was just leaving.” He turned and pushed through the crowd toward the bar’s entrance.

Good move, Darren said. You can talk it out when --

“Shut the fuck up!” D-Too pulled the heavy front door open so hard it came off its hinges and crashed to the floor. The noise of the crowd stopped. Elaine covered her mouth with her hand. The big man who had said he was a prison guard paled. “Shut up!” D-Too said. “What fucking good are any of you?”

###

“Heya.”

Catherine Stuart frowned. “Did you say something, Tim?”

Tim shook his head. “Just clearing my throat.”

Hey, Sarge! Rob said.

Tim pulled his sleeve over the scab he’d just picked open. “I’m not sure I understand the question, Mrs. --.”

What’s up? Darren said.

“Miss.” She smiled. “I’ve seen your file. You spent six years in the Army as a human intelligence collector.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

D-Too’s here, but he’s drunk, Rob said.

Catherine Stuart nodded. “That was some time ago. What have you done to keep your skills current?”

Tim stammered. “I’ve attended several seminars and--.”

“What do you know about computers?”

“Like Facebook and all that?”

She shook her head. “I’m thinking more about coding and algorithms. I have a vendor who says we can save more money and prevent more product loss with his computers than you can with your team.”

What do I say? Tim was sweating buckets.

Tell her it’s bullshit, Darren said. Computers are good at a lot of things, but they’ll never be able to match your experience and intuition.

Is that true? Tim said.

Hell if I know.

Tim took a sip of water. “With all due respect, Miss Stuart, that’s wrong. Computers may get there eventually, but they aren’t up to catching the things that me and my team see.”

“The vendor said you’d say that.” Catherine put a folder on the table and opened it up to show two pie charts. “We’ve been running a little experiment. We’ve had his program analyzing our video feeds for the past two months. Want to know what we found?’

Shit! Rob said. Abort! Abort!

“I can see what your charts say,” Tim said. “They did better than we did.”

“Twenty-seven percent better,” she said. “Based on this report I’m recommending that we close your department down.”

Tim felt dizzy. What do I do?

###

D-Too was exhausted, and he couldn’t figure out how to assemble the basketball hoop he and Elaine had ordered for their daughter’s birthday. The vodka wasn’t making it easier.

He picked up the cheap adjustable wrench and tightened its jaws on the nut.

“Here we go,” he breathed. “Righty tighty, lefty--.” The wrench slipped, and he skinned his knuckles on the cement floor. “God-damnit!” He flung the wrench at the garage wall.

Once upon a time, Elaine would have come out to see what was wrong. She would have gotten the first-aid kit from the kitchen and sat down with him to puzzle out the gift’s instructions. D-Too could have done it himself if he could just figure out where the English instructions became Spanish and stopped being Japanese, but drunk didn’t help dyslexia. He blotted his bloody knuckles on the hem of his T-shirt.

Rob could have put the hoop together without instructions. Tim could have organized them into a crack hoop-assembling team. Darren would make jokes to break the tension. But then they’d know he’d been crying and that he hadn’t been man enough to keep his marriage together.

D-Too kicked the box the hoop had arrived in. It wasn’t enough. He dropped to his knees on the cement floor and sobbed.

###

Rob slammed his shoulder into the door again. “Heya! I fucking need you!” The smoke made him cough. “Force of the Four! Heya!” His knuckles were bleeding.

Don’t charge it; kick it! Tim said. Right near the latch!

Rob lifted a size-11 work boot. The strength of four men drove the door out of its frame and into the room beyond.

Who’s in here? Darren said.

“Neighbor lady,” Rob said. “Two kids.”

And a dog, D-Too said. Over near the TV.

The dog, some kind of pit bull mix, was barely visible through the smoke.

People first, Tim said. There!

Rob shouldered open an interior door. A woman was lying on the carpet in lounge pants and a T-shirt. He picked her up with one arm.

What floor are we on? Darren said.

“Fourth.” Rob coughed. “Same as me.”

Keep moving, Tim said. Get the kids.

Rob carried the woman back to the living room and into the kitchen.

Why aren’t the alarms going off? D-Too said.

Rob inhaled to answer and started to choke.

Think it! Don’t say it! Darren said.

Shitty landlord. Rob punched open the hollow-core door near the fridge. The kids’ room. He slung a child over each shoulder, a pre-teen in pigtails on the right and a kindergarten-aged boy on the left.

Get them out of here! Tim said.

What about the dog? Rob said.

Come back for it! Darren said.

Rob sprinted for the front door of the apartment. As he entered the hallway the sprinklers triggered. Rob slapped doors as he went. The stairwell was clear, but the exit door at the bottom opened only a few inches.

It’s chained, Rob said. Fucking landlord!

Force it, D-Too said.

Rob roared and threw his weight against the door. The chain burst, and he stumbled into the fresh air. He jogged across the parking lot to lay his neighbor and her children on the grassy median.

Make sure they’re breathing, Tim said.

The woman coughed. “Rob? What?”

Rob took her hands. “I got the kids out, too, Rosara. They’re safe.”

A fire engine and ambulance pulled into the parking lot. Rob flagged down the paramedics and pointed the family out.

Now you can try for the dog, Tim said.

Rob grinned. “Supermen to the rescue.” He took a step. “Oh, shit.”

What? Tim said.

I can’t--. Rob faded.

What’s happening? Darren said.

Rob? Tim said. Say something, buddy. Answer me!

###

Darren tucked a $20 in Rob’s breast pocket.

“Drinking money?” Tim said.

Darren nodded. “Something my father used to do. It was either the price of a drink or cab fare depending on who he was talking to.”

D-Too added a five. “Now he has both.”

Tim frowned.

“What?” D-Too said. “I didn’t have time to stop at a machine.”

Tim slid a new pocket knife under Rob’s folded hands. “I told him he needed to lose weight. He’ll be a bitch to carry out.” He rapped his knuckles on the side of the coffin. “It’s quite a box.”

“Did we do this?” Darren said.

“He would have tried to play hero anyway,” Tim said.

“We saved those people’s lives,” D-Too said.

“The power’s gone now,” Tim said. “We could go back next year. Do the ritual again.”

“Strength of the Three?” D-Too said.

“With you bozos?” Darren wiped his eyes. “Okay.”

Editor’s Note: The dudes in this story are vastly different from the dudes I named them after. But the Obelisk was real.

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