A Generation Of Cultural And Technological Change

What has changed in daily life and the large culture in the 32 years since I finished my education (law school in my case), and joined the "adult world"?

* Checks as a payment system have become dramatically less common. I probably write less than half a dozen checks a year, and I doubt that my children write even that many. People are increasingly paid for their work with direct deposits rather than with checks. We pay most of our bills via auto payments, or phone authorized payments, or payments authorized online via a website, or with credit or debit cards presented in person. Increasingly, other payments to households, like investment distributions and mutual insurance company dividends are made that way too. Casual money exchanges between friends and family and to people like lawn mowers providing household services are increasingly done with person to person through apps like Zelle, rather than with cash or checks. I spent a semester class in law school mostly learning about how checks worked at the nuts and bolts level and most of that knowledge is now obsolete.

* Cash was on a strong trend towards a decline, but the state legalized marijuana industry that was shut out of the federally regulated banking industry, prevented it from declining as much as it would have otherwise, both due to people needing cash to buy it, and people being paid in cash wanting to spend it. Widespread undocumented immigration has also probably helped cash, as has an increasing recognition that non-cash transfers siphon money off to big business financial companies.

A few countries have basically gone cashless.

* Tolls on toll roads are paid via a transponder and an account, or with license plate recognition and billing that can be paid with a credit or debit card online, instead of transferring money at a toll booth. Parking is increasingly paid for with credit or debit accounts, or via an online app as well.

* Lots of goods that used to be purchased in brick and mortar stores are now ordered online and delivered, creating a surge of delivery jobs, and making it tough for the brick and mortar retail sector. Even things that used to be delivered, like take out food, is now often ordered via an app or a website instead of by phone interacting with a person.

* Cheap international shipping and online retailing have dovetailed to drive "fast fashion" where ultra-cheap clothing can be purchased directly from abroad without the intervention of a U.S. based importing brick and mortar retailer middleman. Fast fashion has also boosted thrifting, where people can buy lightly used second hand clothing that was donated or sold for a pittance compared to retail. 

* The Trump tariffs mucked this up a little, but the reality is that domestic clothing manufacturing had almost completely vanished well before the 1990s, as did domestic manufacturing of electronic retail goods and lots of other things (steel, for example). Removing the middle man is still cost effective, even with tariffs that are also paid by brick and mortar importing retailers.

* Communications with businesses that involve dealing with an actual person, like customer service and making delivery orders, are now frequently done in apps or websites with online chatbots (my son is employed doing the software engineering for them), or with offshore call centers (or just offshore call takers who work from their cell phones at home). When I was staying in a hotel on the Las Vegas strip a few years ago, even calls about housekeeping and room service that would historically have been handled by people at the front desk were handled by an offshore call center in the Philippines.

* Many states, including Colorado where I live, and Washington State, where my sister-in-law's family live, have largely replaced in person voting with mail-in ballots. And despite the name, increasingly, the mail-in ballots are delivered to 24/7 drop boxes run by local clerk's offices, that are available once the mail-in ballots are distributed to voters by mail. This has been especially true this year as President Trump has threatened to use the USPS to interfere with mail-in ballot delivery. One of the Baltic nations, Latvia maybe, has transitioned entirely to online voting.

* Snail mail is waning, in favor of email, text messaging, and other online messaging apps. We still get a few bills by mail - our water and sewer and trash bills, our gas and electric bill, some of our insurance bills, property tax statements, bills from our dentist and health care providers, a rarely used credit card statement, and our photo radar tickets. But increasingly our bank statements, our credit card bills, our phone bill, and our investment account statements come online and more are sure to follow.

At work, the vast volume of copies of court filings delivered to other parties in a lawsuit, which it took a couple of full time employees in an eleven lawyer law firm to send out every day, and then sort and distribute when they were received, are now filed and delivered via e-filing (apart from a tiny trickle of audio and video file exhibits that are delivered on USB drives to the court and send to other parties via a cloud based data transfer app). This has also meant that court deadlines to file things can now be met at minutes to midnight and not by 4:00 p.m. or so, in time to copy and mail them, and to hand deliver them to the courthouse clerk. 

We still get junk mail advertising goods and services of all kinds and providing coupons, but now, at least half of the advertising communications that I receive are via email, or more annoyingly and often illegally, via text message and robocall.

The United States Postal Service is steadily losing parcel delivery market share to third-party parcel delivery services like UPS, DHL and Insta-cart, to in house private parcel delivery (mostly from Amazon, but also from grocery store delivery services).

Younger people don't even know how to properly address a letter or what to do with stamps. Denmark discontinued its letter delivery service this year.

Certain legal notices and tax returns are still sent via certified mails (although tax returns are now overwhelmingly e-filed, and refunds are increasingly direct deposited).

The demise of snail mail has been hastened by slower delivery times and lower reliability as volumes fall, despite surging prices for stamps. Few newer homes even have home mail delivery, replacing it with collective mail receiving boxes for an apartment complex or subdivision consolidated in one place.

The demise of the U.S.P.S. has also put hundreds of thousands of postal workers, predominantly men, and predominantly veterans, with well-paying, lower skilled, union jobs and good benefits, out of work, retiring early, and dried up those job opportunities for newly discharged veterans and less skilled workers.

* Faxes are virtually obsolete and are used mostly for tax information and medical information because fax transmissions are more secure than email and texts from third-party interception.

* Steaming services have displaced almost all of the video rental business, a huge share of broadcast and cable TV, and a significant share of movie theater attendance. They've even made a big dent in broadcast radio (although the switch from analog to digital broadcast radio and TV was virtually invisible from a consumer prospective). Entertainment and news content is increasingly asynchronous, so you don't have to tune in exactly at the moment it is made available, as you used to have to with broadcast radio and TV and cable TV.

* Streaming has made global popular culture much more accessible.

* The advent of widespread videoconferencing has been huge. This together with cloud based computing, and the extra push that the COVID pandemic created, has made remote working (at least part of the time in a "hybrid" position) has swept the world of office workers. I am allowed to work remotely two days a week, although, in reality I am an old timer who only does so once couple of weeks for a specific reasons like dog sitting my daughter's dog while she is away or being at home to receive someone doing home maintenance or because I expected the weather on my commute to be bad. Lots of my meetings with opposing counsel in lawsuits, witnesses, clients, and co-workers are done remotely via videoconference. My daughter works remotely four days a week. My son-in-law works remotely one day a week.

Depositions and ordinary non-evidentiary court hearings are now routinely conducted by videoconferencing. Court hearings are mostly live streamed for the general public and interested parties to watch, vastly reducing the amount of travel to depositions and short hearings that lawyers have to do. During COVID, even some U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments were conducted via videoconference.

And, it isn't just work - events like birthdays are often celebrated with a family videoconference. My daughter's college graduation, during the COVID lockdown, was held remotely. At the last funeral I attended, of the mother of a family friend, half of the guests and speakers participated remotely and half were there in person. Many churches offer the chance to attend Sunday services online. Civic and political groups sometimes have online meetings or hybrid meetings where some people involved participate online and some are in person. 

* Many schools have replaced snow days with remote days. Some students, especially at the high school and college level, attend some or all of their classes remotely. Many school districts, especially in rural areas, have switched to four day a week schedules.

* Videoconferencing and online retailing has also made a big impact on the real estate market. Demand for office space is cratering everywhere. Retail space is in a slump. But residential real estate has gotten a boost in demand (until a recent rapid surge in interest rates that have made it unaffordable for buyers who need mortgages to do so, before home sellers have responded by lowering their prices) with many office workers feeling the need for more space to use as a home office. In between, flexible co-working spaces for hybrid workers who don't want to work in their homes has emerged as a small but important office space sector.

* Electric cars aren't predominant, but they are now common. Government tax credits helped this along at first, and high gas prices and expanding charger networks and more rapid battery charging have also helped. A car charger is now expected in newly built home garages. So far, however, gas stations haven't been too hard hit and many have installed charging stations of their own. Electric cars are slowly, but surely, however, reducing demand for gasoline and diesel (and for the services of car mechanics because they require far less maintenance).

* Lots of services that used to be provided by people are now handled heavily by kiosks. Full service gas stations barely exist, and the gas pump is basically robotic. Grocery stores have kiosks that handle basic DMV functions. Cash withdrawals and a fair amount of business cash deposits are done at ATM machines. Postage can be purchased at kiosks. Before they vanished almost entirely, video rentals could be done at kiosks. Tickets at in person movie theaters and museums that aren't purchased online are often sold at kiosks. Fast food restaurants now take orders for dining in mostly at kiosks. Grocery stores handle a big share of their sales through self-check outs. At airports, luggage is checked and physical boarding passes (where they aren't just downloaded to a smart phone) are handled at kiosks. Kiosks issue tickets and receive payments to let you out at parking garages. Large medical facilities have you check in via kiosks. Some rental car companies use kiosks heavily.

Airports and places like the Las Vegas strip, are testing pilot projects in having automated vending machines deliver hot food, and not just cold or room temperature pre-packaged snacks.

* The kiosks, and chatbots, and offshored customer service lines, and electronic payment and messaging systems, and online retailing, are wiping out vast numbers of low and medium skilled jobs, in a way similar to the way that offshored manufacturing eliminated low and medium skilled manufacturing jobs, outside the delivery sector.

* We are starting to see drone delivery systems and self-driving Waymo taxis cut the need for jobs that used to require humans to deliver things and people. It will take time, but self-driving long haul trucks may slash the need for hundreds of thousands of truckers, leaving that to the last mile delivery drivers.

* Very short distance driver's jobs (rickshaws and big city style cabs and now illegal cab ride-sharing services) are being cut into by rental scooter and e-bike services.

* Lawn mowing robots and vacuuming and mopping robots may make a little dent in lower skilled jobs doing these tasks. My cousins who are dry land farmers in Eastern Colorado have self-driving tractors that they trained to go up and down the rows of their fields tilling, sowing, and harvesting.

* Ukraine has led the world in a revolutionary way, at replacing front-line soldiers jobs with drones.

* The trend towards increased automation has not run its course. Self-driving vehicles, AI taking over low, medium, and high skill non-physical tasks, robots that don't replace human workers but increase their productivity and the skill needed for the jobs that are being eliminated, and more are continuing to make an impact and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

* More affordable solar and wind power technologies, in addition to environmental concerns disfavoring utility based coal power plants, have put coal as a fossil fuel into a death spiral, and provided a more affordable way to power an increasingly electronic world. Improved and more affordable solar panels have also decentralized the power grid.

* Improvements in heat pumps and electric hot water heating and insulation, have made a bit of a dent in demand for natural gas (offset my utility generation of electricity with natural gas as a substitute for coal) and heating oil.

* Reduced coal consumption has reduced freight rail and barge transportation demand.

* We have turned the corner on some environmental issues. Forest cover is starting to be regrown in many places where forests were cleared for farms, like New England. Amazon deforestation has slowed. Coal sourced pollution is plummeting - less air pollution, less coal waste, less strip mining, outside Wyoming. Lead and asbestos have virtually vanished from new build things and gasoline, and are steadily being removed from older houses and water pipes. We generate more GDP (inflation adjusted) per energy input than we used to. We've cut down on water wasting in the arid west and are continuing to make progress on that. The air is a lot cleaner than it was in the 1970s and even in the 1980s, apart from wildfire smoke. Chlorofluorocarbons that were destroying the ozone layer were phased out worldwide and the ozone layer recovered. The aerosol dispenses they were used in are now scarce. 

* The reality of climate change is now indisputable, even though many folks are resistant to taking the steps to curb it. It is driving droughts, extreme weather like more hurricanes and in different places, snowless ski resorts, wildfires, and higher temperatures that change the biodiversity of places towards those neighboring to warmer places. Glaciers are melting and disappearing entirely and sea levels are rising.

* A large share of household and business solid waste is being diverted from landfills to recycling and compositing, which makes household trash duties more complicated but has become a part of life.

* We bring out own bags to the grocery store reducing that waste flow a little.

* Organic foods have grown very significantly in market share, although they aren't dominant.

* The share of people who are non-religious has surged, especially among younger people (who are also more liberal than older people even when the older people were their age). This has been widespread but most marked among white Catholics and white mainline Protestant denominations. The white Christians who have not become non-religious are more conservative, however, often much more conservative than mainline Protestant clergy.

* Schools at all levels are seeing lower enrollments as the cohorts of children get smaller due to falling birthrates, something that is especially noticeable now that Millennials, the Baby Boom echo generation, have made there way through the system and are having fewer  kids than their parents did, and a growing proportion of children who are in school are children of immigrants, are mixed race, or are otherwise non-white. As a result school districts in most places are closing school buildings that aren't full. The pressure is most stark in rural areas which have continued their relentless secular trend towards depopulating.

We are starting to see small liberal arts and religious colleges not just downsize, but start to close, as the rate at which people are going to college has stopped growing rapidly, and as the cohort of college aged people has shrunk.

* While professional football is as popular as ever, middle school and high school football programs have grown far smaller. Rural schools that have football increasingly play in leagues that use smaller teams like seven a side, since they don't have enough players to field full sized teams.

* Soccer and lacrosse have grown in popularity.

* The study of Latin, Greek, and the humanities more generally has plummeted in high schools and colleges, and social sciences that aren't perceived as useful in getting a job are down, although economics and psychology are hold on better. These disciplines are being squeezed out by business majors and to a lesser extent, STEM fields.

* Adolescents and young adults are smoking less, using hard drugs less, having sex less, getting pregnant less often, committing fewer crimes, starting to drive later, working part-time jobs while in school less often, and in general, are less independent than Gen X was, for example. 

* Young people are getting married later, having kids later, not getting married at all more often, having kids at all less often, who are marrying tend to be closer in age than they used to be. Interracial marriages are more common (and are especially common for Asian American and Hispanic young women). People are marrying people of the same socio-economic background more often, and are much less likely to marry someone of a different political party. Marriage rates are rising and divorce rates are falling for college educated couples, while marriage rates are falling and divorce rates are rising for non-college educated couples. Weddings are trending smaller in the U.S.

* Housing in economically healthy urban centers, health care, child care costs, and higher education have all gotten much less affordable. Household goods have gotten cheaper. Young adults have much less of an ability to afford higher education without big debt loads, to own homes, and to have kids than the Boomers did, and even than Gen X did.

* There are fewer blue laws. In Colorado, banks and car dealerships are pretty much the only businesses uniformly closed on Sundays (although online options and ATMs have made this less consequential in banking). Most retail businesses are open on Sundays now, including liquor stores, and wine and beer can now be purchased in grocery stores in Colorado.

* NIMBY is being pushed back by the YIMBY movement in ongoing political battles over land use, but everyone hates the sudden surge of data centers which are sucking up a huge share of business construction and investment resources, to great ready for an AI future that the general public is ambivalent about.

* Duplexes and townhouses are gaining market share in new construction relative to condos and single family homes. Apartment buildings are being made much more often than architecturally identical condos. Single family homes are being held as rental units more often and are even being built in the first place for that purpose.

* People are trying to make more productive use of roofs in buildings, as decks, as solar panels sites, as gardens.

* Acceptance of lesbians, gays, and bisexuals has risen profoundly in the last three decades, and acceptance of transgender people has also surged but is in flux and has been made into a political football by MAGA Republicans who want to scapegoat them for political gain.

* Election fraud is become a predominantly conservative Republican thing because they are being told, falsely, that everyone and especially immigrants are doing it.

* A global anti-immigrant movement and anti-globalist movement has emerged, mostly as an extension of past racist movements (which are also resurgent). Neo-Nazi and far right movements are resurgent in response to the stagnation of working class, native born, whites with little education, who the economy doesn't need anymore.

* The anti-vax movement has emerged.

* Medical advances have continued. Cancer death rates are falling as one improvement or prevention after another is devised. More things can be vaccinated against. Opioid overdoses can be counteracted. A seriously effective class of weight loss drugs is being developed. Near sightedness can be cured with laser surgery. Gene therapy can cure certain conditions. Surgeries are increasingly less invasive and more effective. More conditions have effective treatments. Access to healthcare is a huge problem in the U.S. but the value that healthcare can add has steadily grown. More medical advances are around the corner.

* Diet and exercise trends have come and gone and there is a declining consensus on these things, even though there is a growing consensus that appropriate exercise and a good diet are important.

* Marijuana legalization has gone mainstream and has more or less fully run its course in many states.

* Abortion rights have recently been dramatically curtailed in red states, although this extreme shift is losing steam and being reversed in some cases as ill-effects of this policy are becoming evident, and as traveling to states where abortion is legal and the use of abortion pills and Plan B contraception (which is not abortion but eliminates the need for it) has limited the effectiveness of these restrictions.

* Fashion has gotten more casual. Litigators only wear suits to hearings and depositions now, rather than to work every day. Many business people, and transactional lawyers, and politicians and top government officials often wear jackets without ties. Business casual has to a great extent replaced the suit among mid-level office workers. People don't dress up to shop as much. Trench coats are rare.

* For reasons not easy to determine, exterior and interior design for buildings has gotten more corporate and more gray and beige and black and white and metallic, with color drained away, and whimsy and originality suppressed. Even cars and trucks are increasingly white, black, and gray in lieu of colors.

* Everyone has high quality audio-video recording equipment and the ability to share it with the world on the Internet in their pocket. Door bells routinely have cameras. Surveillance cams that can be monitored in real time and tracking devices are ubiquitous. Ankle monitors for people on probation and parole are common place.

* Apps have replaced maps and stand alone GPS navigation systems.

* Cars often have keyless entry and starting by key fob.

* Many businesses, almost all hotels, and some apartments have electronic swiping or codes in lieu of mechanical keys.

* Office work isn't paperless, but it does use far less paper and most information storage is electronic rather than on paper, and increasingly the information storage is in the cloud rather than local.

* Software is increasingly an ever updated subscription rather than a piece of digital consumer property that you own.

* Incandescent light bulbs of all kinds have been almost completely replaced by LEDs (light emitting diodes), which generate less heat, last vastly longer, and use far less electricity for the same amount of light. They are as rare now as natural gas lighting systems were before LED lighting became widespread.

* Manned space exploration mostly ceased for a generation and is only recently showing signs to restarting at a meaningful level.

The 5th Circuit En Banc Decision On Pre-Hearing Immigration Detention

One of the key issues in immigration law is whether someone detained for being an undocumented immigrant pending a removal hearing in which that person has statutory grounds upon which they could not be deported, who is detained in the interior of the U.S. rather than at the border, and has long standing ties to the U.S. as a resident of the U.S. is entitled to a bond hearing that evaluates their dangerousness and flight risk.

The second Trump administration has taken the position that an undocumented immigrant who awaits a removal hearing may be detained indefinitely, no matter how long the hearing is delayed, no matter where they were detained or how long they have been in the U.S. or what grounds they have to not be deported, and that these individuals have no right to a bond hearing to give those individuals an opportunity to be released before their removal hearing. (The Trump Administration has also explicitly told private contractors operating immigration detention centers that the conditions of confinement should be cruel, but that is a story for another day.)

Thirty years of prior practice of the Executive Branch, prior to Trump 2.0, under the immigration statute adopted in 1996 and since amended in ways largely immaterial to this question, have held that there is a right to a bond hearing to assess whether someone awaiting a removal hearing is dangerous or a flight risk, while that removal hearing is pending (and at a time when the government has not established before an immigration judge that they are entitled to deport someone). This was also the prevailing practice pre-1996, including in the pre-1907 period which the majority mischaracterizes, as a dissenting opinion notes. As explained at page 136 of the Slip Opinion in a dissenting opinion:

The Government and the majority repeatedly cite the Supreme Court’s footnote in Demore v. Kim, 538 U.S. 510 (2003), that “prior to 1907 there was no provision permitting bail for any aliens during the pendency of their deportation proceedings.”  Id. at 523 n.7.  That sounds significant, but, prior to 1907 this country simply did not detain persons potentially unlawfully present in the interior except in extraordinary circumstances and under narrowly drafted laws; and, when it did so, the general rule was that bail would be available.  See Nash, supra, at 1540–41, 1564–76.4  In other words, the practice of seeking out people unlawfully present in this country in the interior en masse is an invention of modern immigration law.  The practice (challenged here) of seeking out persons unlawfully present in this country in the interior and subjecting them to detention without meaningful process or the possibility of bail—that is, to what was long understood to be the statute applicable at ports of entry, § 1225(b)(2)(A), rather than the interior detention statute, § 1226(c)—is a recent invention of the Department of Homeland Security in the last year or so contradicting its almost three decades old practice.   

Nine of the eleven numbered geographic circuits of the U.S. Courts of Appeal (ignoring the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit which doesn't have jurisdiction over these cases) have held that there is a right to a bond hearing under the applicable U.S. Supreme Court precedents (admittedly, most of which were decided before the current ultra-conservative majority arose in the U.S. Supreme Court, and the current U.S. Supreme Court often shows little regard for its prior precedents or a lower court near consensus). There does not appear to be a case on point out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

So did a 2-1 decision of a three judge panel of the 5th Circuit, and three U.S. District Courts who ruled in favor of the people seeking bond hearings that the government appealed to the 5th Circuit. So did 7 of the 17 judges of the 5th Circuit in a sua sponte review en banc in an 159 page set of majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions announced today of that 2-1 decision in the case of Rodriguez v. Vergara (and two other cases consolidated with it).  

Just counting noses in the 5th Circuit who have considered this case (including the trial court judges in these cases), 10 judges ruled that there is a right to a bond hearing and 10 judges ruled that that there was not. It also bears noting that even the current extremely conservative U.S. Supreme Court reverses decisions of the 5th Circuit more than any other U.S. Circuit, generally, in a less conservative direction than its decisions. 

The 5th Circuit en banc majority relies heavily on a U.S. Supreme Court case involved sex offender registration for a general principle (a circumstance where dangerousness is a presumptively present in almost every case), which is Conn. Dep’t of Pub. Safety v. Doe, 538 U.S. 1, 8 (2003), rather than prior U.S. Supreme Court immigration cases on point, in a very strained analogy.

The only other U.S. Court of Appeals denying bond hearings is that 8th Circuit (which is also very conservative, although so is the 11th Circuit that went the other way), and the 8th Circuit which also followed a related 5th Circuit precedent, Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, 166 F.4th 494 (5th Cir. 2026), cert. sought and neither granted nor denied at this point, in which the 5th Circuit make a minority interpretation of the relevant immigration statute. See Slip Op. at pg. 100 (in a dissenting opinion). See also Slip. Op. at pg. 141 (in a dissenting opinion) ("On appeal, only this court in Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi (and the Eighth Circuit, following us) has accepted the Executive Branch’s statutory arguments for its recent about-face.  See 166 F.4th 494, 502–05 (5th Cir. 2026); Avila v. Bondi, 170 F.4th 1128, 1132–36 (8th Cir. 2026).").

District judges reportedly have rejected the government's position in more than 9,300 rulings (see also page 154 of the slip opinion), relying especially upon Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001), and three certiorari petitions are pending. As noted at page 144 of the Slip Opinion: "The Supreme Court thus far has not accepted certiorari in the sole petition to squarely pose the due process question.  See Petition for Writ of Certiorari, Putra v. LopezCampos, No. 25-1415 (U.S. filed June 22, 2026), https://perma.cc/8TXG-9S4J.  Rather, it first will assess the full statutory picture. See Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, No. 26-104, 2026 WL 2942994 (U.S. Oct. 1, 2026) (granting certiorari)." 

Another key recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, which the en banc majority in the 5th Circuit today and the dissenters in the same decision disagree upon the meaning of is DHS v. Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. 103 (2020), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against someone who was just 25 feet across the U.S. border regarding their immigration law rights. The majority pretty clearly misreads this decision as applying to immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for more than a decade and have strong ties to U.S. citizen children, which the decisions plain language seems to contradict.

A footnote on page 133 of the slip opinion linked above, to a dissenting opinion, sums up the circuit split:

The majority’s holding places our court in a minority position among the circuits. See Guerrero Orellana v. Moniz, 188 F.4th 1, 29 (1st Cir. 2026); Barbosa da Cunha v. Freden, 175 F.4th 61, 96 (2d Cir. 2026), cert. granted sub nom. Rhoney v. Barbosa da Cunha, No. 26104, 2026 WL 2942994 (U.S. Oct. 1, 2026); Buele Morocho v. Warden Phila. FDC, No. 261150, 2026 WL 2546223, at *10 (3d Cir. Aug. 28, 2026); Lopez Garcia v. Guadian, No. 257044, 2026 WL 2661092, at *21 (4th Cir. Sept. 10, 2026); Lopez-Campos v. Raycraft, 175 F.4th 713, 735 (6th Cir. 2026); Cirrus Rojas v. Olson, 183 F.4th 909, 931 (7th Cir. 2026); Padilla v. United States Immigr. & Customs Enf’t, No. 24-2801, 2026 WL 2822044, at *19 (9th Cir. Sept. 21, 2026); Santillan Quiroz v. Mullin, 180 F.4th 1226, 1251 (10th Cir. 2026); Hernandez Alvarez v. Warden, Fed. Det. Ctr. Mia., 175 F.4th 1258, 1285 (11th Cir. 2026). 

Without today's en banc ruling, the 8th Circuit's ruling in Banyee v. Garland, 115 F.4th 928, 933–34 (8th Cir. 2024) (holding that a lawful resident alien could be detained pending removal for over a year as long as “deportation remain[ed] a possibility”) would have been a solitary outlier.

The circuit by circuit analysis is a little complicated, because all immigrations cases funnel up to the national Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which like the courts it reviews is an Article II court of the executive branch that is not judicially independent, and then from there to the U.S. Court of Appeals Circuit in which the case arose at the immigration trial court level. As explained at page 154 of the Slip Opinion:

Article II IJs generally are not bound by Article III district court precedent, just that of courts of appeal.  The BIA has stated that it, “as well as Immigration Judges, [is] bound to follow [BIA] precedent, the Attorney General, and the circuit court of appeals with jurisdiction over the geographic region where a case occurs.”  Matter of Garcia, 28 I. & N. Dec. 693, 695 (B.I.A. 2023); see Matter of Anselmo, 20 I. & N. Dec. 25, 31 (B.I.A. 1989) (noting that the BIA has permitted intercircuit nonacquiescence, but “has not followed a practice of nonacquiescence in decisions of a circuit court in cases arising within the jurisdiction of that circuit”).   

But, habeas corpus review starts in a U.S. District Court (an Article III independent trial court) in a collateral attack on immigration court decisions and proceeds in the usual way to the relevant U.S. Court of Appeals Circuit.

Today's 5th Circuit en banc decision is in my view, clearly wrong under existing precedents, and affects many hundreds of thousands of people in a highly material way. There is little doubt that the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually chime in, and it is not at all clear how it will resolve the issue, since it involves a signature position of the Trump administration which the current U.S. Supreme Court has upheld in all but the most extreme instances of overreach.

The Victorians

Imagine living in a world where 40% of your heads of government and 30% of cabinet members went to the same middle school and high school. The author quoted below hypothesizes that the socialization of the national elite in boarding schools, that were apparently well-enough run, was critical to the success of the 19th century U.K. which was very social class bound. 

Query if the mechanism might have instead been freeing up elite parents to focus on their adult roles rather than on raising their children.

The elites of Victorian Britain operated differently. Their schools and universities were not terribly academic and had very little STEM. As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying. They loved feasting, sports, holidays, dancing, and dressing up. Contrary to their stodgy reputation, they were probably a lot of fun. . . . 

Most socially elite Victorian boys began formal education at the age of seven or eight, spending about five years in a ‘preparatory school’ before passing on to a ‘public school’ (which, to the enduring confusion of international observers, is a kind of elite private school). There was a hierarchy of public schools, with the nine ‘Clarendon schools’ at the top, and just one, Eton College, clearly at the apex. About 30 percent of nineteenth-century cabinet ministers and 40 percent of prime ministers were Old Etonians.

Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire.

From Samuel Hughes, in Works in Progress. 

U.S. Energy Efficiency Over Time

Progress is a real thing.

 

Mad Kings

According to tradition, the Roman Republic was preceded by the Kingdom of Rome from 753 BCE to 509 BCE (244 years spanned by just seven kings).

The Roman Republic had lasted for about 482 years after it began with the establishment of the Roman consulate in 509 BCE. 

The first Roman emperor, Augustus, took office in 27 BCE. Tiberius, the second Roman emperor, who took office in 17 CE was reputedly mentally ill, although less flamboyantly that two of his three successors. Caligula, the third Roman emperor, took office in 37 CE. Nero, the fifth Roman emperor, took office in 54 CE.  Two later emperors before the split and then fall of the Roman empire were also considered mentally ill: Commodus who took office in 177 CE and Elagabalus who took office in 218 CE.

The Roman Empire split between the Western and Eastern (Byzantine) empires in 364 CE (391 years after the Roman Empire was established), and the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 CE (112 years after the split).

According to Google AI (I'm feeling lazy today):

The most notable and documented "mad kings" include:

• King Charles VI of France (1368–1422): Often called Charles le Fou (Charles the Mad), he suffered from manic episodes and the infamous "glass delusion," where he believed he was made of brittle glass and wore iron rods in his clothing to prevent himself from shattering. [1, 2]
• King George III of Great Britain (1738–1820): Known as the monarch who "lost America," George III suffered from prolonged bouts of mental instability—long thought to be porphyria—which caused him to experience severe logorrhea and depression, eventually necessitating a regency. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845–1886): Famously dubbed "Mad King Ludwig," he was deeply eccentric, neglecting state affairs to focus entirely on building extravagantly expensive, fairytale-style palaces (such as Neuschwanstein Castle) before being declared insane. [1, 2, 3, 4]
• King Christian VII of Denmark (1749–1808): Suffering from severe mental illness and paranoia, his inability to govern left his kingdom in the hands of various regents and his royal physician. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• Tsar Ivan IV of Russia (1530–1584): Better known as Ivan the Terrible, his early, capable rule slowly devolved into legendary paranoia and violent, sadistic outbursts later in his life, particularly following the death of his first wife. [1, 2, 3]
• King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (634–562 BC): Often considered the original "mad king," the granddaddy of Babylonian rulers was struck down by a seven-year descent into animal-like insanity as recounted in the Book of Daniel.

In addition to some other European and Middle Eastern mad kings, there are at least two notable ones from Japan (a list that surely omits notable mad Chinese emperors):

• Emperor Yōzei (陽成天皇, Yōzei-tennō, 869–949, ruled 876–884) was described by the 14th-century historian Kitabatake Chikafusa as affected by madness, killing people and animals without reason. His unstable and violent behavior prompted his advisors to force his abdication in 884.^[29]
• Emperor Taishō (大正天皇, Taishō-tennō, 1879–1926, ruled 1912–1926) of Japan, had a variety of neurological disorders, which though at least partially physical in origin incorporated psychological elements as well. Discussion or criticism of an emperor, including that of health issues, remains a controversial subject in Japan for cultural, political, and religious reasons and is referred to as the Chrysanthemum taboo.^[30][31][32]

The United States of America will have persisted for 250 years from its self-declared birthday of July 4, 1776, in a few weeks. Mad kings were a problem that the Founders were familiar with at the time that they drafted the current U.S. Constitution (which took effect in 1789 and added the Bill of Rights in 1791). Indeed, this clear and present danger is the source of some of the emphatic anti-monarchy provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

Probably the most similar historical figures to Trump 2.0 are Nero and Caligula, although there are other somewhat similar examples from European and Asian monarchies.

There is great fear that President Trump signals the end of democracy in America, if not actually on his watch, but showing the way to, and heralding, its end. Then again, while some mad kings were followed by more sane monarchs, others were followed in fairly short order by the demise of the monarchy's power, or its abolition entirely.

40 Acres

An acre was traditionally meant to be the amount of land that a farmer could plow in a day with a farm animal's assistance.

40 acres was traditionally the amount of land necessary for a single family of unmechanized subsistence farms to support themselves. It is the most typical economic unit in which farmland and vacant land is sold, even today.

40 acres and a mule was what post-U.S. Civil War advocates for reparations to former slaves had advocated for (and obviously, did not achieve).

A square 40 acre plot is a quarter mile on each side (a.k.a. 1320 feet a.k.a. 440 yards), with a one mile circumference and a 16th of a square mile area.

The population density of subsistence farmers at this traditional pre-modern scale is about 100 people per square mile.

A survey township has 36 square miles (6 miles a side) and was traditionally the presumptive size of the smallest unit of local government, which at subsistence farming population density would have had about 3,600 people, and perhaps a bit more for a hamlet of perhaps 400 people who would make up the 10% or so of non-farmers who would have been present in a predominantly subsistence farming pre-modern society at the technology level that would have prevailed around the time of the American Revolution (250 years ago), so it might have had a total population of about 4,000 people. Non-farmers in hamlets like this would often include clergy, craftsmen in the skilled trades, doctors, veterinarians, and merchants.

In the brief period where there was democratic government and a predominantly pre-modern subsistence farming economy, people under age twenty-one couldn't vote, and neither could women, so perhaps 400-500 of those people would have been eligible to vote and/or participate in town meetings (in areas without slavery, as slaves couldn't vote either and were usually used to farm cash crops in any case).

In townships that were not governed in the town meeting style of New England towns, a typical town council would have had three elected trustees and sometimes an elected town clerk as well, so about one voter per 100 to 167 people would have been elected officials. This rate is similar to the rate at which people serve as precinct organizers in modern political parties.

A community of this size might have a single church that doubled as a community center and while pre-mechanized subsistence farming largely predated universal public education, a township would typically have something on the order of 2,000 school age children.

In that era about a quarter of children would have died in their first year and about half would have died before reaching adulthood. In any given childbirth, about 1% of pregnant mothers would have died in childbirth, and a typical woman would give birth six to eight times in a lifetime, leading to an excess of widowers over widows. There would be post-menopause age grandmothers in the community, but far fewer, proportionately, than there are today. Most elderly people would have lived with extended family. Then, as now, about a third of pregnancies would have ended in a miscarriage or stillbirth.

It would be unusual for a subsistence farming community to have more than a handful of people with post-secondary education (perhaps a priest and a government official or lawyer), and the percentage of people with the equivalent of a full high school education today would have been comparable to the percentage of people with graduate degrees today, although in some regions, a significant number of people without formal second education would nonetheless have been quite well-read autodidacts. Journalists and school teachers and merchants would typically not have a post-secondary education and would often not have the equivalent of a high school diploma today.

The Levite And His Concubine

The Biblical story of the Levite and his concubine, which is Chapter 19 of the of book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible, is an odd and shocking story. (It isn't, however, part of the Torah, and is instead part of the collection of stories that make up the remainder of what Christians call  the Old Testament, after its initial five books).

Why the Hebrews, hundreds of years later, chose to preserve this piece of legendary history, when they assembled the Hebrew Bible isn't entirely clear. It may be because it has strong parallels in the story of Lot in the book of Genesis, another case where a bunch of random men come to a house and demand the the householder surrender someone for them to rape and the household complies. Or, it may be intended to demonstrate how lawless the Levant was for the Jews in the age of judges, before they established their own proper kingdom there, as Judges 19:30 suggests.

The story of the Levite and his concubine is also cryptic. It belabors seemingly unimportant details at length, while omitting context that help the story make more sense and explain why these people acted the way that they did. Three thousand or so years removed from the setting of the story, we are left to fill in the blanks by inferring what we can from what it does say.

The story

A Levite and his concubine (whom he acquired in Bethlehemjudah, apparently from her father) visit his concubine's father, where they stay for four months and five days and were urged by her father to stay longer. But the Levite insisted on leaving for his home, together with his two donkeys, his servant and his concubine. Judges 19:1-10. His next stop was to "the house of the Lord" (presumably, his home as the Levites are the priestly class of the Hebrews). Judges 19:18.

The Levite and his party consider staying overnight in Jerusalem, but decide to go to the Jewish town of Gibeah that was part of the tribe of Benjamin, instead, because at this time (before there was a Jewish King in Israel) there were no Jews in Jerusalem. But the Levite can't find a place to stay in Gibeah. Judges 19:11-15. However, a local farmer they meet agrees to take the Levite and his party in for the night, provides them with a meal, and stables the Levite's donkeys for the night, so that the Levite and his party don't have to sleep on the streets that night. Judges 19:16-21.

Some men from the area come to the farmer's house saying that they want to rape the visiting Levite. But the farmer refuses because the Levite was under the farmer's hospitality and protection, and instead offers the hostile crowd of men his own virgin daughter, or the Levite's concubine, instead. Judges 19: 22-24. 

It isn't clear if they want to rape the Levite because they are craving gay sex, because the Levite is a stranger in the town, or because they have animosity towards the Hebrew people's priestly class.

The implication is that if the crowd of men wasn't placated with a girl or woman to rape, that they would have taken the Levite and raped him by force.

The men ultimately accept the Levite's concubine instead of the Levite himself and gang rape her all night until dawn, after which the Levite's concubine collapses on the farmer's doorstep. Judges 19:25-27. But the concubine was unable to speak when the Levite asked her to get ready to go (perhaps because she is unconscious and dying as a result of the brutal gang rape), so he put her on a donkey, finishes his trip, and when he arrives there, cuts her body into twelve pieces, and sends one piece to each of the twelve tribes of Israel (presumably to express his outrage at the situation and to protest the mistreatment of the Levite priesthood). Judges 19:28-30.

How We Got Here, And Where We Might Go Next

Proximately, the U.S. is in a bad way because Trump and MAGA secured a federal trifecta and also control the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the governmental apparatus of many states, because our laws do too little to discourage the concentration of economic power.

Political theory seeks to explain what factors in the complex political economy we live in led to this situation.

This post surveys some of the possible answers.

An institutionalist approach

An institutionalist approach is a social engineering outlook on why political systems work or do not work. It takes as an axiom the belief that the right rules and systems and organizations more or less directly produce good political economy outcomes, so reforming existing institutions is the path to a better political economy. 

This is closely aligned with a notion that the rule of law is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe) and is widely rejected in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in China).

Fundamentally Broken Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, other key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are broken. There are deep design flaws with the status quo that can't right itself without decisive, and indeed, perhaps revolutionary change in our institutions.

Common reform proposals in this approach are campaign finance reform, gun control, abolition of the electoral college, expansion of the franchise, proportional representation electoral systems or ranked choice voting, better procedural rules within legislative institutions, improved methods of selecting judges and other key public officials, tweaked checks and balances (like a unicameral legislature, a conversion from a Presidential to a parliamentary system, laws prohibiting corrupt practices enforced by effective enforcement agencies, and so on.

Imperfect, But Fundamentally Sound Institutions

The U.S. Constitution, related key laws, and important institutions of political and civic society (like political parties and the media) are flawed but are not fundamentally broken. These institutions are robust enough to eventually right the ship of our political economy, even though they aren't as fool proof and rapid as we'd like.

Really bad Presidents produce electoral backlash and encourage more competent people who otherwise would pursue careers other than politics to resist bad political leaders, which puts us back on track. But this feedback mechanism can't react much sooner than every couple of years, can't prevent serious abuses and failings, and often takes decades. Lessons learned in the last crisis are forgotten until we pay the price for forgetting those lessons again. In worst case scenarios, it can take long insurgencies or wars or full on Great Depressions to trigger support for the necessary reforms.

Bad high court judges need to be threatened with court packing to overcome their biases. Legal scholars seeing legal doctrines producing bad results propose new legal theories. New political parties need to replace old ones much like the GOP replaced the Whigs. People come to realize that voting for openly corrupt liars and criminals is maybe not such a good idea.

Culture

The main counterpart to an institutionalist approach to the success of a political economy (which has strong parallels in the economic development literature), observation that laws and institutions that are identical in all material respects can produce wildly different results, when people who are culturally different utilize these institutions.

This approach concludes that the character, morals, norms, and values of the people who use the institutions profoundly influence the quality of the political economy outcomes that a society produces, while the particulars of the institutional arrangements put in place to facilitate management of the political economy aren't particularly important within a fairly finite set of combinations of big choices in institutions.

Differences between the success of parliamentary systems and Presidential systems, in this view, have more to do with the political culture of the people utilizing those systems than with the inherent, universal virtues of different reasonable sets of institutions and rules. 

There may be some sets of institutions and rules that usually led to bad outcomes, but people with a good political culture can make any remotely reasonable set of institutions produce good outcomes, while people with a political culture ill-suited to their demands of their current circumstances will find a way to break any set of institutions and rules, no matter how expertly crafted.

The optimal political culture is also not universal. In times of economic hardship and scarce resources which give rise to weak states, cultures of honor, clan based societies, cousin marriage, and systems that reward might over right may be more functional. In times of economic abundance that facilitate the rise of strong states, more atomized social structure, meritocracy, forgiveness, out marriage, and systems that reward truth over power may be more functional.

For example, one way to explain the rise of Christianity in the Greco-Roman classical era is that Christianity was a tool of cultural change that helped a society that was becoming more abundant, more urban, and more mercantile transition managed by a strong state, and away from a Greco-Roman pagan culture more suited to rural living, herding, and tradition based allocations of resources, in small and weak states. The expansion of the Islamic empire likewise involved a massive cultural change from a decadent and disorganized society without strong state management in the post-Roman era to a society with more firm and decisive, yet decentralized leadership that functioned well in the absence of Western Roman Empire type institutions.

This cultural-first approach to political theory is closely aligned with a notion that rule by good and moral leaders is the key to a good society, something that is an article of faith in "Eastern culture" (with its roots in Chinese Confucianism) and is widely rejected in "Western culture" (with its roots in Western Europe), where the "rule of man" is synonymous with authoritarianism, corruption, and arbitrary treatment of people.

Malleable culture

One version of a cultural approach to political economy sees a society's political culture as harder to change in many respects than institutional rules, but feasible with measures like widespread public education, religious conversion or deconversion, and grass roots activism through "movement politics" over decades. And, while this takes longer to accomplish than institutional rule changes, it is almost more robust and enduring.

A malleable culture theory concludes that while the relative political leanings of groups and geographic regions with different cultures are persistent over time periods measured in centuries, that societal progress is attainable over time. Yesterday's segregationists become today's advocates of a color blind society without affirmative action. Yesterday's corporal punishment advocates become today's advocates of large fines and long sentences of incarceration. 

In absolute terms, society gradually abandons specific practices and norms that are conservative or backward at the time, while the descendants of people who held those specific practices and norms come to adopt views that were liberal in the times of their ancestors and are conservative now. But the descendants of the liberal leaning ancestors in turn, become even more progressive.

Even proponents of malleable culture approaches to political economy acknowledge that the process can be two steps forward and one step back. But ultimately, technology and the accumulation of knowledge and fundamental, universal human impulses that are masked by different immediate material conditions point humanity in the same general direction in the long terms (although there are shorter and longer routes to progress), so we progress more often than we regress.

Static culture

In contrast, a view that culture at an ethnic group or geographic area scale is predominantly static, even if isolated and exceptional individuals can change their cultures, see mass movements and programs to change a society's culture intentionally as largely futile.

It isn't that this view believes that the culture of a particular geographic area can't change. But, it sees the main mechanism for a change in the culture of a particular geographic area to be replacement of people of one ethnicity or mix of ethnicities with people of another ethnicity or group of ethnicities.

In this view, some of the main mechanisms of cultural change are colonization by people of a different ethnicity, genocide (through forcible abandonment of culture, actually murder, restrictions on fertility, or economic marginalization), immigration, and differential rates of births and deaths between ethnicities, with these mechanisms being particularly strong among men, while women more easily assimilate into new cultures in which they find themselves. This is also a more zero sum worldview. Flavored with ideas about ethnic or religious or cultural superiority, this can morph into righteous missionary zeal, ethnic nationalism and/or religious nationalism.

Along the same lines, languages associated with dominant cultures tend to increase their market share of language speakers in a society, while languages associated with economically marginal ethnicities tend to decrease their market share of language speakers in a society, in both cases at a pace measured primarily in generations, rather than within the lives of individual speakers of a language.

This outlook was heavily disfavored in the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world (under the motto that pots are not people), but has enjoyed a resurgence as research into ancient DNA, historical linguistics, and physical archaeology have been synthesized in a manner that has reviewed that over time frames of centuries and millennia, that these mechanism of demic change have been far more common than culture change through intercultural contact and elite dominance. Admittedly, there have been notable exceptions to this general trend (e.g. the linguistic transition of the country now known as Hungary, or the Brahui people, or the expansion of the Islamic empire, or the rise of Christianity). But cultural transition without demic change has been the exception rather than the norm.

This outlook on political economy, for example, perceives Zionism and the formation of new West Bank settlements in Israel, or ethnically and religiously motivated raids by Sahel Muslims from traditionally herding societies in Africa on Christian/animist communities to their immediate South, from a very different worldview framework than a worldview in which institutional approaches or malleable cultural views are the norm.

More generally, a political theory bent rooted in the worldview that culture is predominantly static, particularly when fused with the concepts of economic and environmentally driven cultural change discussed below, tends to see political tactics that "civilized society" condemns most intensely, as largely inevitable and natural, even if it is not morally desirable at an individual level.

Political worldviews and theories that emphasis the static nature of culture at the group and regional level are more sanguine about the inevitability of progress than those which see culture as malleable. These worldviews tend to see cultural progress as exceptions to the general rule that require specific and rarely recurring conditions, rather than as a universal law or inevitability.

Environmentally determined culture

A premise which is widely accepted in anthropology, but less widely accepted in political theory, is that people's material conditions determine which cultures are optimal for those conditions.

While no culture is inherently better than any other in a vacuum, in any given set of circumstances, some cultures are more functional than others.

Plough based agriculture tends to favor patriarchy and patrilocal clan systems. Hoe based agriculture and hunter-gatherer societies can tend to favor matriarchal social structures, with households often led by brother-sister couples rather than households led by monogamous co-parent households. 

Affluent, urban societies, without low rates of childhood morality that rely on skilled labor that takes many years of investment in human capital tend to favor small family households; poor, rural societies, with high rates of childhood mortality that rely on unskilled labor tend to favor large family households. 

Weak states tend to favor cultures of honor, and clan based social organization. Strong states tend to favor a focus on individual autonomy, meritocracy, rule based justice, and weaker extended family ties. 

Perceptions of economic scarcity and uncertainty favor conservatism and societies where religion and/or superstition are important. Perceptions of economic abundance and security favor secular, liberal societies that rely on science rather than superstition.

Perceptions of economic decline or stagnation of an ethnicity or geographic group or social class, and societies where the economy is heavily reliant upon economic rents like land ownership or fossil fuel resources, can further fascism, far-right movements, ethnic and religious nationalist movements, and support for authoritarianism. Shared prosperity in a society where the economy depends heavily on a diffuse class of merchants, professionals, and skilled labor rather than natural resources, in contrast, tend to further democracy, an absence of corruption, respect for individual rights, and tolerance for diversity.

Cultures ill-suited to their conditions decline, due to both conversion to better suited cultures and economic and demographic decline. Cultures well-suited to their conditions thrive. Conversely, religious institutions that support threatened cultures tend to thrive, while religious institutions associated with establishment, secure, dominant cultures tend to wither despite the fact that the communities that they serve tend to have more economic resources.

The notion that culture is economically or environmentally determined is relatively agnostic about whether culture is malleable or static, with their very different mechanisms and tactics that give rise to cultural change.

Synthesis

Of course, none of these political theories is 100% true. 

Even a strong culture oriented political theorists who takes a hard look at all the data will acknowledge that institutions and rules can matter, and can shape culture. You can see this particularly clearly when looking at the divergent paths taken by North Korea and South Korea, by Taiwan and mainland China, by East Germany and West Germany prior to unification and persisting in regional culture differences in the thirty-seven years that have elapsed since unification, even though the highly distinct institutions in these places that once shared a common culture including a political culture arose only about eighty years ago or less, in these cases.

On the other hand, scholarly works like Albion's Seed, and studies of persistent regional cultural differences in Germany (that predate the formation of a unified Germany state about 150 years ago), also establish that once regional or ethnic cultures are established, they are remarkably resilient in the face of institutional change and political unification, and can persist for centuries.

If you were to guess how politicians in the late 1700s and early 1800s in newly formed U.S. states leaned politically relative to each other on major groups of political issues like being pro-war or anti-war, or on economic or social issues, based upon the current political leanings of those states, you would overwhelming be correct 250 years plus or minus a few decades later.

The Catholic-Protestant divisions of Europe have been mostly static for the entire early modern period that started with the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s that were decided based upon the decisions of late stage feudal lords to choose one side or the other of this divide in European Christianity. And, those religious divisions, as famously noted by Max Weber in the 19th century, are associated with a whole suite of larger cultural divides epitomized by what he called the "Protestant work ethic."

Persistent culture divisions whose effects predominate in places where different cultures function within the same formal political institutions, like divisions in economic prosperity and political economy between regions dominated by different ethnic groups in Nigeria, whose characteristic cultures and cultural identities pre-date the relatively recent conversion of southern Nigeria to Christianity across a wide variety of diverse ethnicities starting in the 19th century or so, are still very real (even though many formal statistics on African immigrants to the U.S. aren't so fine grained and don't make these distinctions in their record keeping mask these differences).

In India, genetic testing has confirmed the anthropologically well-documented phenomena of caste endogamy and inequalities, pin pointing the time frame, centuries ago, when endogamous caste divisions at the jati level started to harden upon which historical accounts from those time periods were inconclusive and scarce, and eighty years of Indian independence with egalitarian institutions and ideals have only modestly dented the resilient cultural juggernaut of caste divides. Genetic studies also establish the time frame of the much older origins of varna level caste/ethnic divisions within India and help establish more clearly the magnitude, timing, and nature of introgression of people from one varna into another one.

Particularly in my own personal world and my own country, I am well aware that I instinctually lean towards institutional explanations and solutions, and that I also tend to favor malleable culture worldviews over static culture worldviews, to a greater degree than that evidence available to me supports.

How We Got Here

Each of these political theories naturally lends itself to a different narrative about how we go here, and the deeper driving factors behind the proximate causes of our woes.

Environmental determinism points to technological changes and human driven climate changes as the source of structural economic changes and changes to the U.S. social structure and social class system that has shunted the benefits of economic growth to an educated upper middle class serving a thin veneer of old money and new money billionaires and big businesses, and while reducing the less educated whom the modern economy has little use for, from a broad unifying middle class that has a stake in our society to a working class and underclass. The upper middle class has small stable prosperous families, while the working class is seeing their families fall apart despite having as many or more children, and their prospects for social mobility or comfort without generational wealth and social capital fading. The upper middle class has become far more secular, while comparatively the working class has remained more religious despite its long term trend away from religion as well.

The neo-fascist MAGA movement is, in this analysis, a natural consequence of two generations of economic stagnation for the non-college educated working class.

Static cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that there is a straight line from antebellum Southern whites to the KKK and Jim Crow and segregation supporters and American Nazis prior to WWII to opponents of the civil rights movement to MAGA.

Malleable cultural worldviews emphasize the fact that far right political viewholders skew heavily towards older white men while younger generations are much more liberal on a wide variety of issues. They note that the divorce between the MAGA worldview and reality is the product of intentional propaganda by billionaire class funded conservative media outlets like Fox News, conservative think tanks, talk radio, and fundamentalist Christians and Christian clergy who are wary of reality based inquiry because it undermines their religious doctrines, and can be reversed with carefully crafted interventions to deprogram MAGA adherents.

Institutionalists who see the system as fundamentally broken see the proximate causes of our woes as more directly caused by particular flaws in our Microsoft of political systems which was state of the art in the late 1700s, but had rules that didn't benefit from the next couple of centuries of experience with democratic political institutions which addressed the inherent flaws in our own system which the Founders, not being omniscient, and with their own narrow franchise and biases could not have foreseen. The trouble is, that if indeed, our Institutions are fundamentally and deeply broken, there is no clear path to fixing them.

Institutionalists who see the system as flaws but fundamentally sound, in contrast, acknowledge that the flaws in our system have prevented our political system from preventing or more swiftly ending the MAGA scourge. But they are more optimistic and stoic. In an analog to the idea that suppressing all wildfires can make a forest more vulnerable to more devastating big wildfires, or to the hygienic hypothesis that an environment that is too sterile and devoid of threats can lead to autoimmune diseases and allergies because the immune system didn't have a chance to do its job non-pathologically, they argue that as unpleasant as it is at the time, healthy political economies need periodic threats to its values so that the people served by them remain vigilant in developing a combination of institutions and political cultures that can defeat even strong threats to their health.

People never exposed to fraud become too trusting and become easy marks (something that is a big problem in the overall high trust society of Mormon Utah). Politicians who grow too used to playing nice with their political opponents forget the tactics that their predecessors used to win when their political opponents didn't play fair. 

A near miss constitutional crisis of our political economy with fascism and authoritarianism, with an scary dose of corruption and lies, may be what it takes to build broad enough support to fix the most important institutional flaws in the status quo, much like the U.S. did in the New Deal, and again in the 1960s and 1970s.

Institutionalists who see the "bones" of U.S. political institutions as fundamentally sound will note that the U.S. system has been good enough to last 250 years including multiple comparably bad or worse political crises, like those leading up to, during, and following the U.S. Civil War. And, they see the gridlock and shifting political coalitions that have predominated in the time frame from the 1980s to the present, as a feature rather than a bug, by preventing thin majorities from making big and bold political changes in the absence of widespread, bipartisan, cross-ethnic, cross-regional support. Our federal system funnels paths to innovations to the states and refrains from making big changes until with the passage of time, some approaches are widely understood to be desirable, and other approaches are seen as failures. And, like the seventy year plus era of doctrinaire communism in Eastern Europe, China, and Southeast Asia, on one side, and mixed capitalism in the "West" and some Western leaning East Asian nations, this deadlock can seem completely intractable and static, until sudden it collapses, with Eastern European communism collapsing in just a few years, and Asian communism more resiliently adopting market-style reforms to the point where it has become communism in name only with billionaire capitalists holding all positions of power in these one party states.

We saw something similar leading up to the abolition of slavery in the United States. This issue divided the new republic for eight-five years from its inception right up until 1861, only for slavery to be formally abolished four years later all at once, in turn followed after a brief reconstruction interlude, with another eight-five years of so of Jim Crow, only for that institution to in turn collapse over the course of about a decade when it had seemed in 1950 that Jim Crown might persist eternally. Sixty years after the Civil Rights movement had achieved most of its major objectives, MAGA is trying its best to undo the reforms of the civil rights era in a last dying eruption of a movement that know that democracy will mean its death as socially and economically regressive Baby Boomers, some of whom were born in the era of segregated water fountains, bathrooms, and schools, die and reduce their share of the electorate only to be replaced by liberal Generations Z and Alpha in the electorate for whom racial diversity is second nature and is their generation's reality.

Trump has been a racist all of his life, just like his Nazi father. Joe Biden came around later in his political career, but got started in Congress on a platform of opposition to school desegregation in Delaware. Many of the leaders in Congress, and especially in the U.S. Senate, are from that same generation and still wear ideological and worldview boots of clay developed in their politically formative years.

Eventually, however, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, dementia, COVID, geriatric falls, and the like will do the job of replacing them with the next generation of politicians, that Baby Boomers have prevented from happening in the ordinary course as it should have a couple of decades ago.

The midterms in 2026 could end the GOP's trifecta control of the federal government and reducing the bleeding that our national institutions and esteem on the global stage have been suffering. Ideally, its defeat could be crippling enough to lead to the GOP's replacement with some new center-right opposition party that starts over after MAGA has burned all of the GOP's bridges and poisoned the well with several younger generations. Democrats could take the Presidency in 2028 with majorities not seen in recent memory and a commitment to play hardball after the horrors of Trump 2.0, and make enough major reforms to put the U.S.A. on track again with wide consensus backing, even though it may take decades to undo the damage done by Trump already that is not irreparable. And, if that happens, the Institutionalists who believe that flawed as it is, that the U.S. political system is not broken beyond all repair, will be vindicated. The fact that the U.S. has weathered past crises makes this a far from unlikely scenario, and the optimist in my wants to hope that they are right. Polling leading up to the midterms that are barely more than five months away, suggest that they might be right. 

While MAGA stayed loyal during Trump 1.0, his more radical Trump 2.0 term has finally seen Trump's steadfast support start to erode and has seen some prominent GOP/MAGA leaders, like Marjorie Taylor Green, break ranks with him.

What Happens If We Don't Escape And End Up In A Deeper Circle of Hell?

I want to believe that they are right, because the alternatives are very dark indeed. If Democrats can't do this over the next three years or so, because its institutions are too badly broken to return the nation to a positive path, all of the paths before us are nightmares.

One need look no further than North Korea, Cuba, Albania until the fall of communism, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, East Germany, the Soviet Union, post-Soviet Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the slave states of the U.S. prior to the U.S. Civil War, to observe that the fact that a regime is authoritarian, undemocratic, and performs dismally economically in its non-natural resource sector, and faces significant sustained pressure from  the international community to reform, does not mean that these regimes are fragile or vulnerable to prompt collapse. Eventually, many of these regimes did collapse. But it took an entire lifetime or so to do fall, and more often than not it took an international military intervention (or at least a costly cold war interspersed with periodic hot proxy wars) to make it happen.

The U.S. is to big and militarily powerful for a turn for the worse to be cured with a foreign military invasion of the U.S. to liberate us any time soon. 

If one of the darker scenarios has developed in the U.S. by 2028 or 2030, it is entirely possible that the U.S. will degenerate into a full fledged malevolent dictatorship and remain in that state until sometime in the early twenty-second century. 

This dark era for the U.S. could possibly punctuated by an ugly and deadly military insurgency, and waves of assassinations, asymmetric warfare, sabotage, and non-violent resistance that persists as long as Afghanistan has been in a state of near continual war since the 1970s, that may only end or at least subside when it is put down with brutal ruthless efficiency that scars our nation with horrors we have yet to imagine like the annihilation of every soul in a whole liberal leaning rebellious metropolitan area like Minneapolis, rather than a mere attempted ICE and National Guard driven show of force. The Handmaid's Tale was meant to be a warning and not a prophecy, but there is no certainty that it won't turn out to be one.

There are happier paths that one could imagine, like a bloodless coup that is followed by a new covenant that replaces our existing political and economic institutions, if the existing ones don't solve the problem in the next three year or so, that reboot our nation in some manner or another, or a wave of blue state successions, that leaves unsubsidized red state America in a state of total economic collapse, and followed by reform or reunification.

One could also imagine something like the experience of the Romans, who first transformed from a genuine Republic, to a more flawed Republic, to a truly non-democratic empire, stuttering from crisis to crisis, with bandaid temporary political fixes that don't last, punctuated with emperors like Nero and Caligula, who are still remembered about two thousand years later for their perfidy and insanity. Trump could end up being a model for future corrupt, authoritarian, delusional demagogues who are equally bad, but even less restrained by the democratic actions of the electorate or the courts or federalism or military independence, than Trump 2.0 which is actually exploring every avenue to end these constraints upon it.

Some of these nightmares seem almost unthinkable now, after the imperfect and slow mechanisms and institutions for slowing down Trump and MAGA's destruction of the federal government and everything good in the United States of America finally started to kick in. But the United States doesn't get three strikes. If the midterms to provide a decisive and effective check on Trump 2.0 in what has so far been a Congress that has ceded its responsibilities, we'll be lucky to get a federal election at all in 2028, and if there is one then, it will probably be less free and less fair (despite the fact that Republicans are pulling out all stops to undermine the regularity of the 2026 elections and to persecute Trump's enemies with no regard to the law or any notion of anything greater than Trump's momentary whims).

If Americans, collectively, fail to decisively interrupt its current course in either 2026 or 2028, we're pretty much done. Democracy and democratic values and the rule of law and civil liberties will be no more, and there will be no way back within the confined of legal political action or even civil disobedience. The U.S. is too big, and too culturally divided to secure the final turnabout that ousted a far right authoritarian regime in Hungary earlier this year.

Those who can will become political refugees, much like the scientists who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, and fled the Soviet Union as it grew ever more oppressive. Those who can't will suffer, or sell their souls for petty subordinate power at the whim of some unsteady dictator (probably not Trump for long, given his ill-health and age, but possibly some successor who is equally evil but more competent).