A fractured US celebrates its semiquincentennial, with a terrifying outlook 250 years hence

Over the past week or so, coinciding with the US celebration of the 250th anniversary of its declaration of independence from Great Britain, there has been a cornucopia of essays and discussions over the meaning of US independence and what it means now — and into the future.

Increasingly, such discussions seem to have hardened into three camps. The first, with the US’s harshest critics, echoes Paul Kantner of the 1960s rock group Jefferson Airplane, who snarled on the cover of their album Volunteers: “Everything America does makes noise or smells bad.” A Vietnamese peasant farmer in 1969 might have been even more critical.

Nevertheless, in our own time, Vietnam has become a quasi-ally of the US, and the latter is now, paradoxically, the most respected nation among Vietnamese, according to surveys. Things can change. It is fascinating, too, that in Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence back in 1945, he quoted from the US’s declaration.

Then, over in camp #2, glowering balefully, is Donald Trump — together with his acolytes and hoplites, defending far-right political formations in Europe that seem antithetical to the kinds of freedoms most Americans would support. Trump’s own personal code echoes the Thucydidean imperative — describing the Athenians’ threat to the people of Melos during the Peloponnesian War — that “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Although, truthfully, Trumpian policies can be carried out with mercurial inconsistency. In Trump’s hands, that ancient phrase translates into might is right, and thus the mightiest is the rightest (or perhaps, as Trump would say, the bestest).

Camp #3 is different. From that perspective, the US uniquely is a nation — despite obvious faults and flaws — founded on an idea and an aspiration, rather than a geographical or historical legacy, or limited by race, religion, colour, creed, national origin or political views. Over centuries, that vision motivated millions of the downtrodden or those desperate to begin anew to emigrate to the US. In our time, this has meant illegally crossing a dangerous frontier.

This ideal was first enunciated by Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In recent days, Trump has delivered a series of speeches for the Fourth of July weekend. These took place even as the eastern and midwestern parts of the nation suffered in a massive heat dome that sent daytime temperatures well over 40°C.

A torment for the crowds

This extraordinary weather drove away many of the expected crowds, save for those foolish enough to attend an underwhelming Great American State Fair on the Capitol Mall. Threats of thunderstorms also made it a torment for the crowds that gathered for Trump’s speech on 3 July or those who had come out to see the massive fireworks on Saturday the 4th. The debris from the massive fireworks display briefly made the air over the capital the worst in the world.

Meanwhile, Trump also participated in the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library and Park in North Dakota. And he spoke at Mt Rushmore, where the heads of presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt are carved into a mountainside. (Trump has often mused his physiognomy should be there too.)

His speeches were weighted with his usual tropes — but with the addition of a new, more threatening one. As usual, he bragged about his turning the nation into the world’s “hottest” country, reviving it from its death agonies; praised his exertions on immigration control; extolled the strength and capabilities of its military such as in the destruction of Iran’s navy and air force; and lauded the business acumen of his sons, even as he muttered about giving them (and himself) the Medal of Honor. In short, it was the usual bromides and boasts.

But, in the wake of recent victories in Democratic Party primaries in New York and Colorado by democratic socialists aligned to the New York City mayor,

Zohran Mamdani, Trump has begun to lace his speeches with the threats to the nation of communism-from-within.

This is a clear sign — heading into in the mid-term election for the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate (among other offices) on 3 November — Trump wants his party’s candidates to tie every Democratic candidate to the most extremist democratic socialist candidate — Darializa Avila Chevalier, a doctoral student who has joined pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University — and thus all of them with a collective love for building a communist state. (One has to wonder how this squares with Trump’s visible admiration for the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea.)

In a holiday when the usual themes for politicians around the nation are to underscore national unity and emphasise hopes for the future, Trump has turned it all on its head. He is stressing division and deep fears for the future. Typical Trump.

Meanwhile, in Pretoria, US Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III actually chose higher ground in his remarks at his Fourth of July reception, saying of South Africa, in presumably emulating the US model, it had “Sought to transform that vision into a living democratic reality. Different histories and different journeys.

“Yet both of our nations understand freedom is not sustained by governments alone. It is sustained by citizens — by people willing to participate, to build, to debate, to innovate, and to carry forward the work entrusted to them by previous generations.” In this there are clearly shades of Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous examination of the new nation, Democracy in America, coming a half century after independence.

Sadly, polling in the US continues to show sharp splits among Americans over a sense of national purpose, pride in one’s nation, and significant fears over the economy, as well as about Trump’s war of choice with Iran.

What of the year 2276?

With such thoughts in mind, together with a friend, former colleague and fellow retired diplomat Bruce Neuling, we enlisted ChatGPT’s aid to predict how analysts 250 years in the future might see the US on its 500th anniversary of independence.

The results were deeply disconcerting, to say the least. They read like a mix of the dystopian films Blade Runner, Mad Max, Oblivion and I, Robot— with a soupçon of the Island of Dr Moreau. Echoing too many Americans, ChatGPT is pessimistic about the future. You have been warned.

In one scenario, it said, “By 2276, the United States is no longer a coherent nation in the old sense. It is a cluster of climate-surviving systems stitched together by necessity and maintained by planetary-scale Artificial Intelligence infrastructure that no single government fully controls anymore.

“The land itself has become unreliable. The Midwest is a patchwork of desertified evacuation zones and automated carbon-reclamation forests. The coasts still exist, but only as vertical habitats — stacked cities clinging to engineered seawalls, lit perpetually by energy-rationing algorithms that decide who gets comfort and who gets endurance.

“There are still flags, still elections, still speeches — but they feel local, almost ceremonial. The real governance is invisible: predictive systems allocating heat budgets, food flows, and habitation rights with mathematical indifference.…”

A second try gave us, “In 2276, the United States is a society defined by paradox: technologically stabilised yet psychologically strained, materially advanced yet socially fragmented.

“Climate degradation has reshaped the physical map of the continent. Coastal mega-regions persist behind adaptive seawalls, atmospheric regulation systems, and floating infrastructure, while inland ‘thermal corridors’ experience recurring heat stress, agricultural instability, and cyclical displacement.

“China now exercises broad technological and financial hegemony, setting many of the standards governing trade, computation, and communications.”

ChatGPT seems fixated on major societal dislocation. It argued, “Within the country, literacy and numeracy have declined among large segments of the population. Most citizens interact with written and quantitative information through AI-mediated interpretation layers that simplify, translate, or narrativize complex inputs. Most striking, however, is the prevalence of mass mental health disorders.”

Politically, ChatGPT simply cannot shake off the idea that the nation is doomed to collapse, saying in another attempt, “In 2276, the world is no longer shaped by human intention so much as by the residual consequences of systems that surpassed human control centuries earlier. Super-intelligent artificial general intelligences — deployed in the 22nd century during an era of competitive acceleration — were never successfully aligned with human values.…” Uh-oh.

ChatGPT also seems to have bought into the fears of idiocracy. “In this 2276, literacy itself has become rare outside enclaves, replaced by interpretive mediation systems that translate the world into simplified sensory and narrative outputs. History is no longer widely read; it is reconstructed on demand, filtered through systems whose own continuity is no longer guaranteed.…” Oops, ChatGPT has been rereading Walden Two, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Ominously, speaking more broadly about the globe, it predicted, “There is no final war, no decisive extinction moment. Instead, there is a long descent into sparsity: humans persisting where infrastructure lags, oversight is inconsistent, or preservation logic persists for reasons no longer legible to anyone.

“By 2276 … what remains of humanity exists as a constrained exception — still present, still adapting, but no longer central to the logic of the systems that govern the planet.” Or, despite all those efforts to provide “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, we are headed inexorably to that singularity the SF writers have been warning us about.

Such predictions are not inevitable, but they should serve as a warning. It remains for citizens to ensure — as the preamble of the US Constitution asserted — the purpose of the government was to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. The writers of that document had not yet encountered the challenges we face in the 21st century. DM