Our high-tech future can be dark or bright. Your vote will soon decide.

Imagine America in 2032. The forms remain. There’s still a Congress. Still a Supreme Court. We all carry on with our campaigns, debates, yard signs, cable panels, and concession speeches. Children are still told they live in a democracy.But the substance has changed. The Court has been expanded and brought to political heel. Election rules have been totally federalized. Mass mail voting is permanent. New states have added new senators. The bureaucracy is no longer merely hostile to the political opposition; it is fully “fortified” against removal. Banks, universities, corporations, platforms, and prosecutors all understand the same rule: Opposition is permitted, but only as theater.Our road divides. Which future will it be?A Republican may run. A conservative may speak. A dissident may complain. But the machinery effortlessly ensures none of it matters very much, if the voices are even heard.This is the future now gathering inside the Democratic Party. Its energy has left the old, once-familiar liberalism of free speech, hard work, earthy patriotism, and equal citizenship. What pulses now is the politics of the DSA: racial spoils, censorship, open borders, anti-police politics, climate command economics, anti-Western foreign policy, and bureaucratic control. The recent socialist victories in New York and Colorado are not local curiosities. They’re previews of coming attractions.In this future, DEI returns, not as a national faculty lounge but as ruthlessly, preemptively enforced federal law. Race communism becomes the operating system of government, education, finance, hiring, medicine, housing, and contracting. Private property is no longer treated as sacred but as morally suspicious. Wealth taxes impose “fairness.” Reparations stake permanent claims against the dwindling producer class. Upward mobility vanishes for those lacking inside connections. “Privilege” means guilt, and guilt means punishment.And yet America does not collapse all at once. Managed downward, its factories go elsewhere and its capital, fearing crushing exit taxes, simply hides. Energy costs are surcharged to the moon. Police retreat, schools decay, families shrink, and the dollar weakens. Our best people stop building and start hedging. And China takes full advantage. The country still has symbols, ceremonies, flags, and slogans. But underneath them is a nation poorer and angrier, more censored, racialized, and frightened. A “managed democracy,” as the Russians call it, in which elections continue, but real political reversal becomes nearly impossible.That’s one future. Now imagine another.Civilization renewedPopulist nationalists hold Congress and the White House. The Court is preserved. Elections are secured. The border stays closed. The intelligence community and the administrative state are brought back under elected control. Equal citizenship replaces racial spoils. Cheap energy remains, and fuels, national policy. Building becomes honorable, durable, and beautiful again.The wind at its sails, the country turns outward with confidence. The Monroe Doctrine is revived for the 21st century. China is pushed back from the Western Hemisphere. America finds and supports more Bukeles and Mileis — leaders who restore order, unshackle markets, defend sovereignty, and repel socialist decline and decay. Europe is no longer encouraged to censor its own people in the name of democracy. The peoples of Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and the rest of the West are allowed to speak and vote without managerial supervision.RELATED: A swarm of hidden Chinese bots are built to control what you think NurPhoto/Getty Images America also begins to think civilizationally again. We realize the West cannot afford to treat every historic Christian nation as a permanent enemy while China organizes the non-Western world into a rival economic and strategic bloc. A wiser American strategy, where possible and on terms favorable to American interests, aims to pull countries such as Russia back toward the broader family of Western civilization rather than leave them as raw material for Beijing’s empire. Peace, trade, energy cooperation, commodity flows, technology markets, and a larger sphere of nations aligned against Chinese world dominance doesn’t solve America’s debt problem, but the resulting American economic growth can. Cheaper energy. Larger markets. More efficient and defensible force postures. It all makes for a less fragmented, much less deracinated West. If America is going to pay down its debt rather than inflate it away or surrender its sovereignty to creditors, it needs a bigger, stronger, more productive civilization behind it — not a shrinking coalition of guilt-ridden post-national states managing decline.In this future, America wins.Reclaiming our machinesMeanwhile, an irony lays in wait. AI and robots, the very technologies so often described as dehumanizing, may be what finally allow human beings to live human lives again. For two centuries, modernity has promised liberation while chaining families to commutes, paperwork, credential mills, medical costs, school failures, housing shortages, industrial drudgery, and the endless anxiety of keeping up. As a result, many Americans view another wave of highly hyped change with fear, uncertainty, and doubt.But properly ordered, the machine can give time back for the soul. Robots can do dangerous, repetitive, exhausting work. AI can help tutor the child, assist the doctor, accelerate the engineer, guide the farmer, protect the soldier, and multiply the builder. Automation need not mean a cold world of isolated consumers watched by rigged algorithms. In a sane civilization, it can mean parents home earlier, children taught better, elders cared for longer, towns rebuilt faster, medicine delivered sooner, and ordinary people freed from scarcity enough to rediscover family, faith, friendship, craftsmanship, worship, and wonder. The machine, if governed by men who still know what man is for, can help restore the conditions of real life.A return to the soul transforms our vision of the future. The menace and alienation drains away from images of robot aides in every classroom; robot surgeons and AI doctors; 3D-printed schools, hospitals, homes, and factories; and nuclear reactors providing clean, sovereign, abundant energy. With rebuilt American manufacturing, accelerated scientific discovery, and an economy where American workers once again build, supervise, own, maintain, secure, and profit from their ingenuity, the most productive economy in human history beckons.No third wayAnd so our road divides. Which future will it be? There is no third option where the comfortable get to keep their illusions, and the machinery keeps tightening but liberty somehow survives. There is no version of the future in which the groups who want to rewrite the rules gain the power to do so and then politely decline.That’s why the next two years of elections are not normal. They’re not just about which rear ends fill which seats. They’re about whether elected offices will lose the ability to change the direction of the country at all.Whatever differences divide our friends and allies, we need to win now, while winning still means something. Or we can explain to our children and grandchildren why we stood by and watched the door close on their future.