By Skyler Fusaro
Atlanta, 2063
“It didn’t feel like a coup. It felt like forgetting.”
Introduction
In a reflective letter from the future, Skyler Fusaro explains the subtle deterioration of democracy. She emphasizes that it eroded rather than succumbed to violent upheavals. She appreciates historical writing from the past, noting that while predictions were scarce, documentation of gradual changes was vital. Fusaro analyzes the normalization of cruelty. She discusses the performance aspect of power. She also examines how the manipulation of truth contributed to this decline. She emphasizes preserving records and conscience. Remembrance is essential for a future restoration of democracy.
Letter from the Future
Dear Friends,
When people here ask how democracies decline, they still expect a dramatic answer. Tanks. Sirens. A final speech. I have to disappoint them.
That isn’t how it happened.
It happened the way eyesight goes — slowly, then all at once. The lights dimmed in increments small enough to argue about. People debated whether it was really darker or just evening. Meanwhile, the furniture of truth was quietly removed from the room.
That’s why your writing from 2025 still matters.
You didn’t predict collapse. You documented erosion. And in doing so, you left us something rare: a record of how it felt while it was happening.
Truth Didn’t Vanish — It Thinned
“Truth erodes dataset by dataset.”
When I reread your essays now, what strikes me isn’t outrage. It’s steadiness. You kept insisting on evidence when evidence had gone unfashionable. You kept naming lies when repetition had turned them into background noise.
From here, that insistence looks almost heroic — though I know it didn’t feel that way then. You were writing into exhaustion, not triumph. You were arguing for truth while truth was being rephrased as opinion, or worse, as disloyalty.
We now teach students that this is the beginning of democracies suffocating. It is not because truth is disproved. It is because truth is treated as optional.
Power Learned to Execute
“The presidency became a stage, and governance became choreography.”
You saw early what many refused to name — that Trump didn’t just lie; he performed. Reality television had trained him well. Conflict was the engine. Humiliation was the hook. Resolution was unnecessary.
From where I stand, this was the great miscalculation of the press: they believed attention was neutral. They believed spectacle can be covered without consequence. They mistook visibility for accountability.
Trump’s months long intimidation and bombing of small fishing boats they claimed were carrying fentanyl to the U.S. was never shown to be true. Then, using a four-year-old indictment of the President of Venezuela, they snatched Maduro and his wife. This occurred in the middle of the night while they were asleep. This was a power move by Trump, and I saw how this continued throughout his term.
The media didn’t understand something significant. Many of your colleagues did understand it. Power that is performed is protected.
Forgetting Was Framed as Neutrality
“Neutrality was the costume of amnesia.”
The DEI rollbacks you wrote about were never really about policy. They were about memory management.
By removing words, they removed histories. By calling equity “divisive,” they implied injustice was settled. And scrubbing museums and classrooms, they taught a generation that silence was civility.
Here in 2063, we still use that phrase of yours — the rehearsal for forgetting. It’s taught in teacher preparation programs now. Students study how quickly a nation can decide that innocence feels better than truth.
Cruelty Became Procedural
“Cruelty didn’t need hatred. It needed process.”
I wish I can say the ICE basement shocked us into action.
It didn’t.
What shocked us later was how normal it all looked in hindsight. Job postings. Budget increases. Press releases. Everything had a logo. Everything had a workflow.
This is what people misunderstand about authoritarianism. It doesn’t always announce itself with fists. Sometimes it arrives with forms, deadlines, and laminated badges.
You were right to call it what it was: not failure, but intent.
Note: Introducing Skyler Fusaro
Skyler is a fictional correspondent. She is a historian writing from the 2060s in Atlanta. I created this voice years ago to help me think beyond the immediacy of events. She writes from the other side of consequences. Her letters are not predictions. They are reflections — attempts to understand how decisions made in our current shape the moral landscape of the future.
Thinking about the Future
In 1969, I began a teaching career at Georgia State University. I was writing for a group that created audio tapes (yes, audio tapes for use in middle and high school classrooms. These tapes covered a wide range of topics, including geology, environmental science, biology, and the future. One of the audio tapes was named “FIVE’S Walk on Thursday.” The audio tape was published by Science Workshop, Inc., Atlanta, GA, and published in print in by Jack Hassard, in Science Experiences, Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1990.
The Five’s Walk on Thursday tape featured an intriguing voice of person from the future. The voice explained to us what life was like in Atlanta in the future. I first used it a graduate course with teachers.
I placed the tape recorder in in a box. The box was covered with aluminum foil. Dials and an antenna were attached to create an environment of suspense. The box looked like a radio. I turned the tape on and after strange noises from outer space, a voice came on from the future.
“Hello. Hello. Are you there? My instruments tell me that you are able to hear my voice but unable to talk back to me…If my calculations are correct and you are hearing my voice on some type of electrical apparatus, then this is quite a significant day in history—the first trans-time electro-wave communication!”
Five’s Walk on Thursday, Science Workshop, Inc., Atlanta, GA
Bringing future dialog into the classroom proved to be very interesting to the teachers. Many of them took a copy of the tape, and used it with students in their classroom.
I included the text of the tape in a chapter in my book. The book is titled Science Experiences: Cooperative Learning and the Teaching of Science (Addison-Wesley, 1990).
Forty years later, Five’s stayed in my mind. I created a writer from the future who I called Skyler Fusaro. The first letter arrived in 2011. I received a few more in the decade ahead.
Another decade passed, and I began receiving letters from Skyler during the first Trump administration. In 2025, as the country entered a second Trump term, her voice returned with urgency. While I wrote from inside unfolding events, Skyler wrote back from a future still living with their aftermath. That dialogue — between witness and memory — became one of the most meaningful threads in my work this year.
Skyler’s letters are grounded in history, ethics, and imagination. They allow me to ask something new.
What will people say about this moment when the noise has faded? What will they wish we had named sooner? What will they thank us for remembering?
These letters alongside my nonfiction essays are a form of civic reflection. They are meant to slow us down and widen the frame. I want us to think about our actions, and how they affect people living thirty to forty years ahead.
Science Was Treated as a Threat
“A society that doubts its scientists doubts its future.”
When climate data disappeared and researchers were fired, many told themselves it was temporary. Administrative. Correctable. We all read Richard Lazarus’s book, The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme Court. Trump and his EPA head have reversed some of the key findings. They have ignored the science of climate change. This includes its effects on the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, lands, and life.
But you understood something deeper was happening: knowledge itself was being recast as dissent. Evidence became a political liability. Curiosity became suspect.
From here, the damage is easy to trace. We lost years — not just of data, but of trust. Rebuilding institutions was hard. Rebuilding the shared capacity to believe in facts took longer.
Autocracy Didn’t March — It Was Hired
“Authoritarianism walked in through HR.”
Your letters about the “ICE Generation” are now part of educational materials. The work of many of your colleagues is also included. These are taught alongside historical case studies of state formation. Students are startled by how unremarkable it all looked at first.
Bonuses. Recruitment ads. Career pathways.
Some joined out of fear. Some out of ambition. And some out of boredom. The system didn’t ask why. It only asked whether they’d comply.
This is one of the hardest lessons we teach now: systems don’t need monsters. They need momentum.
History Was Knocking, Not Whispering
“History didn’t repeat. It instructed.” Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny“
You kept drawing lines — to Orbán, to Putin, to earlier American failures. People accused you of exaggeration. From here, the parallels feel almost embarrassingly clear.
Strongmen don’t rise because people love tyranny. They rise because people grow tired of responsibility.
You named that fatigue while it was still forming.
And Then, the Country Remembered Itself
“For one day, democracy stood up straight.”
No Kings Day is still commemorated here.
Not as a victory. As a memory.
People stood together without scripts, without leaders, without permission. They remembered that citizenship is not a spectator sport. They remembered that dissent is not disorder — it is devotion.
You wrote that No Kings days felt like the republic taking a breath. That’s exactly how it looks to us now: a moment when forgetting paused.
Why Resistance Writing Survived
“When institutions forget, archives remember.”
Your 2025 essays weren’t just commentary. The writing of your colleagues writing for the resistance was crucial for the future. They include many, including Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Diane Ravitch, Joyce Vance, Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Lucian K. Truscott IV, Anne Applebaum, Thom Hartmann. Bandy Lee, Jennifer Rubin, and others. They were preservationists.
Every post you published, every dataset you linked, every letter you answered — they became part of the reconstruction. When bans lifted and records resurfaced, your work was already there, waiting.
That’s the quiet power of writing in dark times. Not prediction. Not persuasion.
Preservation.
One Last Thing
You worried, back then, that writing wasn’t enough.
It never feels like enough.
But from here, I can tell you this: the future doesn’t just inherit laws and infrastructure. It inherits records of conscience. And you left us many.
We didn’t rebuild because we were smarter.
We rebuilt because someone remembered how to see.
With gratitude — and resolve,
Skyler
Atlanta, 2063
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