Slate Magazine69%
This Is What America Is Like at 250. But What Will We Be Like at 500? 38%
By Luke Winkie0%
7/4/2026, 9:40:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Politically Left Leaning Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 33.1% saturation with 383 hits. Analysis detected 1,084 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,157 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.9% and a BS Rank of 38% (13,673 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.50% of the article peer group.
This Is What America Is Like at 250.
But What Will We Be Like at 500?
I made some guesses.
2026 turns out to be an awkward time to reflect upon the 250<sup>th</sup> birthday of the United States.
Our great nation’s international esteem has flatlined under the incredible weight of the second Trump administration.
Normal Americans have to hold out hope that this current derangement is an outlier.
Surely, two and a half centuries of democracy won’t peter out with a vengeful reality-TV veteran settling long-standing neoconservative scores—bombing Iran, threatening to decapitate Cuba, fetishizing a 1950s-style social contract, and so on.
Eventually, the fever will break, and the world shall once again rotate on its axis correctly.
The story of America, and its many contradictions, will proceed accordingly, and the person at the control panel won’t be Donald Trump.
Because really, 250 years is an <em>extremely long </em>time.
When George Washington fell ill in 1799, doctors attempted to cure him by draining five pints of blood from his body, because that was the scientific consensus in the age of our nation’s founding.
(Unsurprisingly, Washington died shortly afterward.)
Certain vestigial connections to the Revolution remain in place—we have the same Constitution, the same ill-defined values—but everything else has been torn down and built back up a hundred times over.
Do you ever think about how for the entirety of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, one ongoing political debate centered around the establishment of a National Bank?
What about the fact that Charles J.
Guiteau assassinated president James A.
Garfield over, of all things, civil service reform?
These issues have been rendered completely incoherent by the passage of time.
It makes you wonder how Americans of distant future generations will consider our current fixation on, like, data centers, or plastic surgery, or GLP-1s.
This is what got me thinking about what the United States might look like 250 years from now, at the quincentennial, America’s 500<sup>th</sup> anniversary.
Assuming we make it to this easier-to-pronounce milestone, what will be the discourses by then?
Will they have any relation whatsoever to the anxieties of modernity?
What dark ages and golden ages await, further down the line?
Here are my best guesses.
* A postliterate society is cemented by the early 2100s, requiring an institutions-wide effort to translate the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation et al. into the language of short-form video, much like Protestants did with New King James Bible in the 1980s.
(“We hold these truths to be bussin',” and so on.)
* Zohran Mamdani not being born in the United States is remembered by the American left as a universe-altering tragedy of fate, on the same level as Abraham Lincoln naming Andrew Johnson his vice president.
* The Great Data Leak finally occurs, exposing all text messages, DMs, Google search histories, and so on to the public.
This completely inverts our relation to privacy, in an unexpected, positive way.
Subtweets are expressed out in the open.
Gossip reigns.
Pornography is consumed with zero shame.
We are a happier, freer, and more honest society.
* Relatedly, the OnlyFans Union becomes America's most powerful bastion of labor power.
* Taylor Swift gets divorced and remarries on at least five different occasions, producing a family tree that attains a certain Kennedy-esque stature in American life.
* "Fuentes studies" is offered at certain universities, "Mangione studies" at others.
* Meanwhile, college Classics programs—withered by postliteracy—now entirely consist of students reading and studying magazine articles, like Edith Zimmerman’s GQ profile of Chris Evans.
Community colleges, on the other hand, have long shed their trade-school applicability, and basically just offer classes in rage bait, algorithm-juicing, virality, performative relatability, et al.
* The 100<sup>th</sup> season of <em>Survivor </em>is set on Mars, and the show is finally canceled after everyone dies during some sort of SpaceX-sponsored endurance hold.
* One of the most visited destinations in D.C. is the former Trump Presidential Library.
Originally, he had constructed it on top of the Reflecting Pool in a last-ditch effort to cover up the mess that haunted his last term.
But soon after his death, his various creditors convert it into a casino that proves to be generally popular on a bipartisan level.
* Elon Musk, still alive at the quincentenary, sets the Guinness World Record for total number of children fathered, and total number of children estranged.
* Everyone born after 2050 is left to assume Charlie Kirk was some sort of Buster Keaton–style comic actor, rather than a political commentator.
* Los Angeles experiences a total population collapse.
The surrounding hamlets—Oxnard, Pasadena, Burbank—retain their density, but the city itself is rendered a Mad Max–esque wasteland.
All that's left is Dodgers Stadium and the Ace Hotel.
Everyone is basically OK with this.
* Meanwhile, New York housing prices continue to spiral out of control, leading to some truly baroque and fucked-up developments as young people move further out into the hinterlands.
(In 2100, there is such a thing as an "Ozone Park rave scene.")
* There's One Dakota, and One Carolina, but a hellish and unnavigable Three Virginias.
* Additionally, it's just "Hampshire" now.
* Florida solidifies its status as the social and intellectual hub for American conservatism, to the point that every fascist Twitch streamer, crypto dork, and tradwife influencer eventually takes up residency in the state.
Many of them live inside of submarines due to coastal flooding caused by climate change.
But unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably, Florida's uniparty consensus is shattered after one too many heated debates about the age of consent.
* A.I. never proves to have any society-altering utility, and is exclusively deployed to create Girl Talk–style mashups of pop songs.
* Due to the 50-year-long presidency of J.D.
Vance—heretofore known as the Dark Ages—Millard Fillmore retroactively emerges as one of the most celebrated presidents of all time, though, unfortunately, that is mostly due to his anti-Catholic sentiment.
* Similarly, the implosion of Vance's dominance occurs when he attempts to forcibly annex Greenland, and is flummoxed after the country closes down the Baffin Bay.
* Sydney Sweeney marries Barron Trump, and their great-great-great-great-great grandchild—Jaxson Trump—hosts the sparsely attended celebration in the National Mall for the 500<sup>th</sup> anniversary.
* American football freefalls into irrelevance, as outlined in the Chuck Klosterman book, due to a combination of fan indifference and an implosion of traditional advertising models.
Tom Brady never gets consecrated with the same mythic status as Babe Ruth, and instead occupies the same cultural terrain of, say, Timothée Chalamet's character in <em>Marty Supreme</em>.
* Soccer becomes MAGA, as flyover America realizes that European-style racism possesses refined ferocity similar to their own.
This is horrible news for the many "Arsenal bars" that dot the country's liberal enclaves, but this is alleviated by a development that can only be described as "Woke NASCAR."
* Still no Cowboys Super Bowl.
Speakers
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