News from a future America that, at the time of writing, has not yet completely lost its mind.
Something extraordinary has happened in America.
MAGA is dead.
In its place has arisen a vast populist movement sweeping through the very states that once formed the heartland of Trumpism. Its supporters are angry, patriotic and thoroughly fed up with being told that prosperity is coming next Tuesday.
They have a new slogan:
MAKE AMERICA SOCIALIST AGAIN.
MASA.
There is, admittedly, a small historical problem with this, a minor inconvenience : America has never been socialist.
But that’s a nicety which must be – and will continue to be- muted. Since when did reality and ideology coalesce?
Nobody worried too much about the historical precision of Make America Great Again, either. Again is useful political word because it describes a past that exists outside of the space-time continuum in a purely ultra dimensional three body problem reality. .
When exactly was America great? I mean historically speaking?
Was it the 1950s, when much of the country was segregated? The 1920s, before the Great Depression? The nineteenth century, with slavery followed by Jim Crow? Perhaps the 1980s, although anyone who actually lived through them may remember interest rates, recessions, crack cocaine and an alarming quantity of shoulder pads.
America has unquestionably achieved great things. The more difficult question is whether there was ever a particular historical moment when the country as a whole existed in the state of absolute greatness implied by the slogan.
Fortunately, nostalgia does not require footnotes.
Neither does MASA.
America has never been socialist, but it is going to become socialist again.
Try not to overthink it because there is another minor difficulty to accommodate.
Somebody ordered 40 million hats saying MASS and nobody noticed until they arrived from China.
By then it was too late.
Fox News had already denounced the MASS movement. CNN had assembled a panel to discuss the MASS movement. The New York Times had published an 8,000-word investigation into the origins of MASS, and three universities were offering postgraduate courses in MASS Studies.
Pointing out that Make America Socialist Again abbreviates to MASA, not MASS, is now considered unnecessarily pedantic and possibly counter-revolutionary.
America has therefore entered the socialist era in much the same way it enters most eras: with a branding error.
Socialism Without the Socialism
The really clever thing about MASA—or MASS, depending on which hat you bought—is that nobody is allowed to call it socialism.
Socialism remains deeply suspicious.
MASA is about freedom.
Universal healthcare becomes Healthcare Freedom. Free university tuition becomes Education Freedom. Rent controls are Apartment Freedom, while nationalising the railways is Train Freedom.
Even taxation has been rebranded. Taxes are now Mandatory Patriotic Freedom Contributions, which polling has established are considerably more popular than taxes.
The government doesn’t nationalise a company anymore. That would far too Marxist and even worse European. No way. It returns the company to the American family.
This has proved enormously popular with people who remain absolutely opposed to socialism. No commie bastards in our movement.
“I hate socialism,” explains one Kentucky truck driver while collecting his government fuel subsidy and free prescriptions. “That’s why I joined MASA.”
The movement has achieved what generations of Marxists could not: it has persuaded Americans to embrace socialist policies by repeatedly assuring them that they are not socialist.
Karl Marx has quietly disappeared from the promotional material because focus groups thought he looked European.
He has been replaced by a bald eagle, a quintessentially patriotic symbol.
President Alexandria Is Coming
At the centre of this entirely fictional future is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now universally known to supporters as President Alexandria, partly because it sounds revolutionary and partly because nobody wants to fit Ocasio-Cortez onto another hat.
JD Vance attempts to fight back, only for Republicans to discover that campaigning against government benefits becomes surprisingly difficult once their own voters decide they would quite like some.
The Republican Party consequently announces that it remains absolutely opposed to socialism while introducing the American Freedom Healthcare Guarantee, the American Workers Wage Protection Programme and the Strategic Patriotic Food Price Stabilisation Authority.
All three bear an uncomfortable resemblance to socialist government intervention.
They are not socialist, Republican officials insist, because they contain the word American.
Wall Street Discovers the Revolution
Wall Street initially reacts calmly to MASA. Then somebody reads the manifesto. Sharp intakes of breath then panic sets in.
By lunchtime several hedge-fund managers have applied for political asylum in Switzerland.
MASA in its mission statement intends to tax billionaires, regulate private equity, expand healthcare, build millions of homes and rebuild America’s infrastructure.
The programme is trends well on social media. The algorithms compute a unanimous me like and the hits just keep on coming. .
There is only one minor problem. An Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikinil problem
America is already ginormously in debt.
The United States government owes tens of trillions of dollars. MASA economists address this first contact with economic reality through an innovative fiscal doctrine known as Not Talking About It.
When asked how the programme will be financed, officials explain that billionaires will pay.
When asked what happens after the billionaires have paid, they explain that the billionaires will pay again. And again.
When economists point out that you cannot confiscate the same fortune ever time the figures reveal an economic architecture built on debt, they are accused of using legacy arithmetic and bad energy.
The Department of Inclusive Mathematics is investigating parallel algorithmic equations, the sleight of hand previously known as printing money.
What About Trump? The Maga bogeyman under the stairs
Then comes the question everybody wants answered.
The more excitable wing of MASA wants him imprisoned.
This might provide considerable emotional satisfaction to his opponents, but criminal punishment in a democracy is supposed to depend on evidence, law and judicial process rather than political demand.
There is also a more immediate problem.
Putting Trump in prison does not balance the federal budget.
Economists have modelled this extensively.
Even putting him in prison twice does not work.
Trump could theoretically be sentenced to 400 years and America’s national debt would remain stubbornly unaffected.
The Treasury therefore classifies imprisoning Trump as fiscally neutral.
Eat the Rich, But Keep the Receipts
Attention consequently moves to America’s oligarchs.
MASA has branded them the Epstein-Crypto-Oligarch Complex, a term sufficiently elastic to include almost anybody who owns both a cryptocurrency wallet and an aircraft.
Their yachts will be seized, their mansions taxed and their offshore accounts investigated. Private jets will be converted into public transport.
Unfortunately, confiscating the possessions of the super-rich still doesn’t solve the fundamental problem.
You can take a billionaire’s yacht only once.
After that, you simply own a yacht.
Worse, the federal government must maintain it.
Within eighteen months the Department of Transportation is spending $14 million annually on a 90-metre superyacht nobody knows how to sell because MASA has abolished billionaires.
The Dollar Has Not Joined MASA
The greatest threat to the revolution, however, is neither Republicans nor billionaires.
It is the bond market, stupid, doh!
The bond market doesn’t attend rallies and doesn’t wear hats. It simply looks at the numbers and quietly decides how much interest it wants before lending you another trillion dollars.
This makes it extremely dangerous.
America possesses an extraordinary advantage because the dollar sits at the centre of the international financial system. Governments, businesses and investors around the world use dollars and hold dollar-denominated assets.
MASA therefore has to perform a difficult balancing act. It must dramatically expand the social state while maintaining confidence in American finances and the international position of the dollar, all while explaining to voters that nobody except billionaires will have to pay for anything.
The first proposal is to print more money.
Someone mentions inflation.
That person is transferred to Alaska.
The Magnificent Power of “Again”
Eventually, the entire revolution comes back to one small word.
Again.
It was the most important word in MAGA and it becomes the funniest word in MASA.
Make America Great Again asks you to remember a magnificent America without requiring anyone to agree precisely when it existed or for whom it was magnificent.
Make America Socialist Again goes one better by asking Americans to remember something that never happened at all.
But perhaps that is the genius of American political marketing.
The past does not have to have existed.
It merely has to feel as though it should have.
MAGA offered a remembered golden age. MASA offers an entirely imaginary one.
One promises to recover a greatness whose historical address remains elusive. The other promises to restore a socialism that never existed.
And somewhere between them sits the United States itself: extraordinarily rich, enormously powerful, deeply indebted and perpetually trying to return to somewhere it has never actually been.
Eventually President Alexandria will sit in the Oval Office with the Treasury Secretary, staring at several horrifying spreadsheets, and realise that America needs one final movement.
MASA.
Make America Solvent Again.
America may never have been that either.
But by now everyone understands that Again is just a nicety. It doesn’t need to have happened …to have happened.
