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| Genghis |
The path forward for the US is perfectly clear: there isn't one. At least there isn't a path forward for the US as it had been conceived of and constituted up to but not including the present. Of course, something or other will continue happening, no matter how nasty and dismal. For example, a viable though particularly nasty development would be to bring back the institution of slavery, in the form of prison labor. The system is already in place; it just needs to be enlarged. One traditional way of enlarging it, perfected during the Great Depression, is to dispossess millions of people, then arrest and imprison them for vagrancy.
I will have more to say about this later, but what I want to do here is take many steps back and look at an interesting hypothetical situation: what would Genghis do? What would come of the US if it were part of Genghis Khan's Empire of the Blue Sky?
The Mongol Empire, or the Empire of the Blue Sky, once encompassed most of Eurasia and the Russian Federation, in many ways its inheritor, still encompasses a major chunk of it. When the Golden Horde (the westernmost part of the Mongol Empire) faded out, it melded with the Russian Empire which was burgeoning at the time, and as the Russian Empire spread east toward the Pacific and China it absorbed peoples already inured to Mongol rule as a superior alternative to the horrible fate of endlessly fighting each other. It took some time for the Mongol term "yasak" (tribute) to be replaced with the Russian "nalog" (tax). It is Genghis Khan's great genius, and the ethos it produced, that has produced the world's largest land empire that, under different names, has persisted for seven centuries, and that neither Napoleon nor Hitler could destroy.
The Empire of the Blue Sky was prevented from expanding to the Americas by the geographic impediment of the Bering Strait (the Mongols were not seafarers, which is why they conquered and ruled Korea but not Japan). But Bering Strait was a land bridge as recently as 13000 years ago, and so this is just a quirk of timing. For the sake of this discussion, we'll assume that the descendants of Genghis were able to drive their herds and their wagons loaded with yurts across to the Americas and after a few decisive battles, and perhaps some slaughtering of the uncooperative and the unreasonable, peace was established. Let's imagine the empire died back a bit in recent decades because of drought on the prairie, but after a few years of plentiful rains its herds recovered and it came roaring back. Upon stampeding into Washington to sort things out once again... what would the Great Khan find on arrival? And what would he do about it?
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