Confederate Dispatches

The timeline starts in 2024: An initiating conflict sets in motion events and rhetoric that foreshadow the birth of a new Confederacy. News and social media coalesce along partisan lines; narratives diverge to the point of mutual exclusion. A sense that political differences are irreconcilable becomes widespread and increasingly serves as an organizing principle within communities nationwide...

These “dispatches from the Confederacy” are works of the imagination, written as they might appear as stories in a local newspaper of the 2030s. The twenty short pieces here sketch life in a literal “two Americas” scenario, in which our country splits along its familiar red/blue divide but avoids another bloody Civil War. The new Confederacy will not be such a strange country. For many, it will be a disturbingly recognizable American landscape.