Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

The book is out. The title is Tomorrow as Tribute: The Politics of the Burnt Future. It is available in paperback, in Kindle, and as a free web edition through David Boles Books. The audiobook is in production with narrator selection underway. The web edition is free because I want the argument to circulate as widely as possible.

I have been writing this book in some form for about three years. The first notes I have for it are from a long drive across western Pennsylvania in the spring of 2023, when I was thinking about what the political phrase “make America great again” actually proposes. The book argues that the proposition is more accurate than its critics have allowed and more catastrophic than its supporters understand. A specific structure shapes the world being promised. The cost of trying to deliver that world is a specific kind of damage. Naming both was the work of the manuscript.

Here is the argument in a paragraph. Voter populations across more than a dozen contemporary democracies and pseudo-democracies have agreed to trade the material future of their political communities for the maintenance of a fantasy past. The trade is voluntary. The costs include dead soldiers, dismantled institutions, scientific apparatus destroyed across decades, public health systems collapsed, climate adaptation foreclosed, and democratic procedures captured by movements that openly oppose them. Voters know the costs. They have decided that the costs are worth it. I call this trade the politics of tribute, in the ancient sense of tribute as what a subordinate polity pays to a dominant one. The dominant polity, in this case, is the fantasy past itself, which collects payment in the currency of children’s futures.

The book covers thirteen contemporary cases. Russia under Putin and the United States across the second Trump administration are the two anchor chapters. Hungary under Orbán, India under Modi, and Turkey under the long Erdoğan are extensively examined. Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, France, Germany, and Poland appear as the harder comparative cases. Each chapter examines what is being traded, what past is being maintained, what future is being foreclosed, and who pays the costs.

An earlier version of this book, drafted in 2024 and abandoned, tried to argue that contemporary voters had been deceived. That manuscript collapsed under its own argument. The deception account could not explain why voters who had access to the same evidence as the rest of us (the closings, the casualties, the institutional decay) kept voting for more of it. Discarding the deception frame and accepting voluntariness as the starting point freed the rest of the book to do its actual work. The discarded manuscript was a hundred and twenty thousand words. My published version comes in at a hundred and six. The fourteen thousand words removed were the wrong argument’s worth of evidence.

The hardest part of the writing was holding the voluntariness argument against the friends and early readers who pushed back on the word voluntary. They argued that the voters in these countries are trapped, that they have been propagandized for decades, that the alternatives have been systematically denied to them. All of that is true. None of it changes the basic argument. The voters know what they are buying. They have access to the same news, the same evidence, the same obituaries as everyone else. Calling them stupid or deceived misses the transaction. They have decided, election after election, that the fantasy is worth the cost. Naming that decision accurately is the analytical task of the book. Softening the naming, into a more comfortable account of trickery and ignorance, would collapse the affirmative argument that follows from it.

The affirmative argument is in the closing chapters. What replaces the politics of tribute in the historical record is patient institution-building. Schools that work. Hospitals that stay open. Wages that rise. Public health systems that function. Climate policy that protects the actual places where actual people live. A political class that accepts the loss of short-term advantage that the long view requires. The book examines four historical cases of democratic restoration in detail: postwar West Germany, postwar Italy, post-Franco Spain, and post-junta Greece. Each of those restorations took decades. None was complete. All were preferable to the alternative.

What I am hoping for from readers is harder to name. This is not a recruiting document, and I have no expectation of persuading anyone who was not already concerned. I am hoping that readers who are already concerned find their concern named accurately, and that the naming clarifies the work in front of them. Restoration is the work. The work is generational. It is happening now, in many places, mostly invisible at the scale of national news but visible at the scale of a county or a school district or a hospital or a courtroom. Joining that work is the actionable conclusion of the book.

Here is what is available now. The paperback is at Amazon under David Boles Books. Kindle is also at Amazon. The free web edition is at BolesBooks.com. The audiobook is in production with narrator selection happening this month. Sample chapters and the introduction are at BolesBlogs.com for anyone who wants to read before buying.

I want to thank Janna, who read every chapter and pushed back on every claim that needed pushing back on. The book is better for her readings. I want to thank the early readers who objected to the voluntariness argument; the chapter that defends voluntariness exists because of their objections. I want to thank the David Boles Books production pipeline, which has been running on a tight schedule across the spring of 2026 to get the book into the world in five formats simultaneously.

The book is out. My next book is already in early notes. The work continues, on the writing side and on the reading side and on the political side. Thank you for being a reader.