Once the Quebeckers finally declared their independence, it could not be long before the Maritime provinces, isolated from the rest of English-speaking Canada, sought accession to the United States. They were followed soon enough by the remainder. Conservatives in the Senate were opposed, knowing that the political balance would be shifted decisively against them. But it was hard to resist something that had been so clearly envisaged by the Founding Fathers. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the nine new states had been “preadmitted” all along since 1787.
In 2025 two of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates and cyborg Warren Buffett, pronounced that Marx had been right all along about the general direction of capitalism. They pledged to put their fortunes at the disposal of any movement that promised to address the enlarged nation’s mounting economic and social problems through a generally socialist programme. In 2030 a “coalition of the people” captured both houses of Congress, the Presidency and enough states to permit a fundamental overhaul of the 250 year old constitution. The new settlement placed severe curbs on corporate and religious interference in politics and began to rein back on extremes of wealth and income through the tax system. Individual states began to pursue welfarist, even collectivist, social policies. But perhaps the coalition’s boldest and most far-reaching reform was the constitutional ban on paid-for advocacy, which finally put an end to that bane of the American way of life – the legal profession.
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Jasper Johns
Author: Jim Robertson
