I'm hardly Pollyanna-ish on the United States' current situation. I share a lot of your structural critiques. I have a child. We're likely to step away from the US, at least for a while. 1/

But unlike a terminal cancer patient, the territory of the United States and I think the overwhelming majority of its population and descendants will continue to live on this Earth. 2/

The US won't die, just transform. There's no point trying to plan out a hypothetical future for a person dying of cancer. It's very much worth trying to think of what might rise from the ashes of our collective life in the US, and how to minimize how literally to ashes we collectively fall. 3/

I have no idea whether what emerges will be one country or several, or to what degree there will be continuity with the 1789 Constitutional republic (a new founding, like post-Civil-War? something completely different?) 4/

The broader project of social democracy will continue, and building a social democracy that can do dramatically at actively coordinating our collective life and preserving its own prerequisites to thrive is what I spend my time thinking about. 5/

One way or another, it's a project that has only just begun. /fin