Manifest Destiny 3.0

American Demographics, Sept 1, 2004 by Dr. Jim Taylor

Byline: DR. JIM TAYLOR

In this year of virulent politics, the war in Iraq, charges and countercharges on issues of policy, battles over jobs and the state of the economy, anger seems to be the dominant political thematic emotion. What is interesting, to me at least, is what lies beneath the anger. Once again we find ourselves divided, in part between so-called Red States - sure bets for Bush - and Blue States - sure bets for Kerry. And here we find the North-South distinction rearing its ugly head in American politics once more.

The South and the North are dividing. Up to now, states in the red zone have been distinguished from their Northern cousins by matters of tradition, religion, industry, political behavior, racial relations, education, sports, family and military tradition.

For some time, perhaps since the heady days of the Civil Rights Movement, there has been balance in America. In its most simplified form, the South made and the North paid. But new forces are creating asymmetries in the economic and demographic landscape that are altering this balance. These include an asymmetrical shift in the distribution of retiring families south; an accompanying shift of capital southward and a disproportionate shift of the burden of managing aging households to the South as well.

THE DISCIPLINE OF THE FUTURIST

Before I forecast the reorganization of the American social landscape and what it will do to the cities and states affected, let me briefly explain how I predict the future. One day, I was more or less minding someone else's business, when my secretary (ah, those were the days) came bouncing into my office to tell me that The Wall Street Journal had named me one of America's five leading business futurists. I had, admittedly, written a book with Watts Wacker on the future, but I neither knew that futurism was a discipline, nor that I was a futurist. Nevertheless, the declaration by a journal as august as the one on Wall Street changed my life; it made me a futurist.

Without overstating the methodological depth of my forecasting process, I developed a strategy that enabled me to make provocative speculations on everything from the future of sunglasses to the social effect of Osama Bin Laden on the public acceptability of nuclear weapons. My process assumes that two key factors of human life are always in play whenever there is a collision between the expected and the unexpected.

The first of these has to do with the things that do not change. People as individuals mature and, in that sense, change over the course of a lifetime, but human beings as a species do not change. Our search for family, kinship, property, self-esteem, material object identification, language, creativity, social organization and a place in the cosmos remains a constant. As far back as the anthropological record takes us, those values don't change. At the same time, a 25,000-year record of observable human history shows that the objects available to us for decor, weapons, tools, systems of social orchestration, political systems, geographic and environmental dominance, and the philosophies by which we reconcile our poor lonely existence have evolved.

These two ideas: that we are the calm, unchanging eye of the hurricane around which the social order rotates allow me to make predictions about how shifts in the storm will change life. Change, human change, is therefore, a kind of illusion. I count on people staying the same: greedy, loving, moody, aggressive, familial, intelligent, witless, etc. so that the consequences of an arising asymmetrical event can be forecasted for the humans affected.

An asymmetrical event is any event in the social order that disturbs established harmonies in relations between people, their governance or their pattern of social relations. The attack on Iraq is an asymmetrical event that altered the balance of consequences for individuals, nations and religions. But, so also was school busing. To see asymmetry in action, give a disproportionately, (asymmetrical) valuable gift to a colleague. The response will not be "Gee, thanks." Instead, it will be, "What does this mean?"

THE THIRD GREAT AMERICAN MIGRATION

America has seen two spectacular migrations of its non-native population to date. The first of these began at the end of the 17th century. From the solid establishment of defensible emergent cities, people moved west and kept moving west until, by the middle of the 19th century, we were a bicoastal country. The second great migration grew out of the Great Depression. From the Midwest, people went west. From the South, they went north. From the North they clustered around cities. Long after the Depression, the helices of livelihood and aspiration perpetuated U.S. migration patterns well into the '70s and, to a lesser extent, they continue today.

We are entering a new, third great American migration. People from the South who left to work the auto plants are retiring and heading home to the land of their fathers. Joining them are corporate transplants, the urban poor and those who are looking for an uncomplicated life as a reward for years of hard work. The motivation for migration is a warmer climate and a simpler life. As many as three-quarters of the people pondering retirement have established a good reason to head for America below the 35th Parallel north. And this may mean as many as 50 million emigres to the South over the next 20 years.