Letters From The Future

[lettersfromthefuture]

Detroit, Michigan, July 2032

Illustration by Christine Bedenis

[lettersfromthefuture]

Writing On The Wall

Let’s go back to the mid-2020s one more time. It’s 2026, during election season. You’re running for Congress, and it’s the last time you will represent a big district before the Apportionment Act kicks in for 2028. What’s your pitch to your voters? Why are they sending you to Washington?

It doesn’t work anymore to ignore your voters. That strategy worked in the past, but now there are too many people paying attention. You’re getting questioned on committee votes - committee votes! - by high schoolers filming your answers. Florida’s coastline is disappearing. The kids are pissed. And now they can vote. What’s your play?

Sartre famously said that hell is other people, but for House reps in the 2020s, hell is other voters. The process is clogged up with more people than ever. Every party is fielding candidates, and states are moving to top-two primaries and ranked choice voting. Some states are trying out citizen commissions to guide the legislature on tough issues like abortion and gun rights.

There’s nowhere to hide.

The Working Families Party and the Greens benefited the most from the increase in voters. 65% of newly registered voters in the mid-2020s joined up with one of the two parties, with most of them going to WFP. In the face of terrible heat waves and crushing ice storms in the summer of 2026, activists on the left organize mass protests. Their goal: Nationalize and shut down the entire fossil fuel economy immediately, from oil drillers to gas stations to coal power plants. The idea polls incredibly well with voters under 40, but business owners and older voters are terrified of the disruption to the economy - and their retirement savings.

Meanwhile, the Freedom Party is coming apart at the seams, as its members all push in different directions for their individual freedoms. Freedom-led towns and states cut their services to the bone, causing power failures, bridge collapses, and bear invasions. But there’s also a skepticism about big business that makes them unreliable partners for the religious Republicans and Together We Stand, the centrist party.

The center-right representing business interests starts to get pretty nervous.

Together We Stand sees an opportunity to broker peace, while protecting capital owners from losing everything to government takeover. They take the core of the Working Families platform - guaranteed minimum income, national healthcare with no cost at the point of service, trade unions - and put it forward in Congress. Together We Stand also proposes the creation of a Transition Fund at the Federal Reserve to pay for the national conversion to green energy, making business owners whole for all costs involved in the transition. (This will be the way that Delta Air Lines becomes Delta Rail Lines.)

The guaranteed national income for all citizens, including kids, brings in the family-focused Republicans. The Greens agree to the Transition Fund, with the stipulation that all fossil fuels must be out of use within five years. It’s an expensive deal, but it’s becoming clear that the costs of further climate change will be much worse, and more deadly.

The Great Unlocking resets the federal government’s relationship with its citizens. The central role of a government - of the people, by the people, for the people - in citizens’ lives is no longer up for debate. At the same time, the government has changed shape to become more responsive to the needs of its people.

In the process, Americans get an important reminder: What matters is not just the peaceful transition of power, but the peaceful transition of the political system from one version to the next. The Great Unlocking marks the official start of the Sixth Party System in US history.

[lettersfromthefuture]

Ferguson, Missouri, June 2032

Illustration by Jazzmin Imani

[lettersfromthefuture]

We Need Numbers

The rise of new political parties totally changed the math on voting rights. Suddenly, no one party was big enough to command a majority on its own. Staying on top meant gathering as many people as possible, to force the other parties into coalitions with you.

The 118th Congress (2023-2025) looked like a real mess at the start. Representatives were changing party affiliations day by day, some of them even before they were sworn in. But that Congress still managed to pass the Voting For All Act of 2024, which lowered the voting age to 16, made voter registration automatic in all 52 states, and established Election Day in November as a federal holiday.

Over 200 million people voted in the Congressional elections of 2024, smashing all previous records for the number of voters and the share of the population taking part in the election. There was just one problem, though - Congressional districts were still way too big to represent the people.

For nearly a century, the size of the US House of Representatives had been capped at 435, by a law called The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. The size was based on the number of citizens counted in the 1910 census. Since then, the US population has grown from 92 million people to over 350 million - almost four times as many people.

The US Constitution actually says that there should be a representative in Congress for every 30,000 voters. In most western countries, the number of voters per representative is somewhere between 40,000 and 200,000. By the 2020 House elections, the US had 733,000 people per rep in Congress. No wonder people felt like their elected officials weren’t listening - there weren’t enough Congresspeople to go around.

With more voters in play, pressure was growing to let the size of Congress grow beyond the artificial limit from 100 years ago. The Apportionment Act of 2025 wouldn’t take effect until the House elections in 2028, which was also a presidential election year. But in that election and going forward, Congress would now have one rep for every 200,000 citizens - meaning the House grew from 435 to roughly 1,750 representatives.

The 118th Congress was a huge turning point in American history. This group gave more citizens the vote, and more voices in Congress to represent all Americans, than we had ever seen before in the US. No one knew it at the time, but these moves formed the second phase of The Great Unlocking. The rest happened faster than anyone would have imagined at the time.

[lettersfromthefuture]

Montgomery, Alabama, May 2032

Illustration by Maggie Prendergast

[lettersfromthefuture]

Ice Cream and Parties

Imagine that the world contained only two ice cream flavors: vanilla and strawberry. You have to pick one or the other, and that’s all you get. No Tin Roof, no Rocky Road - in fact, no chocolate of any kind.

How would you choose a flavor? Perhaps you genuinely like one of your two options - how lucky for you. Maybe you hate strawberry, so it’s vanilla by default. But if you’re a chocoholic, maybe you just decide to skip out on ice cream entirely. The set of options is not wide enough to contain your desires.

This was the situation in the US in the early 2020s when it came to political parties. A country of 330 million people had infinite variety in the toothpaste aisle, or the ice cream freezers for that matter, but basically had two choices at the ballot box. Third parties were on the fringe and not meaningful players in elections or policy. Even a strong turnout year, more than 30% of voters stayed home instead of choosing one of the two flavors on offer.

The first phase of The Great Unlocking was an expansion in the number of viable political parties. The Republicans, lost in the wilderness after 2020, saw their far-right wing break off and form the Freedom Party. On the left, the climate movement organized younger voters into a functioning Green Party. These were the first moves to widen the set of options.

There are over 500,000 elected positions in the US. These parties really gained momentum when they started fielding candidates for town councils, county commissions, and state legislatures. As with gay marriage, direct contact with the new way, in the form of friends and neighbors, made it easier for people to accept what was happening.

The Freedom Party has represented about 15% of voters at its peak, and the Green Party is still growing at 12% of voters. Those numbers were large enough to cause radical change in the process of making law. One party couldn’t go it alone anymore, whipping the reluctant fringes of their own caucus into a tough vote. Everyone had to learn how to make deals all over again.

For those who had stayed behind in one of the big two parties, the results were frustrating at first. Smaller groups on the fringe were getting a great deal of influence over policy. If you were still inside a big tent, and you felt your voice was not getting heard, that problem got worse, not better, with the Green and Freedom splits.

So the next phase, after the turbulent 2024 elections, was a more profound shift in the makeup of the Republican and Democratic parties.

The “country club” Republicans no longer felt welcome in a party that was still dominated by the religious right bent on waging culture wars. Meanwhile, Centrist Democrats felt demonized for their business-friendly attitudes. A new center-right coalition formed under the banner Together We Stand.

Those who were left behind in the Democratic Party then decided that a full reckoning with their party’s heritage was necessary. This was, after all, the party of Jim Crow rule in the South between the First and Second Reconstructions. In 2025, the former Democratic National Committee voted unanimously to change their name to the Working Families Party.

In the 2030s, we live in an era of coalition governments and ever-changing alliances on policy. The Freedom Party and the Greens find common ground on anti-monopoly and privacy issues. Together We Stand found its way to a compromise with Working Families on unions, once the tide had turned in the field of economics on the importance of unions to a healthy economy. Voter turnout is much higher than it was in the early 2020s. People say in surveys that they do feel their voices are heard in government, and they also feel they can hold their government accountable through elections.

Next month, we’ll take a look at the size of Congress, and how an expansion of the House in 2025 led directly to the Unlocking itself.

[lettersfromthefuture]

Ellijay, Georgia, April 2032

Illustration by Cat(ie) Chapman

[lettersfromthefuture]

April 2032: Ellijay

Hello and welcome to Letters From The Future.

I’ve always enjoyed the American travelogue in the style of Charles Kuralt or Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley. But those guys are from another time. I wanted to hear the modern, progressive, inclusive version of their stories from the road. So I decided to create them myself.

One day, I hope to hit the road for real and find these stories in nonfiction mode. Prince wrote songs about Paisley Park before he built it. That’s how creativity works.

What is The Third Reconstruction?

The original Reconstruction was the time immediately after the Civil War when the federal government worked to support the newly freed Black people who had been enslaved in the former Confederate states. It didn’t end well, for a whole bunch of reasons, and gave way to the Jim Crow era in the South.

Fast forward to the 1950s. Some historians say that the Civil Rights Movement, which hit its peak in the ‘50s and ‘60s, represented a Second Reconstruction. Once again, the federal government got directly involved in breaking up the structures of white supremacy. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, aimed to get rid of discrimination on the basis of race. The idea of The Third Reconstruction is that we need to have another go at finally getting this right. The Rev. Dr. William Barber wrote the book on the subject. He says:

“We must have a Third Reconstruction. We must address the five interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation/denial of health care, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism. These are breaches that must be addressed, and according to the text, repairing the breaches will bring revival. ... No, America has never yet been all that she has hoped to be. But right here, right now, a Third Reconstruction is possible if we choose.“

How did it finally happen?

To get to The Third Reconstruction, it was necessary to clear a path out of the political stall that dogged us at the federal level in the early 2020s. The Great Unlocking was a series of events that played out over that decade. There wasn’t a grand design from the beginning as it happened - in fact, there was a series of choices and trade-offs that people made for selfish reasons at the time. They just happened to create the conditions for meaningful change.

I’ll explain more in the coming months, but for now let’s just say that in 2032, when LFTF begins, you have more political parties, more people in Congress, and more voters than we do right now. Mix all of those factors together, and you get national leadership that is more in tune with people’s needs than we have seen in a long time.