Overview

The year is 2057. The place is America. The Great Upheaval has begun, and Morgan Whitaker is dead. Morgan was an intellectual brawler and a dangerous one. His splenetic indictment of his son John at a debate over the fate of a teetering America broadcast to the world removed its life support. Throughout his early years, John's esteem for the Founding order of reason and faith stood against his father's cold assessment of America as a nation of liars. John's vision was to return America to reason and morality, but not Morgan. He trafficked in the tribal aggression Americans came to embrace as blasphemous to violate. Both men knew America's Founders sought to save Americans from this outcome with governance of, by, and for unstable humans. Though John learned too late that the Founders had handed America a time bomb. Stable society could not persist in modernity because it found no home in the malignant autonomy of individuals without belonging and the meaning it provides. As John struggles to douse the fire his father lit, barricades to passion buckle under the assault. As the marble eyes of monuments watch, Washington, DC, appears as a modern-day Pompeii. The nation burns under a molten storm of patricide from the Mount Vesuvius of its military-industrial complex riven between the clans. The Culture War is finally hot. Fanned by foreign clout, gorged by primate emotions, and the comforting satisfaction of hate favored by innate evolutionary psychology. What is the fate of America? Now we know. This is what the fall of civilization looks like.