chapotraphouse

Only two I can think of off the top of my head (and a lot of misses and navel gazing in-between). I had a subscription once and after reading the second or third one I stopped even bothering to remove them from the plastic wrapper.

1: Is this the future Liberals want? (2019)

Dated by the Sanders campaign, but it has a pretty long discussion of the class dis-alignment of the contemporary US political system. Also a really funny intro.

October 2040: an exhausted nation readies itself for the third and final presidential debate of a grueling campaign season. Across America’s living rooms, bars, basement shelters, and prisons, augmented reality devices light up with images of the two contenders.

First-term California governor Malia Obama, vaulted to the Democratic nomination after her heroic response to the devastating Central Valley flood of ’39, introduces her Green Forward agenda. This ambitious plan, developed in partnership with Harvard University and the Bezos Foundation, aims to relocate 20 million workers from environmental and economic “brownfields” to productive metropolitan cores, where they can apply for federal grants, providing the displaced with access to education and skills training, along with civic engagement and entrepreneurship programs.

The proposal brings a throaty sneer from Republican president Allen Jones, the retired professional wrestling star formerly known as A.J. Styles. “The elite wants to make you move to Portland, Oregon, and eat plastic hamburgers in a cubicle until you die,” he says, referring to the city’s recent ordinance banning the consumption of animal products. In contrast, Jones pledges to protect Judeo-Christian values by building the largest military drone fleet in world history, implanting microchips in illegal immigrants (“just stamp ‘em!”), creating a million new American jobs in ocean-floor mineral mining, and cutting taxes.

As the debate ends, pundits remark that the country is more polarized than ever. Earlier in the campaign, Jones’s son Ajay, a freshman congressman from Georgia, made headlines by performing his father’s signature move, the Styles Clash, on longtime Texas senator Beto O’Rourke; images of “bleeding Beto” have featured prominently in campaign ads on both sides. But it is not clear how many Americans are really paying attention. One hundred and thirty million people sat out the last election, including a record share of lower-income and working-class voters. Even as wealth and income inequality soar to new highs, experts predict that less than a quarter of Americans without college degrees will cast a ballot in 2040.

2: Burn the Constitution (2011)

Thus, brilliantly and subtly, the system they built rendered it virtually impossible for the electorate to obtain a concerted change in national policy by a collective act of political will. The Senate is an undemocratic monstrosity in which 84 percent of the population can be outvoted by the 16 percent living in the smallest states. The passage of legislation requires the simultaneous assent of three separate entities — the presidency, House, and Senate — that voters are purposely denied the opportunity to choose at one time, with two-thirds of the Senate membership left in place after each election. The illogical electoral college gears the whole combat of presidential elections around a few, almost randomly determined, swing states that happen to contain evenly balanced numbers of Democrats and Republicans. And the entire system is frozen in amber by an amendment process of almost comical complexity. Whereas France can change its constitution anytime with a three-fifths vote of its Congress and Britain could recently mandate a referendum on instant runoff voting by a simple parliamentary majority, an amendment to the US Constitution requires the consent of no less than thirty-nine different legislatures comprising roughly seventy-eight separately elected chambers.