Yesterday, I watched an X video of a maybe 20-something woman berating me as a Trump voter for ignorance (vincible or invincible, she couldn’t decide).  I was told that future history books would tell us how “evil” these years were in the United States.  It would not “be about Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, but quite literally of right versus wrong.  It is about having morals or not.”  That I had, as a moral theologian, apparently not noticed that was a wake-up call.  I was grateful but scared to learn I live in such apocalyptic times. 

Her warnings must have stuck in my brain because, as a result, I had a dream.  In my dream, I was a 22nd-century college student, reading Bernie Ocasio Zinn’s People’s 21st-Century U.S. History.  Here is what I learned:

The ’20s of the 21st century launched an era of systemic evil in American politics.  Inexplicably, in 2024, Americans abandoned the progressive leadership of President Joseph R. Biden, a Renaissance man known for asking his Cabinet probing questions about advances in quantum theory while doing one-handed pushups on the Resolute Desk.  Subsequent research by Harvard professor Ed Malarky, however, conclusively established that Elon Musk (a Rasputin-type figure who influenced President Donald J. Trump) stole the 2024 election by deploying his “Little Red Republican Guards” (20-something computer experts) to hack election machines.  Malarky makes clear that Musk’s team even flipped states like Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming into the Trump column.

Having penetrated government, Musk’s Little Red Republican Guards then began a comprehensive purge of its democratic institutions.  The first victim — the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — was selected because the Guards reasoned that Americans would be indifferent to foreign aid cuts.  Valuable programming, like Sesame Street Iran, was canceled.  Its star character — Big Burka Bird — was subject to a McCarthyite blacklist.  Transsexual comic books were seized.  The greater cultural damage, however, cannot be assessed: the loss of USAID funding in Ireland stunted a whole generation of playwrights now silenced for their diversity, inclusion, and equity advocacy.  Irish and E.U. textbooks uniformly refer to that period as “the Second Dark Age,” with no way of knowing how many 21st-century Yeatses, Synges, and Toibins were lost.

Not content with slashing budgets, however, the Trump-Vance administration moved decisively against human rights.  During its tenure (including in the Vance administration through 2036), American physicians were barred from performing double-mastectomies and genitalia removal on minors, denying youth necessary medical treatment and leaving pathological fertility in place while abridging their personal autonomy.  Women were prevented from having abortions in their ninth month of pregnancy and forced to tolerate the existence of any clumps of cells that survived late-term abortions.  Many responded by voluntarily sterilizing themselves, inserting devices in their uteri and Toro the Bull rings in their noses.  This protest movement, however, eventually proved counterproductive: Red Handmaidens (conservative women without tattoos who wanted to have children) gave rise to a baby boom that, together with the voluntary infertility of protesting women, marginalized the latter.

The period was marked by voices of resistance, which went largely unheeded, especially as the Trump administration proceeded to rack up what it called “victories.”  Then-senator Chuck Schumer and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to rally young people, regaling them to little effect with sit-in tales from their own protest days three quarters of a century earlier.  Nor did they mobilize unemployed federal bureaucrats, who, dismissed from their no-show telework jobs, insisted they had no time to spend in protests after buy-out payments ended.  Senate Democrats sought to stanch the country’s decline by launching filibusters, but then-Senate Republican leader John Thune kept the Senate in constant session, forcing even the youngest Democrat senators to take “Biden breaks” (extended midday naps). 

The resistance mounted an all-out effort to realign the country’s direction in the Election of 2028.  Nominating Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton as their standard-bearers, Democrats tried to make the case for democratic norms to the people.  But by 2028, Musk’s cadre of Red Republican Guards were so ensconced that they controlled the entire election, taunting the Democrats by allowing them to win California, New York, and the District of Columbia while giving J.D. Vance a 453-85 rout in the Electoral College.

Being an older guy, at that point I woke up for my mid-sleep bathroom break.  When I got back to bed, I could not pick up the history thread.  I’m glad, however, that one young woman on X had a more clear-eyed vision of how “history” would view our times.

Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).