I’m in the “it wont be a sudden collapse, things will just keep getting shittier until we wake up one day and realize that most of the states are basically ‘developing countries’” camp. A sudden collapse would require something like a war going badly and the US getting invaded - and I just don’t see that happening. The US will lose its ability to project force around the globe, but will remain a strong player in the Atlantic and the hegemon of the Americas. I think there will be a new paradigm of foreign relations where we basically lean on Europe and our presence there becomes a lot less gregarious. As control of Africa slips from our fingers the Middle East and especially Saudi Arabia will re-balance their own foreign policy commitments and that will be when you see the true last gasp of American Empire as we try to prevent the cheap oil tap from being turned down - if we;re successful the Empire will last fifty more years, if we fail then the Empire is de facto dead.
Poor regions in America will deteriorate even more rapidly than they already are, wealthy regions will experience something like the stagflation of the 70s and working people will get squeezed even more, mass shootings will become more common, the suicide rate will rise precipitously, fascists will seize power in many governments only to realize that the copper wiring has long been stripped out by corporations, somewhere socdems will take power and try to reverse course only to be sanctioned by the corporations (everyone will point to the capital flight and say that that’s why communism doesn’t work), and so on.
This will continue until a Putin-like figure emerges who can exercise some sort of control over the bourgeoisie and remake the government, or a Bolshevik-like organization does and ignites a class war. But the conditions of shock therapy or post-WW1 can’t be replicated, so there’s no telling how long the ship will take to sink and it might not be in our lifetimes.
Yes, there will be like a centralized federal military and everything, although probably some more active state militaries also. The US will drift towards more of an E.U. level of separation, with the federal government being far less important than state governments and state laws, other than the centralized military. We’ll have more and more of these extremely disparate state laws that cause population transfers, and freedom of movement will mostly exist except for marginalized and threatened groups like trans people, who will essentially have like 20 or 30 states they can travel through.
I’m in the “it wont be a sudden collapse, things will just keep getting shittier until we wake up one day and realize that most of the states are basically ‘developing countries’” camp. A sudden collapse would require something like a war going badly and the US getting invaded - and I just don’t see that happening. The US will lose its ability to project force around the globe, but will remain a strong player in the Atlantic and the hegemon of the Americas. I think there will be a new paradigm of foreign relations where we basically lean on Europe and our presence there becomes a lot less gregarious. As control of Africa slips from our fingers the Middle East and especially Saudi Arabia will re-balance their own foreign policy commitments and that will be when you see the true last gasp of American Empire as we try to prevent the cheap oil tap from being turned down - if we;re successful the Empire will last fifty more years, if we fail then the Empire is de facto dead.
Poor regions in America will deteriorate even more rapidly than they already are, wealthy regions will experience something like the stagflation of the 70s and working people will get squeezed even more, mass shootings will become more common, the suicide rate will rise precipitously, fascists will seize power in many governments only to realize that the copper wiring has long been stripped out by corporations, somewhere socdems will take power and try to reverse course only to be sanctioned by the corporations (everyone will point to the capital flight and say that that’s why communism doesn’t work), and so on.
This will continue until a Putin-like figure emerges who can exercise some sort of control over the bourgeoisie and remake the government, or a Bolshevik-like organization does and ignites a class war. But the conditions of shock therapy or post-WW1 can’t be replicated, so there’s no telling how long the ship will take to sink and it might not be in our lifetimes.
Yes, there will be like a centralized federal military and everything, although probably some more active state militaries also. The US will drift towards more of an E.U. level of separation, with the federal government being far less important than state governments and state laws, other than the centralized military. We’ll have more and more of these extremely disparate state laws that cause population transfers, and freedom of movement will mostly exist except for marginalized and threatened groups like trans people, who will essentially have like 20 or 30 states they can travel through.