The 20th century was the American century. By the close of the 21st, America will no longer be ascendant. It will play second fiddle to Canadian and Oriental powers. The Bush Presidency is the point of inflection, but the groundwork for the decline began much earlier. The Environment: An unholy alliance between a complacent populace and a short-sighted private sector makes necessary changes impossible. Despite warning supply shocks as early as 1973, the nation continues to be largely dependent on fossil fuels, much of them imported. Despite mounting scientific evidence of climatic shifts due to global warming, the populace is confused by corporate-sponsored research to the contrary. Half of America's topsoil is gone. By 2100, the nation's breadbasket will be a dustbowl and Canada will inherit an arable climate by global warming. The bedrock of the American information boom, and our industrial society, are the people who wake up hungry every morning, and we aren't going to have the food. Wind, geothermal and solar energies are maturing, recycling is much farther advanced in Europe and Japan, but the US lags. The Bush Presidency, with its ties to Halliburton and Enron, both powerful fossil fuel companies, will not take the unpopular but necessary steps to prevent increased pollution. The loss of Gore, arguably the best hope for a reversal of environmental damage, will be a lesson to both parties that this issue doesn't resonate with most Americans, and will not until it is too late. True, a broader coalition of Nader and Gore voters could have risen above the ability of Bush to carve out a tricky win, but Democrat strategists are going to move right beat Bush next time, not left, because there are more votes to be had that way.

Race: The white hegemony will be under attack as its majority becomes a plurality among the growing black, Hispanic and other ethnic populations. Expect economic oppression of the majority by free-market capitalism to spark violence. The Bush Presidency, with its poor record on civil rights, execution of a disproportionate number of minority convicts, opposition to Affirmative Action, and suppression of the Floridian black vote will exacerbate this problem. Fully one-third of black males 18-24 are behind bars, awaiting trial, or on parole. Disenfranchisement of male black voters unwinds the clock towards '70s South Africa. Intellectually, the rule of law will be discarded when Native Americans fight for treaty compliance in the courts. Manifest destiny does become indefensible once its white supremacist rationale is repudiated, and its ethnocentric Christianity relativized by political correctness, but no matter. Might will triumph over right, but not without an energy-sapping fight.

Economics: America will continue to press the private sector to extend into areas unsuitable for it, such as health care and retirement. While every other industrialized nation has nationalized health care, America has it only for seniors. Health care takes up 13% of GDP, compared to 8% for nationalized health care, and we get inferior service, judging by infant mortality and other measures. The extra 5% goes to private bureaucrats, liability lawsuits, and remedial care of ailments pro-actively prevented by universal health care. The clinic is cheaper than the emergency room. The Bush Presidency, with its private-company friendly drug plan, and its partial privatization of social security plan, will continue to move the mixed economy further into inefficient free market solutions than any other successful world economy.

Class Stratification: With a Bush Presidency, the populace is already looking backward, toward parentage, wealth and history, rather than future accomplishments. Kennedy, the last visionary President, took us to the moon. Bush will take us back to the clubroom of insider scheming and power brokering. The middle class has been losing ground for the last 25 years. In many metropolitan areas, the average household can no longer afford a new car, or even a house. The decline of union manufacturing jobs, the rise of the service economy, and the proliferation of CEOs with princely compensation packages complete this picture.

Erosion of Freedom: American citizens surrender their freedoms when they walk through their employers' doors. No freedom of speech, conscience, assembly, or redress of grievances occur at most workplaces. Whistleblowers are usually destroyed economically, and some, like Karen Silkwood, physically. The fear of costly litigation creates a perilous, cautious society without effective freedom of expression. The courts are increasingly used as tools by the powerful to keep the underclass in check. George W. Bush is a creature of corporate giving that would seek to extend the trend of increased, over reaching power by big business, and was effectively handed the Presidency by the Supreme Court.

Education: America continues to fall behind other countries in the depth, and vigor of its schools. We, in a recent study, fell behind Saudi Arabia in math skills. Without the propertied franchisement of a well-educated middle class, there can be no democracy. The Bush education initiative is illusory. He is talking about training for corporate information workers, not the critical thinking that is needed for informed judgements. The testing he wants is all about rote learning and math, not anything approaching intelligence… much less wisdom. The credibility of this campaign centerpiece depends on the ignorance of the American voter. Voters must not know that education is tangential to the priorities of the federal government, or that education is only 6% federally funded.

Censorship: The corporate mass media will continue to engage in trick photography, focussing on the frantic attempts of a few to climb out of the underclass while cropping the picture so you can't see the guys at the top pulling the ladder out of reach. The Republican spin machine, financed through big corporate money, borrows propagandist techniques of reinforcement and entertainment from Hitler, Skinner and Madison Avenue. Appeal to reason is absent, since television age viewers don't accept arguments as well as they soak up sensory stimulation. Media serves its corporate parents, not the public's right to know. They even bleat on about 'Liberal Media', when the very fact that this is a big story shows the conservative push to make this unreality real. There are precious few, marginalized, and fading alternative voices courageous enough to tell the truth about the corporate media. Much of it is in trouble, like Salon.com, or tiny, like Mother Jones. There are hundreds of conservative, pro-business voices, like Rush Limbaugh, but you would be hard pressed to find a liberal comentator. Most important news is neglected. A few innocuous stories saturate the homogeneous, concentrated media outlets, giving the illusion that information is plentiful. Bush cut his campaigner teeth through his father's Willie Horton/Flag Burning pseudo-scandal days, and learned his lessons well, of how attack ads compellingly displayed trump intellect, experience, and even a popular agenda.

Religion: We have traded the cosmopolitan universalist deism of our founders for the repressive fundamentalism of the rural south. The followers of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are intolerant, sexist, Homo-phobic, anti-intellectual, and believe an apocalyptic script that should make reasonable folk very afraid. Their fundamentalism extends to a literalist interpretation of the Constitution as well, justifying rampant gun ownership, rogue militia groups and failing to adapt the document to modern circumstances, stifling needed change. Bush is a darling of the Christian Right, claims to be born-again, and wants strict constructionist judges.

This is why the Bush Presidency is the beginning of the end. While we have many good years left, the US of our grandchildren will bear no resemblance to the world power we are today. Faced with this decline, we can work against it, but the powerful and the popular have bought in to a mass hallucination that makes these trends look good.