Future fumbles

Here for fun is the syllabus of a college course that might be taught in 40 years:

History 210 / Professor Nivram

The Crisis of the 21st Century is a commonly applied name for the almost-collapse of the United States in recent decades. Students who took my classical history course last year and read about Diocletian will note the resemblances to the Crisis of the Third Century in the Roman Empire.

The United States pulled back internationally beginning in 2009, with dramatic results (see the No. 1 best-seller Death in Tel Aviv). Domestically, over-spending and deficits led to disaster—as the federal government printed more money to pay for spiraling Social Security and healthcare costs, double-digit inflation became common.

Political rhetoric grew more heated as partisans frustrated by foreign or domestic policy attacked each other as nests of lying liars. Between 2015 and 2040 no president after more than six months in office had approval ratings over 30 percent. Over time the four different parts of the United States took on different looks: Pundits regularly wrote about the libertine Northeast, stolid Midwest, faith-oriented South, and libertarian West.

A constitutional convention agreed that the United States was ungovernable as a single nation, and in 2049 the country split into four sections, which journalists dubbed the Tetrarchy (from the Greek word for four leaders). Northeast President Dick Cletian ruled with strong support from the Muslim-majority state of New Jersey. Meanwhile, Christian influence grew in the West as missionaries from Korea and Christian China flooded in, and descendants of Mexican immigrants became more influential. The South remained Christian-influenced.

This course not only will use video and occasional 500-word reading assignments but also Feelivision discs to give you a visceral sense of the passing scenes. Key issues we will examine in this course include the problems of leadership in a divided culture, the role of healthcare costs in breaking the budget, and U.S. relations with Eurabia.