Amanda Salisbury Books

You know much of the story already. This post looks at history, current events, and imagined outcomes.

Act One

Exposition & Backstory

Over more than a hundred years America evolved from its original form:

• Presidents strengthened and expanded their power;
• Congress micromanaged the country;
• Courts lost prestige;
• A world-savior complex was adopted unchecked;
• Industrialization was nursed and incentivized long after its time to grow up into innovation;
• The prison-industrial complex got rich;
• The military-industrial complex grew powerful;
• Military conflict made widows, orphans, and disabled people;
• Mass incarceration largely did the same;
• Education distorted and often failed; and
• Temporary aid programs necessarily became permanent.

In short, a free people were slowly recast into dependent people.

Inciting Incident

A president unlike any before (even himself) was inaugurated, a day known as J20/25. This 47th presidency started with ceremony, a rally, and many opening lobs at established law.

Act Two

Goals:

Instead of galvanizing the government to unify towards ensuring the safety and soundness of the U.S. people, the 47th either

But the speed of change during this term suggests the 47th is

Choice C embeds in language and actions, both planned and undertaken.

Imperialistic takeovers are easy to identify by the word own. To own the Panama Canal, Ukrainian mineral rights, Greenland, Canada, and Gaza means to take them by might, coercion, or money.

Expansion of the U.S. footprint is easy to identify by integration concepts. To integrate Greenland as a U.S. territory or Canada as a state means to expand the U.S. to those places.

Authoritarian insistence is easy to identify by executive orders that exceed existing power, that challenge the Constitution, that dismantle or defund congressionally established agencies, or that unilaterally change the law.

Such authoritarianism also exists in a failure to immediately obey court orders and anything using the word mass, like mass firing and mass deportation.

Isolation is a tool forged by imperialism, expansion, and retooling government for profit. The U.S. stops foreign aid and defense. The country vastly slows, encumbers, and dismantles foreign commerce. It increases access to foreign resources—minerals, land resources, and position. Using every advantage to be the dominant party, it selectively deals with vendors and competitors.

All in the name of profit and power.

Rising Action

To accomplish goals, the 47th moves fast and breaks things. Steps in the rising action:

Eliminate expertise from the government, head archivist to chairman of the joint chiefs to statisticians.

Roll back legal structures built on ideas of equality in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution:

• Deny citizenship to those born on the soil;
• Grant citizenship to wealthy outsiders;
• End organized efforts to promote or even consider equality, such as DEI programs;
• Disenfranchise dissenters or make voting difficult or dangerous for them;
• Deny the existence of some humans and decry the existence of others;
• Pretend the stroke of a pen unmakes a hundred years of court precedence;
• Withhold funds from the disobedient.

Read the Constitution broadly sometimes and narrowly sometimes as suits the needs of the hour.

Control the flow of information:

• Establish social media, radio, television, and internet that exists to serve the would-be authoritarian;
• Systematically exclude established and trusted media from office space and rooms where it happens;
• Legitimize non-traditional media, knowing they are as easily excludible as the established media;
• Move ever toward a single source of information flowing through content providers to push the would-be authoritarian’s version of facts, events, and truth.

Create the fog of war without a war:

• Fire employees indiscriminately;
• Push out confusing or misleading data that changes but becomes no less confusing or misleading;
• Issue daily executive orders, ensuring some deal deadly blows to governmental and societal institutions while others use lots of words to ask for reports and suggestions;
• Say aloud even more than is written down—more outlandish, more outrageous, more fuel for the fire;
• Speed the news cycle to the breaking point, making it impossible to keep up.

Telegraph intentions of war:

• Use warfighters instead of soldiers;
• Use invasion instead of immigration;
• Divert resources from foreign or domestic aid to munitions, war training, and war transportation;
• Use own or ownership instead of take, seize, or win (because winning is a foregone conclusion);
• Abandon historical geographic names, treaties, and allies;
• Embrace and stump for would-be and actual authoritarians worldwide.

Weaponize science:

• Stop studying diseases;
• Stymy vaccinations;
• Deregulate food and drugs, climate protection, farming, land use, and worker safety;
• Grow unregulated scientific sectors without ethical guardrails (AI, for example).

Defund and deregulate education: Rally around state rights and private responsibility to remove federal education oversight and funding, knowing that few if any states or private educational institutions can afford to fund and oversee education.

Normalize imprisonment of immigrants and pardon of traitors.

Deputize local, state, and federal workers and officials to implement presidential policy.

Transact U.S.-favorable agreements before aiding the defense of a sovereign nation, ensuring U.S. access to mineral or land rights, trade surpluses, or similar outcomes.

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If I wrote the novel that is current life, I’d write the would-be authoritarian to use the points above to do the things below:

• Allow no guarantees: repeal the Constitution and laws.
• Suffer no representation: impeach congress.
• Offer no redress: revoke judicial jurisdiction.
• Exclude and trap: close borders to immigration, emigration, and travel.
• Remove the barriers of hope, help, and community: destroy religious, including Christian, endeavors and other non-profit organizations.
• Collude with Russia to invade Canada and Greenland, ensuring U.S. leverage to integrate the countries in exchange for military protection and their own survival.
• Collude with China to take over the Panama Canal, ensuring U.S. leverage to resume ownership, operations, and profiteering of the canal.
• Amass sufficient oil reserves to negotiate with countries of the Middle East, ensuring reduced interference with U.S. resettlement of Palestinian people and ownership of the Gaza Strip for profiteering.
• Eliminate free education, health care, and anything else that might enable a middle class.
• Engage a survival-of-the-fittest system to eliminate the sick and disabled through lack of aid, medication, vaccination, or safety (food, drugs, work, roads, products, and so on).
• Remake society into an uneducated, sick, starving, suspicious mass.
• Offer survival to the mass through limited avenues: a) mining domestic and foreign mines; b) service work on government-owned properties; c) joining federal police forces or informing them; d) joining the military as a warfighter or tech worker; or e) manufacturing state-sponsored food, clothing, munitions, transportation, and devices.
• Impose strip mining, child labor, debt imprisonment, forced prison labor, and similar practices that boost profit.

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Main Character Arc Climax

If I wrote this fictional reality, the 47th president would not be the main character. No, protagonist would be someone introduced in the beginning. Throughout rising action, the protagonist would strive against the 47th, disrupting its actions and protecting the vulnerable.

But now, when the 47th seems to have certainly won, the protagonist face a moment of reckoning. Their commitment against the 47th would turn from disruption and reducing harm to restoring America beyond the pre-J20/25 status quo, to something new that the founders had desired but had no experience or words for describing.

Act Three

Falling Action

In my novel, once the protagonist chooses restoration, the falling action would be an all-out response to the brutality of the 47th’s rising action.

Compassion would resurge and fuel republican democracy, formal and informal leadership at all levels of society, and a recommitment to evidenced fact. Citizens and world allies would stand with the protagonist, engaging every tool they had to return the nation to its people.

The protagonist would make more good decisions than bad ones. Not alone, they’d wrest power out of would-be authoritarian hands. They’d protect the vulnerable and forge a way forward to balance safety and soundness against profit and personal political power.

Main Character’s Moment of Final Suspense

The joy of freedom would fade under daily grind of restoring government. The 47th, or its remnants, would see an opening to resurrect the government in American history. World oligarchs would aid such a resurrection, and some who had helped bring government back to the people would wrestle with what felt easier in the moment.

But the protagonist and their allies would allow no going back. They would find a way to block the 47th and its allies.

Denouement

American democracy would have its second chance. Leaders would not merely revert to pre-J20/25 government. They would restore a strengthened constitution, representative government, and judicial authority. But they would carefully remake law.

The remade laws would ensure no would-be authoritarian could succeed again. They would also protect the vulnerable and align with allies for mutual good. The remade laws would free individuals and captured sovereignties. They would restore land to its historical people and steward natural resources.

And the people would live, as happily as we could manage, even if not forever after.

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But This is Real Life

The stuff above could be a great novel. But we don’t live in novels. We live in the real.

In the real, I desperately hope the protagonists are many and rise to the climax of their arcs much sooner.

And I hope we heal the nation very closely to the denouement written above.

And I hope we live, as happily as we can manage, even if not forever after.

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More To Read

Check out Besparc for plain language writing on recent governmental events.