Summery

In 1989, Fukuyama declared history ended with liberal democracy's triumph. This essay argues it just rebooted at higher difficulty.

Trump, Milei, Meloni each seemed locally explicable—regional populism, economic dysfunction. Then Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won in Queens. Same country as Trump, opposite ideology. This is the Rosetta Stone. When radical right and radical left win in the same nation within years, "local conditions" cannot explain it. The pattern becomes undeniable: four dialects of one sentence—"I can't keep living like this"—marking the shift from economic problems to survival crisis, now accelerated by AI + general-purpose machines. One technology stack threatens trucker and surgeon alike, turning "work = survival" from civilizational assumption into open question.

We face a fork: Weimar (panic → strongmen → collapse) or Philadelphia—a second constitutional moment. Where 1787 negotiated how humans govern themselves, the 2030s must negotiate how humans survive when silicon can do the work. This is True MAGA: "Make All Genuinely Able." Not Trump's nostalgic nationalism, but species-level redesign requiring an "affordable fairness zone" between two collapse boundaries: Hayekian efficiency engine above (markets generate wealth), Keynesian survival floor below (no one falls out). Not charity—mutual insurance against system implosion.

With AGI likely in the 2030s—when theoretical job loss becomes irreversible displacement—we have one decade to rewrite rules. America is the only table where all players sit: tech capital, labor, radical flanks, under one constitution. What gets written there becomes the global template, as 1787 did for democracies. The convention is already happening, disguised as chaos. The question: will we recognize it and write the rules—or be written by them?

I. A Truth That Offends Everyone

Michigan, 2016.

Jim Stewart is standing in a Ford factory parking lot, in his fifties now, staring at a paycheck smaller than the one he lost in the Great Recession. Back then he and his wife, Peggy, lost everything—jobs, house, and the quiet certainty that tomorrow would look like today. For the first time in their lives they lined up at a food bank, and he told a reporter, almost apologetically, "I didn't think it was going to get this bad. I really didn't."

Now he's back at Ford. On paper, Michigan is doing fine: unemployment is five percent, the kind of number politicians brag about. But the food bank director sees a different country: "We're not at a livable wage, even though we have low unemployment." People are choosing between food and medicine, rent and electricity. The old equation—work equals security—has quietly broken.

So when Trump promised to bring back manufacturing, to make America great again, Jim didn't really believe the details. He voted for him anyway. Because he couldn't keep living like that.

Queens, New York, 2024.

Sarah lives four blocks from Zohran Mamdani's rent-stabilized apartment. She's twenty-five, works in communications, and pays $3,100 a month for a one-bedroom—nearly half her income. She has a college degree, works full-time, budgets carefully. She follows all the rules. But she can't save. She can't buy. She may not be able to stay in the city where she was born.

"I would love to be in the city for the rest of my life," she told a reporter. The conditional tense is everything.

So when Mamdani promised to freeze rents, to fight the landlords pricing people out, Sarah didn't really believe the mechanics. She voted for him anyway. Because she couldn't keep living like that.

Two cities. Two candidates at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Two voters who, according to every pundit and think piece, should hate each other's politics. But listen to what they're actually saying. Strip away the left-right labels. Remove Trump and Mamdani from the equation. Ignore the media classifications—"populist" versus "socialist," "deplorable" versus "radical." They're saying the same thing. Not "I disagree with the other side's policies." Not "I prefer a different vision of America." But something more primal, more urgent: "I'm not sure I can keep living like this."

That's not an economic problem. That's a survival problem. And when enough people are speaking the language of survival, the old political grammar stops working.

How do you put Donald Trump, Javier Milei with his chainsaw, Giorgia Meloni's nationalist revival, and a New York State Assemblyman accused of being a communist in the same analytical frame? The mainstream answer: you don't. These are separate phenomena. Trump is American populism. Milei is Argentine dysfunction. Meloni is European nationalism. Mamdani is progressive urban politics. Different countries, different grievances, different solutions. But that answer is getting harder to defend.

The New York Post called Mamdani a communist. The New York Times editorial board questioned his experience. Neither label stopped voters from choosing him in Queens—the global capital's backyard, a place where Wall Street bankers and immigrant service workers live within subway distance of each other. If socialism can win there, the usual explanations start to fail.

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama published "The End of History?" as the Berlin Wall was falling. His thesis was elegant and, for a moment, convincing: humanity had solved the regime question. Liberal democracy plus market capitalism represented the endpoint of ideological evolution. History—understood as the grand contest between competing visions of human organization—was over. What remained was implementation. For a while, it felt right. Then the world refused to behave.

But here's what's important: Fukuyama was answering the right question for his time. The Cold War had ended. The great human ideological struggle—communism versus capitalism, autocracy versus democracy—appeared settled. His error wasn't in the analysis. It was in assuming that the only questions worth asking were about human governance structures.

What Fukuyama could not see in 1989—what no one could see—was that the next rupture would not come from a competing human ideology. It would come from something that makes the entire left-right spectrum look like an internal family dispute. We are witnessing the prelude of silicon-based life. AI paired with general-purpose machines—silicon minds wedded to silicon bodies—is not a new tool in human hands. It is a new player at the table, one with theoretical substitutability for the entire spectrum of human labor, blue-collar and white-collar alike.

This is not a left-right contest. This is a survival crisis. And survival crises don't care about your ideology. They care about whether you can pay rent, feed your children, and see a future that includes you.

I confess something personal: when Zohran Mamdani won his State Assembly seat in Queens in 2020, and then won the Democratic mayoral primary in 2025, I felt a strange elation. Not because I am a socialist—I am not. Not because I think his specific policy proposals will work—many probably won't. But because his victory means something crucial for what comes next. The full political spectrum in America is finally represented.

For too long, America's political debate has been artificially constrained. You could choose between center-right and center-left, between tax cuts and modest social programs, between deregulation and mild oversight. The Overton window stayed comfortably within capitalist realism. Mamdani is different. He is genuinely to the left of the American left. He represents communities that have never had survival security—not even in the imagined golden age. The immigrant worker juggling three jobs. The service worker whose rent takes sixty percent of income. The college graduate with no path to homeownership. These people aren't nostalgic. They have nothing to be nostalgic about. They're desperate for a future that doesn't exist under current arrangements.

With Mamdani's rise, the table is complete. America now has real representation from the radical right, the radical left, and everything in between. This matters because America is the only country on Earth where all the real players of 21st-century politics actually sit at the same table: tech capital, financial elites, organized labor, multicultural urban precariat, conservative heartlands, radical left, radical right. Silicon Valley and Wall Street. The Rust Belt and the outer boroughs. The people building AI and the people AI will replace. The winners and losers of the same transformation, negotiating under the same constitutional system. You cannot hold a constitutional convention if half the parties aren't in the room.

This essay is not about who is right or wrong among them—Trump, Milei, Meloni, Mamdani. It is about why their victories rhyme. Why their supporters, despite mutual ideological hatred, are speaking the same language of survival desperation. And it is about why, in the age of AI and general-purpose machines, we may need nothing less than a second constitutional convention.

Not "Make America Great Again" in Trump's nostalgic sense—a return to the 1950s that never existed, where factory jobs paid middle-class wages and cultural homogeneity felt comfortable to those inside it. But True MAGA: Make All Genuinely Able to survive in the age of silicon-based life's prelude. That doesn't require a slogan. It requires what it has always required when the rules become obsolete: sitting down at a table, with all the real players present, and hammering out a new contract. Painful, messy, incomplete—but better than the alternative.

Fukuyama wrote at the end of a story. This essay is written at the beginning of one.

II. Survival Crisis—Redefining Our Era

Economic Problems vs. Survival Problems

There is a difference between being dissatisfied and being desperate. Between wanting more and needing to survive. Political science has a tendency to blur this distinction, treating all voter discontent as points on the same spectrum. But the difference is not one of degree. It is one of kind.

An economic problem is: my income isn't growing as fast as I'd like. My job doesn't offer the advancement I expected. The opportunities available to my children seem narrower than those available to me. These are real grievances. They shape voting behavior. But they exist within a framework where tomorrow is assumed. You're playing a game where the rules might be unfair, but you're still in the game.

A survival problem is: I might not make rent this month. I might lose my health insurance. My children might not be able to afford college, or housing, or the basic infrastructure of a stable life. I might be ejected from this city, this profession, this economy entirely. These are not grievances about distribution within a system. These are fears about being expelled from the system altogether.

When the dominant narrative shifts from "How do we grow the pie?" to "Who gets to eat?"—when scarcity feels existential rather than temporary—the political logic changes completely. Technocratic incrementalism starts to look like a category error. You can't optimize your way out of drowning. This is why the calm, measured, evidence-based proposals from establishment politicians feel so enraging to people in survival mode. It's not that voters have become irrational or uneducated. It's that the establishment is speaking the language of economic problems while voters are experiencing survival problems. The mismatch isn't ideological. It's existential.

Tone as Answer

In survival mode, people don't evaluate candidates based on policy white papers. They evaluate them based on something more primal: Does this person's emotional intensity match mine?

Javier Milei didn't win Argentina's presidency with a detailed fiscal plan. He won it with a chainsaw—a literal chainsaw that he wielded at campaign rallies, promising to cut through the entire corrupt apparatus. The chainsaw wasn't policy. It was tone. It said: I am as angry as you are. I will destroy what needs destroying. Trump didn't win Michigan with a trade policy dissertation. He won it with "Build the wall"—a simple, visceral, impossible promise that signaled: I see your fear. I will act. Mamdani didn't win Queens with a housing economics treatise. He won it with "Freeze the rent"—a blunt instrument that may or may not be economically feasible, but that communicated: I am on your side against the people making you homeless.

When survival is at stake, the question isn't "Will this work?" The question is "Does this person understand that I'm drowning?" This is not voters becoming stupid. This is voters becoming honest about what they need from politics in a survival crisis: someone whose desperation matches theirs.

The Symptom Spectrum

Look at the four cases. Trump: Rust Belt towns where factories closed, where a high school graduate could once get a union job and buy a house and retire with dignity, now economic dead zones. The voters aren't just economically anxious. They're watching their entire way of life become obsolete. Their grief is real. Their rage is rational.

Milei: Argentina spiraling through hyperinflation, currency collapse, debt default. The middle class watching their savings evaporate overnight. Every institution—government, banks, unions—revealed as either corrupt or impotent. When the system has stolen your future that many times, "burn it all down" stops being radical and starts being reasonable.

Meloni: Italy facing waves of migration, economic stagnation, cultural vertigo. Small towns seeing their character change faster than they can process. The fear isn't just economic—it's ontological. Who are we? Will we recognize ourselves in a generation? These questions don't fit neatly into left-right frameworks.

Mamdani: Queens, where the median rent-stabilized household earns $60,000 a year and forty-six percent are rent-burdened. Where twenty percent of tenants reach the end of the month with nothing left. Where young people with college degrees and full-time jobs cannot imagine affording the city they grew up in. This isn't poverty. It's precarity—the sense that one accident, one illness, one rent increase could eject you from stability forever.

Four different countries. Four different languages. Four different ideological traditions. But listen to what they're saying underneath the surface: "I'm not sure we can keep living like this." And here's the crucial pattern: these people hate each other. Trump voters think Mamdani supporters are communists. Mamdani supporters think Trump voters are fascists. Milei's base and Meloni's base would find little common ground in a policy discussion. They occupy opposite ends of every political spectrum. But their supporters' situations are surprisingly similar. All of them feel the survival line moving closer. All of them feel the old answers failing. All of them are willing to gamble on extreme promises because moderate promises have already failed them.

This is not four separate stories. This is one story told in four dialects. The story of what happens when enough people simultaneously realize: the system that promised to take care of us if we played by the rules has changed the rules, and we're losing.

III. The Total Catalyst—Silicon Minds, Silicon Bodies

From Tools to Entities

For most of human history, technology has been an amplifier. The wheel made your legs more efficient. The printing press made your voice louder. The computer made your memory more reliable. These were profound changes, but they operated within a stable ontology: humans use tools. Humans set goals. Humans decide.

AI was, for a while, comfortable to think about in these terms. A better search engine. A smarter autocomplete. Software that could help you work faster. Threatening to some jobs—customer service, data entry—but bounded. Cognitive labor, not physical labor. White collar disruption, but the plumber and the nurse were safe. Then the category shifted.

When AI stops living only on screens and starts driving trucks, performing surgeries, assembling products, and building other machines, we are no longer dealing with a tool. We are dealing with the prelude of a silicon-based species. This is not metaphor. This is engineering description. When a system can autonomously perceive its environment, make decisions, execute tasks, and persist through time—when it doesn't need a human in the loop except to set the broadest parameters—it has crossed a threshold. Not consciousness in the human sense, perhaps. But agency in the functional sense. Silicon minds plus silicon bodies equals something that can do what we do, in the spaces we do it, without us.

The Timeline Is Compressing

GPT-4: March 2023. Claude Sonnet 4: 2024. Humanoid robots in pilot production: 2024-2025 (Tesla Optimus, Figure, others). Autonomous trucking commercial deployment: Expected 2025-2027. Labor substitution acceleration: Happening now. But these are the tremors. The real threshold lies ahead.

AGI—Artificial General Intelligence—marks the point where silicon-based systems achieve something approaching autonomous goal-setting and self-improvement. Not just "follow instructions better," but "decide what needs doing and figure out how to do it." Most credible estimates place this inflection point somewhere in the 2030s. That means we have one decade—perhaps less—to redesign our institutions before those institutions are obsolete.

This is not science fiction. This is extrapolation from current trajectories. The distance from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was eighteen months. The distance from "robots can barely walk" to "robots can navigate complex environments and manipulate objects" was three years. The curves are not linear. They're exponential. And exponential curves have a particular property: they look like nothing is happening, then everything happens at once.

Full-Spectrum Substitution

Previous technological disruptions followed a pattern: they automated some jobs while creating others. The automobile destroyed the horse-and-buggy industry but created automotive manufacturing. The computer eliminated typing pools but spawned IT departments. The pattern held: creative destruction was genuinely creative, just on a lagged timeline. If you were displaced, your children could learn new skills. AI plus general-purpose machines breaks that pattern.

Blue-collar domains: Three million truck drivers in the United States alone. Warehouse workers already being replaced by Amazon's robots. Construction sites experimenting with autonomous equipment. Agricultural harvesting increasingly automated. White-collar domains: Radiology—AI can read imaging scans faster and more accurately. Legal document review—junior lawyers are already being displaced. Software engineering—AI can generate, debug, and optimize code. Financial analysis—pattern recognition at speeds humans cannot match.

The crucial difference: this is the same technology stack threatening all of these at once. When a single platform can replace both the surgeon analyzing scans and the trucker driving cross-country, you're not looking at a labor market adjustment. You're looking at a survival cascade. Just as Homo sapiens arriving in Europe wasn't "better tools" for Neanderthals—it was another species competing for the same ecological niche—AI plus general-purpose machines isn't "better software" for humans. It's the prelude of a silicon-based lifeform emerging onto the same economic playing field.

The question isn't "Which jobs are safe?" The question is "What happens to a civilization whose foundational assumption—work equals right to survive—comes undone?"

The Catalyst Mechanism

Here's what makes this the total catalyst. Every major actor sees the same thing and reaches the same conclusion from their own logic. Capital's logic: If I don't deploy AI, my competitors will. I'll be obsolete in five years. This is an efficiency event without precedent. I must move first. Nation-states' logic: If I don't develop AI capabilities, I'll be subordinate to whoever does. This is an arms race. Falling behind means geopolitical irrelevance or worse. Corporations' logic: If I don't automate, my quarterly earnings suffer and shareholders defect. Automation isn't optional. It's survival. Workers' logic: If I don't find a way to be useful in an AI economy, I'm ejected from the middle class. I need protection now, whether from unions, government, or radical politics.

Notice: every actor thinks they're playing defense. Every actor thinks they're responding to someone else's aggression. Every actor is acting rationally from their own vantage point. But the system-level result is: collective acceleration toward a state where all groups can reasonably feel their survival is threatened.

The rich fear that populist backlash will expropriate their wealth or trigger violence that makes their cities unlivable. The poor fear they'll be economically erased. The middle class fears it will be dissolved. And everyone is correct to be afraid, because in a pure acceleration scenario with no governance layer, all of those things happen simultaneously. A total catalyst is not a single cause. It is a technology that binds every existing stressor into the same survival story.

Climate change, inequality, labor displacement, cultural vertigo, institutional decay—these were already simmering. AI doesn't replace them. It synchronizes them. It gives them a common countdown clock.

Why Fukuyama's Framework Fails Here

Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis rested on a particular set of assumptions. First: The players in the game are human polities—nation-states, ideological movements, governance systems. Second: The question is: which human system is best? Third: Technology is background infrastructure—important, but not a player. By 1989, it looked like liberal democracy and market capitalism had won. The Soviet model collapsed. Fascism was dead. No compelling alternative remained on the table.

But Fukuyama's framework was anthropocentric. It assumed that the great questions of politics were questions among humans about how humans should organize themselves. That assumption is breaking. The question we face now is not "Which human ideology is best?" It's "How do humans redesign their institutions when another form of intelligence-plus-capability emerges that can do what humans do, but faster, cheaper, and without the need for food, sleep, or social security?"

Fukuyama discussed regime-versus-regime. History as the evolution of governance ideas. But he was working within the assumption that humans would always be the only agents that mattered. We're now in a different game. It's not capitalism versus communism. It's carbon versus silicon. And carbon-based life needs a new rulebook.

History, in Fukuyama's sense—the tournament of ideologies—may indeed have paused. But in a deeper sense—the sense of a species negotiating its place in a rapidly shifting technological ecosystem—history has just rebooted at a higher difficulty level. The rules that worked when humans were the only players no longer apply when silicon is entering the field.

IV. The Crossroads—Weimar or Philadelphia?

Standing at the Edge

Standing in 2025, watching Trump rallies and Mamdani victory speeches, watching AI labs race toward AGI while labor unions scramble for protections, you can feel history breathing on your neck. Not the Fukuyama kind—the ended kind. The other kind. The kind that asks: Which way do we break?

There have been moments like this before. Moments when the old system's failure was undeniable, when survival anxiety was universal, when the center could not hold. History offers two archetypal paths from such moments. One ends in catastrophe. One ends in reformation.

The Weimar Script

Germany, 1920s. The numbers looked manageable on paper—the Weimar Republic had a democracy, a constitution, elections. But underneath, the foundations were collapsing. Hyperinflation wiped out savings. A loaf of bread cost billions of marks. Workers were paid twice a day because by evening their morning wages were worthless. Then the Great Depression hit. Unemployment reached thirty percent. Entire industries vanished.

The moderate center—Social Democrats, Catholic Center Party—offered incremental solutions. Gradual reform. International cooperation. Patience. But patience is a luxury of people who aren't starving.

Imagine a Berlin beer hall, 1932. An unemployed machinist sits at a table. He lost his job. His savings are gone. His children are hungry. A moderate candidate takes the stage: "We need careful reform. We must work within international frameworks. We must rebuild trust in institutions gradually." The machinist thinks: I can't pay rent tomorrow. What good is your five-year plan? Then an extreme candidate takes the stage: "I will give you bread. I will give you work. I will restore your dignity. Those who destroyed your life will pay." The machinist doesn't necessarily believe it will work. But he knows the moderate approach has already failed. He chooses the extreme promise. Not because he's stupid. Because he's desperate. Within eighteen months, democracy is dead.

The Weimar script has a clear logic: When survival anxiety meets narrative vacuum, strongmen fill the gap. If AI and general-purpose machines continue accelerating with no governance framework—if millions of workers are displaced with no safety net—if inequality reaches levels where the bottom half has no economic function—the result is predictable. Not because people are irrational. Because they're rational about their own survival. If the establishment offers nothing, people will turn to whoever promises to burn it down and rebuild. Even if that person is lying. Even if the price is democracy itself.

The Philadelphia Script

America, 1787. The Articles of Confederation were failing. The states couldn't agree on trade policy. The federal government couldn't raise taxes or pay debts. Shays' Rebellion—an uprising of farmers against creditors—nearly sparked civil war. The system was broken. Everyone knew it. The question was: what comes next?

Fifty-five delegates from twelve states (Rhode Island refused to attend) locked themselves in a room in Philadelphia for four months. They represented radically different interests: Large states versus small states. Slave states versus free states. Commercial interests versus agricultural interests. Federalists versus state sovereignty advocates. If they failed to reach agreement, the likely outcome was dissolution—possibly civil war.

Here's a key moment: The Virginia Plan proposed representation based on population. Large states loved it. Small states revolted. Delaware's delegates threatened to walk out. If they walked, the union was dead. The impasse seemed insurmountable. Then the Connecticut Compromise: a bicameral legislature. The House of Representatives based on population (large states win). The Senate with two members per state (small states win). Nobody got everything they wanted. Virginia's delegation was furious. Delaware's delegation was wary. But both accepted. Why? Because both sides did the math: The cost of failure exceeded the cost of compromise. A civil war would destroy them all. An imperfect union was better than dissolution.

The Philadelphia script has a different logic: When all essential players are forced into the same room, and the cost of failure is clear to everyone, painful compromise becomes possible. Not because people suddenly become noble or selfless. Because they become rational about their collective survival. The Constitution that emerged wasn't perfect—it embedded slavery, limited voting rights, created structures we're still arguing about. But it was functional enough to survive. It gave the system time to evolve rather than collapse.

The 2030 Dystopia

If we do nothing—if we follow neither Weimar nor Philadelphia but simply drift—here's one possible 2030.

Scene One: The Unemployed Trucker. Self-driving trucks are commercial reality by 2027. Three million American truckers start losing jobs en masse. Retraining programs are offered: "Learn to code!" But AI is already replacing junior programmers. "Work in healthcare!" But medical diagnostics are increasingly automated. Most displaced truckers are in their forties and fifties. They have mortgages. They have children in school. They don't have a decade to retrain. By 2030, millions of men who once had working-class stability are structurally unemployed. Not because they're lazy. Because their labor is obsolete. What do they do? Where do they put their rage?

Scene Two: The Urban Fortress. AI companies—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google—are worth trillions. Their founders are richer than nation-states. Meanwhile, crime is spiking in major cities. Not because of moral decay, but because millions of people have been pushed outside the survival line. The wealthy respond rationally: they build walls. Gated communities with private security. Armored cars for commutes. Separate schools, separate hospitals, separate infrastructure. The city fragments into fortress zones and neglected zones. The cost of security—insurance, guards, technology—consumes an ever-larger share of GDP. This is not a sustainable society. It's a society eating itself.

Scene Three: Political Fragmentation. A radical-right governor in a red state bans AI deployment: "We're protecting our workers." Tech companies flee. A radical-left mayor in a blue city imposes a ninety percent tax on AI profits: "We're funding basic income." Businesses relocate. The federal government is paralyzed. Neither side will compromise. The country operates under effectively different economic systems depending on zip code. International competitors—China, European Union—watch this chaos and accelerate their own AI deployment without the baggage of democratic accountability. By 2035, America is no longer the leading tech power. But it also hasn't solved its internal crisis. It's the worst of both worlds.

In a world where silicon-based pre-life is rising, and survival anxiety is everywhere, do we drift into a Weimar ending—or fight for a Philadelphia moment? The question is not hypothetical. The timer is running. We have perhaps one decade before the substitution effects become irreversible. Before the political window closes and we're locked into whatever path we stumbled onto by default.

V. True MAGA—The Constitutional Answer

What It Is, What It Isn't

MAGA—the Trump version—answers a backward-looking question: "How do we restore what we once had?" It summons a mythologized 1950s: factories humming, middle-class wages, cultural homogeneity, American dominance unquestioned. The promise is simple: bring back the jobs, bring back the certainty, make it like it was. The problem: you can't tariff your way past silicon.

Even if every manufacturing job that went to China came back to American soil tomorrow—even if you banned all immigration and tore up every trade deal—the fundamental equation has changed. If the choice is between paying American workers $25/hour plus benefits or installing robots that work 24/7 with no bathroom breaks, the math is brutal. And that math gets more brutal every quarter as the robots improve and cheapen. MAGA offers an answer to the wrong question. It asks "How do we restore American labor's economic value?" when the real question is "What happens when all human labor starts losing exchange value?"

True MAGA answers a forward-looking question: "How do we survive something unprecedented?" Not "Make America Great Again" in the nostalgic sense, but Make All Genuinely Able to survive in the age of silicon-based life's prelude. This is not about one nation's past. This is about the species' future. It's about designing institutions that can maintain enough stability for humans to continue existing when silicon can do the work. The question isn't "Which group wins?" The question is "How do we keep the system from collapsing entirely?"

The Affordable Fairness Zone

The problem isn't "how much fairness is morally correct." Moral philosophy has debated that for millennia without resolution. The problem is: what's the minimum fairness required to prevent system collapse? Think of it as engineering, not ethics. Every system has two failure modes.

Boundary A: Order Collapse—When those with resources conclude that staying in the system costs more than leaving it. Boundary B: Security Collapse—When those without resources conclude that working within the system offers less than breaking it. Between these two boundaries lies the affordable fairness zone: the range where the system remains viable.

Boundary A: Order Collapse

Scenario: Mamdani becomes mayor of New York City. He implements his platform: rent freeze on all stabilized apartments. Aggressive wealth taxation. Massive expansion of free public services. The wealthy start calculating: What does it cost to stay in New York versus leaving?

Staying in New York has significant lock-in effects: Wall Street's network effects—deal flow depends on proximity. Cultural capital—the prestige of being based in New York. Social networks built over decades. Children in elite private schools with Ivy League pipelines. Access to world-class hospitals and cultural institutions. These are powerful anchors. But they're not infinite.

If the tax burden rises high enough—if wealth becomes subject to confiscation rather than redistribution—if the cost of staying exceeds the value of these anchors—the wealthy will leave. Not all at once. But gradually, then suddenly. The most mobile first. The merely rich before the ultra-rich. Then the upper-middle class starts calculating the same equation. Once it starts, it accelerates. Each departure shrinks the tax base. Which requires higher taxes on those remaining. Which triggers more departures. A doom loop. The endpoint: tax base collapse. City services degrade. The very programs meant to help the poor become unfundable. Queens becomes Detroit. This is Order Collapse. Not because the policy was immoral. Because it pushed past the boundary where the system could sustain itself.

Boundary B: Security Collapse

Scenario: The opposite extreme. Pure market fundamentalism. Zero safety net. No unemployment insurance, no healthcare support, no housing assistance. "Let the market sort it out." Millions of people are displaced by AI and automation. Truckers, paralegals, radiologists, junior programmers—all structurally unemployed. Not temporarily between jobs. Permanently obsolete. With no support, they face a simple calculation: What gives me better odds of survival—trying to compete in an impossible labor market, or taking from those who have?

Crime spikes. Not because of moral failure, but because crime becomes rational when legal pathways to survival close. The wealthy respond by building walls. Gated communities. Private security. Armed escorts. Separate infrastructure. But here's the math: The cost of living in a fortified society exceeds the cost of having bought social peace in the first place.

Insurance premiums skyrocket. Security services consume GDP. Infrastructure decays because maintaining it is too dangerous. Business becomes difficult because transport and communication are unreliable. Talented people leave for more stable countries. The economy slowly grinds down under the weight of its own security costs. This is Security Collapse. Not because the policy was immoral. Because it pushed past the boundary where enough people had a stake in the system's survival.

The Zone Between

The affordable fairness zone is not determined by moral philosophy. It's determined by these two boundaries. For the wealthy: Cost of redistribution < Cost of fleeing < Cost of living in a war zone. For the poor: Value of staying in system > Expected value of burning it down. The zone is where both inequalities hold simultaneously.

And here's the crucial point: This is not charity. This is insurance. The wealthy are buying social stability insurance. The premium is redistribution. The payout is: you get to keep your wealth without being murdered in your bed or having it expropriated by a revolutionary government. The poor are buying system-access insurance. The premium is accepting less-than-full-equality. The payout is: you don't have to risk your life in the streets or watch your children starve. Affordable fairness is not generosity. It's the insurance premium both sides pay to avoid playing Russian roulette with the system.

And here's why the AI era makes this more urgent: both boundaries are shifting inward. Boundary A (Order Collapse) is getting weaker: Remote work means the wealthy don't need to be physically present in cities. Digital infrastructure reduces the importance of face-to-face networks. AI makes geographic location less relevant for many high-value jobs. The cost of leaving New York has dropped. Boundary B (Security Collapse) is getting stronger: AI-driven unemployment is faster and broader than previous disruptions. The number of people pushed toward survival desperation is larger. The timeline is compressed—people don't have decades to adapt. The affordable fairness zone is shrinking. We must find the balance point faster and more precisely than ever before.

The Nested Structure

If you want a system that survives the AI transition, you need two layers operating simultaneously.

Macro Layer: Hayekian Efficiency Engine. At the top level, you need markets, competition, innovation incentives. You need price discovery and resource allocation through decentralized decision-making. You need the possibility of getting rich if you create value. Why? Because without an efficiency engine, there's no wealth to redistribute. Command economies don't generate enough surplus to fund generous safety nets. History tested this. Soviet socialism collapsed not because of moral failure but because of economic failure—the system couldn't generate enough wealth to sustain itself. So: let AI companies compete. Let entrepreneurs get rich. Let capital flow to its most productive uses. Don't try to centrally plan the future. Markets are unmatched at processing distributed information and adapting to change.

Micro Layer: Keynesian Safety Floor. At the bottom level, you need a guarantee: no one falls out of the system entirely. Not universal affluence. Not guaranteed comfort. But a floor: housing that keeps you off the streets. Healthcare that prevents treatable conditions from becoming death sentences. Food security. Access to retraining. Call it Universal Basic Income. Call it a citizen's dividend. Call it a social wealth fund. The branding matters less than the function: a minimum below which no one drops, regardless of labor market status.

Why? Not because it's morally beautiful, but because the alternative costs more. Letting millions of people fall into destitution triggers Boundary B collapse. The cost of managing that collapse—crime, political instability, infrastructure decay—exceeds the cost of preventing it. Think of the safety floor as preventive maintenance for society. You don't wait for the dam to break. You spend money reinforcing it before catastrophic failure.

This isn't socialism. This is system stabilization. Just as we fund fire departments not because we "love buildings" but because the externalities of uncontrolled fires are intolerable—we fund survival floors not because we "love the poor" but because the externalities of mass desperation are intolerable. Markets are excellent at efficiency. They're terrible at preventing systemic collapse. You need both. The efficiency engine generates the surplus. The safety floor prevents the engine from vibrating itself apart.

The 2030s Window

The 2030s will likely see the emergence of AGI—artificial general intelligence. Not just "better chatbots" but systems capable of autonomous goal-setting and recursive self-improvement. That's not a tool. That's an entity. Once we cross that threshold, the game changes in ways that are difficult to predict but easy to see coming. When silicon-based intelligence can improve itself without human intervention, when it can design the next generation of itself, we've moved from "automation" to "succession." We have one decade to write the rules. After that, we're living under whatever rules emerged from the chaos.

VI. Why America, And What It Means for the World

The Complete Table

America is not better than other nations. It is not more deserving. It is not morally superior. But it has one structural advantage that matters for what comes next: All the real players of 21st-century politics are physically present and politically active in the same constitutional system.

The players at the table: Tech and Capital—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Tesla—the companies building silicon-based intelligence. Wall Street, venture capital, the financial infrastructure that allocates trillions. Labor and the Precariat—Traditional unions (UAW, AFL-CIO). Gig economy workers (Uber drivers, DoorDash couriers). Service workers, the urban working class. Conservative Heartland—The Rust Belt, rural communities, small towns. Manufacturing workers, farmers, the constituencies that elected Trump. Progressive Cities—New York, San Francisco, Seattle. The professional class, tech workers, the constituencies that elected Mamdani. Radical Flanks—The far right (Trump's MAGA base). The far left (Mamdani and the democratic socialists).

Compare this to other major powers. Europe: Strong labor protections, social democratic traditions, but lacks technological leadership. The cutting-edge AI research isn't happening in Brussels or Berlin. Europe will be a rule-taker, not a rule-maker. China: Tremendous technical capacity, massive state resources, but lacks pluralism. Different interest groups cannot openly contest. The Party decides. Whatever emerges will be a top-down solution, potentially efficient but not a negotiated compact. India: Population scale, democratic institutions, but insufficient state capacity. The bureaucracy cannot execute complex policy at the required speed.

Only America has everyone in the room AND a constitutional system that—for all its flaws—still allows for fundamental renegotiation without revolution. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 happened in Philadelphia because that's where the crisis and the capacity coincided. The Constitutional Convention of the 21st century must happen in America for the same reason.

Mamdani as Rosetta Stone

Mamdani's victory serves a specific analytical function: he closes the last escape hatches.

Escape Hatch One: "This is a foreign problem." Before Mamdani, you could say: "Milei? That's Argentina—they've always been dysfunctional. Meloni? That's Italy—they have unique immigration pressures. These are problems of other places." But Mamdani won in Queens, New York—the financial capital of the world, the most cosmopolitan city on Earth. If radical politics can win there, you can't dismiss it as a Third World phenomenon or a European anomaly.

Escape Hatch Two: "This is right-wing populism." Before Mamdani, you could categorize everything as "populism" or "far-right nationalism." A convenient label that let you avoid deeper questions. But Mamdani is left-wing. He's a democratic socialist. His platform is the opposite of Trump's. If both the hard right AND the hard left are winning in the same country within years of each other, you can't use ideological labels to explain it away.

Mamdani forces the recognition: This is not about left versus right. This is about survival versus stability. And both ends of the spectrum are fielding candidates because both ends' constituencies feel the survival line approaching. He's the Rosetta Stone—the same text (survival crisis) written in two languages (left-wing and right-wing), allowing us to decode the deeper pattern.

Philadelphia 2.0: Who Must Be in the Room

If we're serious about a constitutional moment, here's who cannot be absent.

If Tech + Capital is missing: The policies will be economically illiterate. You'll get well-meaning redistribution schemes that kill the efficiency engine, leaving nothing to redistribute within a decade. If Labor + Precariat is missing: The policies will be oligarchic. You'll get a system optimized for capital returns, triggering Boundary B collapse as millions conclude the system offers them nothing. If Conservative Heartland is missing: The policies will be unimplementable in red states. The federal system fragments. You get blue-state solutions and red-state solutions with no national coherence. If Progressive Cities is missing: The policies will ignore the dense, diverse, globally-connected nodes where much of GDP and innovation is generated. You lose the future. If the Radical Flanks (both left and right) are missing: You lose the early-warning system. The radicals are the canaries in the coal mine. They're the ones whose constituencies are first to feel the survival pressure. Excluding them means flying blind.

This is not about achieving consensus. This is about forcing painful compromise. No one will be happy with the outcome: Tech will be constrained. Labor will get less than they demand. The wealthy will pay more than they want. The poor will receive less than they need. The left will see continued inequality. The right will see continued redistribution. But everyone will get something better than system collapse. That's the Philadelphia model. Not "everyone wins" but "everyone survives."

This Is Not American Exceptionalism

Let me be clear: This is not an argument that America is uniquely virtuous or that American solutions are universally applicable. This is structural diagnosis. America in 2025 happens to be where the crisis and the capacity to address it coincide. If Europe develops equivalent technological sovereignty and political pluralism in the 2030s, the center of gravity could shift to Brussels. If India builds state capacity while maintaining its democratic culture, New Delhi could become the venue. If Japan awakens from its stagnation, Tokyo might host the conversation. The table is in America now, but the game is global.

Whatever rules get written at that table will not stay in America. They will ripple outward. Other democracies will adapt them. Autocracies will respond to them. The entire geopolitical order will be shaped by them. When the American Constitution was written in 1787, it was an American document. But its principles—separation of powers, federalism, checks and balances—became templates for democracies worldwide. The constitutional settlement of the AI era will follow the same pattern. It starts somewhere. But it belongs to everyone. This is not an American story. This is a species story that happens to begin in America.

VII. Conclusion—The Last Window

Fukuyama's Epitaph, Our Emergency

Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History?" as a tombstone inscription for an era. The Cold War was over. The great ideological contest was settled. His essay had the tone of a eulogy—somber, reflective, final. This essay is not a eulogy. It's an emergency room intake form. Fukuyama wrote at the end of history. We are writing at the beginning of the next chapter. And the first page is the most dangerous—the page where the rules are still fluid, where mistakes compound, where wrong turns become locked in.

The Acceleration No One Can Stop

Three realities. First: The technology will not pause. AI research continues regardless of political will. GPT-5 is coming. GPT-6 is coming. The labs are staffed, the compute is allocated, the incentives are aligned. Even if America stopped, China wouldn't. Even if China stopped, Europe wouldn't. Even if all governments stopped, the military applications alone would ensure continuation. The genie is not going back in the bottle. The question is whether we control the terms of its release or whether it controls ours.

Second: It amplifies every inequality. AI rewards scale, speed, and data access. The winners win bigger. The losers fall faster. Wealth concentration that took a century during the Industrial Revolution will take a decade. And wealth concentration at that speed produces political instability at that speed.

Third: It rewards the most ruthless political actors. When people are desperate, they don't vote for nuance. They vote for whoever promises to fix it fastest. If the establishment offers nothing, voters will turn to whoever offers everything—even if it costs democracy itself. If we drift, we don't drift into a neutral future. We drift into Weimar. Into strongmen who promise simple solutions to complex problems. Into breakdown.

The Choice

We have two paths.

Path One: Invent True MAGA. A constitutional-level redesign. Bring all stakeholders to the table. Force painful compromise. Build the nested structure—efficiency engine plus safety floor. Find the affordable fairness zone before we blow past both boundaries. It won't be perfect. It won't be fair in any absolute sense. Large segments will be dissatisfied. But it will be functional enough to survive. It will give the system time. Time to adapt. Time to learn. Time to evolve.

Path Two: Let inertia decide. Continue the current trajectory. Let each actor optimize for their own survival. Let capital automate without constraint. Let labor radicalize without outlet. Let governments oscillate between paralysis and overreach. The result: one of the dystopias sketched earlier. Maybe Weimar. Maybe fortress urbanism. Maybe fragmentation into red and blue Americas that cannot coexist. All lead to the same endpoint: a civilization that cannot maintain itself.

The Convention Is Already Happening

Here's the crucial recognition: The constitutional convention of the 21st century is not coming. It is already here. It's happening in real time. In the simultaneous victories of Trump and Mamdani. In the acceleration of AI development and the panic of labor unions. In the widening gap between those who own the machines and those who are replaced by them. The question is not whether to convene. The question is: Will we recognize the convention while it's happening—and seize the chance to write the rules, rather than be written by them?

Right now, the rules are being written by whoever moves fastest, shouts loudest, or breaks things most effectively. That's not a constitutional process. That's a brawl. But it doesn't have to be.

A Cognitive First Step

You cannot attend a constitutional convention if you don't know it's happening. The first step is cognitive, not electoral. Stop treating Trump and Mamdani, Milei and Meloni, as separate freak events. They are different dialects of the same survival crisis in the age of silicon pre-life. Once you see that, you cannot unsee it. Once you see it, politics stops being a shouting match about whose ideology is correct and becomes what it always should have been: a negotiation over how much each of us must give up so that most of us can go on living. That negotiation is ugly. It's painful. It requires abandoning the fantasy that your side can win completely. But it's the only negotiation that ends with civilization intact.

The Question for You

The table is set. Trump's base feels the crisis. So does Mamdani's. The AI labs are building. The capital is flowing. The workers are panicking. The politicians are scrambling. Everyone senses that something is breaking. Most don't know what. Most don't have language for it. This essay is an attempt at language. An attempt to name the thing before it names us.

History did not end in 1989. It is beginning now. Every one of us is invited to write the next chapter. Not as spectators, but as participants. The constitutional convention of the 21st century is not a scheduled event. It's a process already underway, disguised as chaos. The question is not whether to show up. The question is: Will you recognize it while it's happening?

END

Publication & Licensing

Title: True MAGA: The Constitutional Convention of the 2030s
Version: 1.0 | November 10, 2025
Author: Alex Yang Liu
Publisher: Terawatt Times Institute
Document ID: TMG-2025-v1.0
Citation Format: Liu, A. Y. (2025). True MAGA: The Constitutional Convention of the 2030s. Terawatt Times Institute, v1.0. DOI: [To be assigned]

Copyright & Use

© 2025 Alex Yang Liu. All rights reserved.

You are free to: Read, cite, and reference this work; Use it for research and education; Quote and excerpt sections with clear attribution. Non-commercial full-text online repost is permitted with clear attribution and a link to the original source.

Commercial use, translation, or adaptation (including re-publication, book editions, documentary projects, podcast series, or other derivative works) requires prior written permission. Contact: alex.liu@terawatttimes.org