I mean hopefully it can be delayed by a year or two until I can get SRS and move to Seattle and integrate into some leftist networks. But we're all just stuck in this limbo of waiting for the evil empire to implode and it's still tottering along, smashing thousands of lives daily. I'm not romanticizing the Cool Zone, I'm just tired of being kept on the edge - waiting, waiting. Let's just get it the fuck over with
This is the collapse, it’s just going to play out over your entire lifetime rather than like a week
wanna sneak peek at how the 21st century will play out for the United States? Look at Brittan in the 20th century.
eh. history doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. while there are no doubt similarities our decline will be different from theirs owing to a lot of factors like politics, economics, culture, society, science, technology, geography, etc. Those things are all different enough from England. Especially geography.
Especially geography
arguably a contender for top determinant of the course of history
Oh, for sure. I just like my glib comparison. Exactly how this shakes out over the next 10, 20, 30 years is anyone's guess. That being said... people often want to imagine some sharp drastic moment where the US as we understand it is humbled/crippled/changed in some drastic capacity -- that it becomes clear to everyone involved that we've entered a new era. I think it's gonna creep up on us, slowly, like it did for the UK. So I stick to my glib comparison.
the empire is not going to implode any time soon. The inertia is incredible. It has at least a couple generations left in it.
I have to agree, it's getting bad in the imperial core, but it's already been so much worse outside and it's going to have to get a lot worse inside before the stasis breaks. That will come with time.
It feels like it's right around the corner, and maybe there's going to be some rupture, but all we can really hope to do is organize what we can and survive.
Nobody predicted the end of the Soviet Union. In 1980, it seemed like it was going to last forever. By 1990, it was in full collapse.
I think its easy to look at '83 and '01 and '08 and '20 in hindsight and say "If we survived this, we'll survive anything". But this neglects how much more concentrated and fragile we're becoming with every systems failure.
Louisiana never actually recovered from Katrina. The state is still there on paper but the infrastructure and population were never properly restored. People just fled to Houston.
The Texas grid wasn't fixed after the '21 Freeze. The Houston Addicts Reservoir wasn't modernized after the big flood. Nobody is spending any money on the Ike Dike to protect Galveston. And that Gulf isn't getting any cooler as we approach hurricane season.
What's going to happen next? Idk, but it always just feels like another roll of the dice.
Nobody predicted the end of the Soviet Union. In 1980, it seemed like it was going to last forever. By 1990, it was in full collapse.
"Everything was forever, until it was no more". Hell, this happened twice with Russia+ in the 20th century. No one, especially Lenin, expected state collapse in the 19teens until it suddenly happened. It was obviously on the edge but the actual moment it was ready was a surprise to all. Ditto for the collapse of the USSR. The cracks are obvious but no one can really predict ahead of time when the whole structure just crumbles. The US has attributes that render it incredibly resilient, but its facing a series of cascading failures that will inevitably fall into a complete systems collapse. Predicting its exact date is like trying to accurately predict the next Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake or, perhaps more accurately, the next ground zero for a pandemic. We can make a lot of very educated and intelligent guesses. But the timing will only become obvious in hindsight.
The US has attributes that render it incredibly resilient
I mean, so much of it is simply that its an enormous open liberalized market system. So while you can point to Ohio going into economic decline or Mississippi and West Virginia just kinda existing as these banana republics since their inception, the rest of the country can keep growing in a manner that dwarfs their under-performance.
But then a downturn hits Wall Street or Silicon Valley, and nothing good happening in the Gulf Coast or the Midwest really matters, because several hundred billion dollars getting flushed all at once can't be ignored.
The resiliency is largely just in these heavily fortified economic bastions that the national population gathers around, like refugees around a burning barrel. The Fed comes around and dumps more fuel in the barrel and everyone says "This is fine". But then some dipshit like Rand Paul or Donald Trump starts taking stabs at the Federal Reserve because of all the contradictions in the "We live in a palace while you huddle around a barrel" economic system. And that presents an existential threat to the country.
We can make a lot of very educated and intelligent guesses. But the timing will only become obvious in hindsight.
We can see the stress points. But they're well insulated and fortified and deliberately made opaque from the outside. So its difficult to determine what their state actually is, until the cladding finally gets pierced or the interior begins to give way.
But we can also see a pattern of history. The Volker shock preceded the '83 collapse. The rate hikes in '06 ultimately triggered the '08 collapse. The minor rate-hikes starting in '16 combined with COVID ran us into a big '20 downturn. And now we're trying to raise rates again specifically to suppress wage growth. Everyone with an ounce of memory regarding economic trends knows where that's headed.
And you might say "We know how to fix this, we just lower rates and give out a bunch of free money again". But that's hard to do when we're losing dollar hegemony and our Congress is full of people who hate domestic spending.
You can see the tower trembling. I agree you can't say when its going to collapse, but you can see all the pressures building. Something is going to give in the next few years. This isn't '92. This isn't '03. This isn't even '14. We're way too unstable and way too hard up for real economic utility. There isn't some tech boom coming to save us. There isn't a glut of cheap energy coming to save us. :ron-paul-its-happening:
Something is going to give in the next few years. This isn’t '92. This isn’t '03. This isn’t even '14. We’re way too unstable and way too hard up for real economic utility. There isn’t some tech boom coming to save us. There isn’t a glut of cheap energy coming to save us.
The Empire is/was indeed incredibly strong and could take a number of body blows that would have collapsed weaker nations. And you're right, despite its historic resilience, even the US can only stagger around punch-drunk for so long before it falls over. The cheap energy of the aughts and the tech boom of the aughts/teens provided a temporary boost in profits. But aside from AI, there's really nowhere else for investor money in Silicon Valley to go. The energy sources we've shackled ourselves to won't be able to compete with the renewables boom. People aren't interested in working for shit pay while wrecking their bodies with American health coverage in the trades, so that will continue to dry up. The nation will literally crumble before our eyes; it already is. Education metrics will continue to fall, with fewer and fewer people able to perform at a high school level, much less engineer the innovations of the future. More and more of the citizenry will become ever more isolated, insecure, afraid, and alienated. And the cost of everything from health to education to food will continue to rise and at some point soon the stone will simply have no more blood to give. Except literal.
And now we’re trying to raise rates again specifically to suppress wage growth. Everyone with an ounce of memory regarding economic trends knows where that’s headed.
It’s really been wild to watch the fed deliberately pressing the “crash the economy” button while everyone screams “No don’t do that!”
On the other hand, consider that the Soviet Union collapsed and although Russia still hasn't fully recovered from the 90s it's already once again a 'distant 3rd Great Power'. Even if the US was stripped to the fundamentals of it's geography it remains a contender for world-class power. It has a large population, it has the best river networks in the world, the infrastructure is in desperate need of renewal and modernization but at least it exists, it's an entire continent's worth of good arable land, it commands rich client states across the world, and it's on the northern hemisphere so it suffers less from climate change.
I think that as bad as things get in the imperial core (and at the core's margins, as you've described), nothing short of full on balkanization of America changes that calculus.
The US is practically designed to balkanize, given the way the state system is arranged. It wouldn't even be the first time we've tried.
I could very easily see the states start cracking up, particularly if there is any infighting within the US military.
That's not too say the new constellation of power would be weak, but modern Russia pales in comparison to the old Soviet Bloc or the rising Chinese and Indian states in terms of raw industrial power.
I think that raises two questions.
First, Balkanization: sure, but how? It's not gonna be along state lines. So even if the states become power centers in their own right, we have to factor in some interesting things. Geographically the US is rather united by the Mississipi River. Culturally the US is a new world diaspora nation, divides are ideological and racial rather than ethnic, and those divides are spread out between cities and rural areas.
Finally, will there be in-fighting in the US military? If there isn't any then the country won't balkanize and the states won't ever become centers of hard power. My impression, looking from outside, is that the US military retains the institutional wherewithal to discipline itself. Should it become politicized, then it will be as in Latin America. They'd launch a coup to 'stabilize the situation', but the national territory won't be under negotiation.
To give you an example. Brazil lacks the unifying geography factor of the US (quite the contrary, it's disunited as such), and during the First Republic (1890s-1930s) it was practically a confederacy. The states weren't just autonomous. They had their own armies, foreign relations and debt. The federal government did not get involved in coups launched inside the states. It was that decentralized. When the 1930s crisis hit the result were army junior coups, followed by the rise of a strongman, followed by a rebellion by the strongest state, followed by a purge of the army. Brazil in the latin american populist era not only recentralized, but embarked on a nationalist building campaign that involved burning state flags on tv. Countries the size of ours go through cycles like these. The question ultimately is wether national identity is strong enough (and here Brazil and the US both have an advantage over the 'old world'), and where the public institutions are headed.
First, Balkanization: sure, but how? It’s not gonna be along state lines.
I've been giving that some thought. Given the present course of things, my own amateur best guess it that as the federal government is stripped of more and more power, the states themselves will be forced to take on more and more responsibilities. The states that have stronger bureaucracies and material economic bases (agriculture, manufacturing, transport networks, etc) will naturally arise as power centers. I think California and the West Coast at large will be good examples of this. From there, it all depends on how things crack and break up at the federal level. Maybe it'll be closer to the pre-Constitution 13 colonies' confederation, maybe even the extreme Brazil example.
To return to the California point, I've been thinking about how that state's borders are the top contenders for making geographic sense in the nation (besides like Florida and Hawaii). Big mountain ranges protect an extremely agriculturally productive central valley, not to mention the incredible ocean ports. If it were an independent nation, its number one priority would be securing the outside water supplies it desperately needs for that agriculture and the large, parched cities on the coast. That's a big deal, especially with the Colorado River getting smaller and smaller each year. The federal government is already barely able to keep CO, UT, NV, AZ, and CA to come to terms about that water usage. That's a potential wedge point in future balkanization.
This is where I think the brazilian parallel becomes more interesting. You've shown how a California must secure the nearby states due to the Colorado River. Let's think about the implications of that. This means water rationing in times of climate change, most likely against the interests of the rest of the Colorado River states. This means finding a border with Texas and other states which might be carving their own sphere of influence. This game theory can blow into all out war, but doesn't have to. Just as it didn't in Brazil.
The First Republic followed the Brazilian Empire. The Monarchy, specifically during the reign of Pedro II, had morphed into what historians like the call the 'saquarema era', or the era of conservative consensus. All the hardpower in the first decades after independence had been in the hands of the landlord class. And they often tried, here and there, to carve their own countries, or to carve some autonomy for themselves. There had been many rebellions in the first decades of Brazil's existence. The ultimate victors were the factions closest to the capital, and they and their provincial supporters came to a simple conclusion: liberalism (federalization) doesn't work as it breeds more rebellion, and we have to stop and set up a highly centralized system to pacify this nation which, in reality, was a multitude of colonies wrestled into one.
So the Brazilian Empire had been a country where all power rested in the landlord's hands, and to maintain their economic means was why the regime existed. But actual rule was centralized away from the rural areas, into the capital and into the provincial capitals, and was vested on an urbanized bureaucracy. The abolition of the monarchy came into being as local oligarchies grew prosperous enough to outcompete the heavily indebted imperial boy's club in Rio, and as the monarchy itself also lost even the capital landlords' support after abolishing slavery but failing to enact federalism in the late 1880s.
All the monarchists believed that the end of the centralized regime would balkanize the country. It ultimately didn't. There are many reasons why, one of which that the monarchy had lasted long enough to create at least the foundation of a common brazilian national identity. And yet, in the turmoils after the military coup that ended the Empire, the oligarchies of the new United States of Brazil found themselves making the same game theory as we presume the oligarchs of California, and New York, and Texas all will. The result, was this: you notice that I said the First Republic was practically a confederacy, but formally it wasn't. What held it together was that part where I said that the Federal Government would not intervene in coups that happened inside the states. This was the so called Governor's Policy. The second informal policy that marked the era was 'Coffee and Milk' politics: the Federal Government thereafter was to be alternated between the two strongest states, São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Altogether what we have is an Oligarchic Republic with a pecking order. São Paulo and Minas Gerais are at the top; Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul are somewhere in the middle with their own provincial spheres of influence; Rio de Janeiro becomes an 'occupied capital' of sorts and lives off prestige and everyone else is at the bottom.
Can you imagine something similar in the US? California and Texas agree not to go to war over the Colorado because they can just do what oligarchs do and shake hands while hiding knives behind their backs? And so the country decentralizes and balkanizes in anything but name.
Speaking briefly on CA / TX and Colorado water, note that the largest water source that originates in CO for Texas is the Rio Grande. That flows down into New Mexico and then into Texas. So CA needs to secure water from CO, UT, NV, and AZ. TX needs to secure water from NM and CO. A lot of those states will struggle greatly in a more confederated or even free-for-all balkanized setup (can you imagine AZ or NV surviving for long in their current configurations outside of the existing federal support structure?). CA and TX could come to some kind of agreement where they keep these "lesser" states subjugated by various means.
Are you Brazilian, or do you have any further reading I could look into? This is all fascinating and very new to me. You're definitely convincing me that Brazilian history can provide pertinent clues into reading America's potential future.
National identity will be a tricky issue. The PNW would have a secession problem if the Republic of Cascadia idea gains actual traction. Texas used to be its own literal nation, if only for a short while. I don't think it'd be hard for them to whip up a new Texan identity that outshines (or even positions itself as the rightful successor of) American identity. My outsider's perspective has always been that CA kinda does view itself apart similarly to NYC.
I'm Brazilian, yeah. I haven't read this one but I remember liking what the authors wrote back in uni. It should be a pretty good primer.
In a balkanization situation, I see southern California seceding and joining Mexico. If it was put to a popular plebiscite, like the UN does all the time, it would pass in a landslide.
Never underestimate the power of white worshipping POC to throw themselves under the bus
If it were an independent nation, its number one priority would be securing the outside water supplies it desperately needs for that agriculture and the large, parched cities on the coast. That’s a big deal, especially with the Colorado River getting smaller and smaller
doesn't 90% of California's water come from the Sierra Nevada ice and not the Colorado river
It's complicated. It's a big state and water comes from many disparate sources. For the Central Valley, the linked article quotes 30% of the agriculture coming from Sierra Nevada snowpack. Meanwhile the Colorado river is more important for the southern portion of the state (so presumably leaning towards urban use and less agriculture)- "The Colorado is a critical source of irrigation and urban water for southern California, providing between 55 and 65 percent of the total supply."
First, Balkanization: sure, but how? It’s not gonna be along state lines.
I mean, for the most part all the Confederate states held their own lines. West Virginia was only an exception because it was an edge case.
Finally, will there be in-fighting in the US military?
There would have to be in order to see any kind of real split. You might get an outright coup, with some cartel of generals or spooks removing a sitting President and replacing them with Their Guy, but historically that just means a dictatorship for some number of years. You'd need a real divide between powers within the military to get a geopolitical split in the nation. I suspect that's a real possibility because (a) lots of military brass are pilled af and (b) the branches are already naturally antagonistic because everyone's pulling from the same Pentagon pot of money. Infighting can be papered over so long as Big Number Always Goes Up, but as soon as you start seeing one branch or the other up for a serious set of cuts, its going to be viewed as a power grab and people in the other branches are going to respond.
When the 1930s crisis hit the result were army junior coups, followed by the rise of a strongman, followed by a rebellion by the strongest state, followed by a purge of the army. Brazil in the latin american populist era not only recentralized, but embarked on a nationalist building campaign that involved burning state flags on tv. Countries the size of ours go through cycles like these. The question ultimately is wether national identity is strong enough (and here Brazil and the US both have an advantage over the ‘old world’), and where the public institutions are headed.
Brazil has a substantive native population, though. A lot of the power struggles in the country fall along ethnic lines. I don't really see that in the US. Yes, there's something of a racial divide. But there's still more than enough crossover to produce candidates of mixed ethnicity in both parties. A lot more of the divide in the US is economic, with particular industries favoring one state over another and business interests squabbling over turf through legislation and regulatory capture. You can kinda see this in the Crypto bullshit and the fight over regulating AI. Or how a state like Delaware has functionally monopolized the entire credit card industry.
That's where I really see dividing lines. Texas being a petro-state and energy exporter puts it at odds with California which is a heavy electricity consumer and Georgia which is leaning hard into lithium battery manufacturing. Great Lakes states that are fiercely defensive of their fresh water reserves are under threat from drier states that want to pipe it out. Mississippi states have a variety of conflicting interests based on whether they're agricultural or mineral or shipping centers.
The Feds ostensibly keep all that in line, but as soon as a military conflict enters the mix you can see the contradictions sharpen noticeably.
Brazil has a substantive native population, though. A lot of the power struggles in the country fall along ethnic lines.
Oh no, self proclaimed natives are not a factor in the story I was telling. Frankly their numbers are actually too small. The victories of the native communities are very recent and rather rare. Consider that Brazil is different from Mexico. The native population was much smaller and much more sparsely distributed. But then you may ask: aren't there a lot of black, brown and native looking people in Brazil? Yeah. But that's where Brazil is also different from the US.
When you consider racial relations in a country like Brazil you must understand that the model has the same assumptions as in the United States, but it follows a different path. The foundation is white supremacy. The assumption of the superiority, desirability and even the fetishization of european-christian cultural norms, which for most of our history meant catholic christianity. But unlike the United States, the portuguese colonies were built on minority european communities. That lead to a different sort of social order.
Let me tell you a little story. During the American Civil War there was this judge, I think, from Virginia. He sold off his posessions and moved to the Empire of Brazil. He settled with his fortune, bought a bunch of slaves and invested his fortune in a farming estate. From what I remember he sent two letters home. In the first he'd proclaim that Brazil was the future of civilization, that slavery would eternally remain an institution in the country. He exaggerated of course, but his feelings didn't come from nowhere as Brazil would only abolish slavery in 1888. The second letter, a few months later, he proclaims the opposite. Brazil is a twisted nation. His reasoning? Blacks could be soldiers and police down there. Of course one imagines that the real reason for his pessimism is due to the fact that his farm mcfucking failed. But the culture shock is self evident. This isn't an isolated event either. During the Christie Question, when the British Ambassador threatened war on us, one of his complaints was that british sailors who went drunk and became rowdy not only were taken to a normal prison, but were escorted by black bailiffs.
So from an american perspective you can fall into a pitfall of putting Brazil and the US on a spectrum and saying that Brazil is less racist, somehow. Remember however that we took decades more to abolish formal slavery, and know that we never truly ended informal slavery in the country. Only a few months ago the most expensive vineyards in the country were caught practicing slavery. So what gives? It's simpler. These societies are just different. If whites are a minority for centuries, then instead of the One Drop Rule you've got a caste system. You don't prohibit mixed marriages, you encourage them so as to whiten the population.
So why did I tell you all of this? Because the same thing happened to the natives. Unlike Mexico or Perú, the portuguese colonies would slowly either settle or enslave different native tribes, which were much less numerous than elsewhere. That was our version of the american frontier. So when a Brazilian says they are black or brown, or even white, odds are they have something of native in them as well. But their self identity is brazilian.
Furthermore, given that Brazil is a class society, the divisions of class are felt in that assimilation process as well. The traditional elites of the state of São Paulo are mostly white today. They've married with white people for a long time. One of them includes the queen of Sweden. And they generally descend from a native chief called Tibiriçá. Who was a portuguese ally. Though his case was rarer, what happened generally is that whenever the jesuits would set up shop and settle down weaker or defeated tribes from the frontier, the leader of that tribe was elevated into the colonial order. He went from chief to patriarch in a quasi-nobiliarchical system. He built alliances with colonial governors and colonels. He was the 'first' of the village, and ruled his people together with a jesuit 'tutor'. If, for an example, the native patriarch fought against colonial authorities against some decree of public works (where the natives of his village need to build a ditch or a bridge somewhere), he's not just doing it for the good of 'his people', he's doing it because thats the people whose labor he has some rights to.
Our system of white supremacy is more insidious, diabolical even. Assimilationist and whitening in character. Best symbolized by the horrible expression. 'A black man with a white soul'. So of course, racial struggles are present in every period of the last 200 years. But with most people integrated into that class system we end up in a situation where in pivotal moments of time the minority rights groups were either sidelined, or empowered only as part of a larger populist project. Things only began to change after the fall of the military regime in 1988.
It has a large population, it has the best river networks in the world
Someone has been watching Peter Zeihan.
You know he used to work for Stratfor, right? He wrote a ton of stuff for them.
I haven't actually read anything from Peter Zeihan. In fact, my immediate circles tend to meme on him a lot for being wrong all the time and I can't even join in on the fun.
In any case from my reckoning those are not really 'Peter Zeihan arguments'. The territory in which the United States was formed is geographically excellent for a great power. Abundant resources for all periods of the industrial era, more natural ports than anybody else, more river navigability than the rest of the world combined, a river network that connects the extremes of the country, and an abundance of plain terrain with temperate climates for food production.
I'm sure Zeihan used those arguments for his own purposes, and I don't know which. But these points are also actually made in contrast with Latin American history. We are rich in iron but we were poor in coal during the era of steelmaking, we had difficult terrain which broke our countries apart, we have few natural ports and many highland rivers (good for power dams, bad for transport), isolated pockets of fertile soil surrounded by mountains and in a tropical climate. The big stark contrast was always with Argentina, which in many ways felt like a mini version of US conditions, explaining their productivity at the beginning of the last century.
Now the demographics is harder. I believe the US is below replacement rate, it's only growing because of immigration. Now I don't see that situation changing so soon, but it would seem that in a world of population decrease the US should decline less than many. They have the language, the cultural cachet and the financial means to keep it going. And they'll suffer less due to climate change than some places in Europe, most definitely less than anyone in south asia, africa or south america. Ie, places that would supply cheap migrant work to the US.
The territory in which the United States was formed is geographically excellent for a great power. Abundant resources for all periods of the industrial era, more natural ports than anybody else, more river navigability than the rest of the world combined, a river network that connects the extremes of the country, and an abundance of plain terrain with temperate climates for food production.
Stratfor used to go on and on and on about these "points" and people used to dunk on them over and over and over (on blogs, social media wasn't here yet.) All about these rivers and other shit that absolutely nobody writes about or cares about. Then Zeihan struck out on his own and lo and behold, he didn't change his tune one wink. He also trots out that demographic chart all the time.
Well, I don't know if bloggers don't care about these things but we definitely wish we had the profile of the Argentina or the US. Even our portion of the platine region couldn't compete with Argentina for the longest time because mountains cut them off the river. I am somewhat proud of what we've achieved with the cards we were dealt with (and utterly ashamed that we have done so little in terms of rail transport and so on), but we definitely could have used a break.
I suppose the problem with someone that writes for Empire is that they are basically arguing that the US's position is natural and eternal. They don't really build on geography or demographics and hardly talk about society beyond mottos like freedom and innovation and rule of law. It's like the reverse of the argument that the PRC government doesn't really matter for development since China is just returning to it's 'natural place' in the world, with the implication that everything prior to opening to western capital was just holding China back. I'm a historian so I think that's wrong on its face. The US was dealt a good hand, and it's government was ruthlessly efficient in exploiting it. It didn't have to be this way necessarily, and it doesn't have to stay that way forever.
No one here knows who Zeihan is. No cares if he's been dunked on. If the rivers and demographics points Catboy is making are so laughable, why aren't you pointing the flaws yourself?
Because the fact that Zeihan is a joke has been extensively covered elsewhere and I assumed everyone was familiar with it? He worked for Stratfor! Remember them? The people that think wars start because of rivers?
I think its easy to look at '83 and '01 and '08 and '20 in hindsight and say “If we survived this, we’ll survive anything”.
what happened in 1983 exactly?
Excuse me, '86
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis
If it weren't for imminent catastrophic climate change, I'd agree. But the forecasts for the next decade are horrific, and American agencies at federal, state, and municipal levels are increasingly being legally constrained from planning for climate change by politicians and their financial backers. A few bad years of infrastructure-destroying storms and preliminary steps to balkanization (especially the phenomenon that Chris Hedges calls "sacrifice zones") could really ramp up faster than expected.
Post-Suez Britain didn't have imminent climate change to deal with, and they had their ideological cousins in the USA to support them. The modern USA has climate disaster on the horizon, and have spent the past 20 years pissing off the world's rising powers.
My theory is capital will realize it is too risky to turn violence outwards and we are about to see a ratcheting of violence internally.
I think we're already seeing the foreshocks of that. The militarized internal police were designed to keep ethnic minorities down, and that original mission has been expanding for awhile. To be honest, a huge part of the drive to get everyone back to work during 2020 was a terror of the George Floyd summer. Everyone was fired or furloughed or otherwise out of work, so a ton of people were protesting and shit did get violent. The resultant desperation to get everyone back into their jobs has an obvious motive there. If that didn't work, you can bet the state violence in response would be increased severely.
What I see happening isn't an orgiastic display of violence or beautiful if dangerous fast collapse. I see a slow dissolution as capitalism winds down and becomes ever more sclerotic, it withdraws from its frontiers and hinterlands and suburbs and ends up being in a few great (probably only metaphorical but perhaps literal) walls where they jealously guard their global cities.
I don't think anywhere will balkanize, maybe a few more breakaways are left where tensions are highest or have been - like Quebec possibly or the Republicans winning in Northern Ireland or Scotland etc. Instead of balkanization, one day you'll wake up after going to work and realize the national government just isn't part of your life anymore. Yeah sure, it claims to be in control and you can vote for it - but it doesn't actually have any power to do anything, it was all devolved and dissolved itself as capitalisms economic base for Nation-States ate itself.
Like I bet there will still be a President that lives in Washington DC and a bit of the Boston to Washington city is all it actually has control over - but still claims the whole contiguous continental US.
Like I bet there will still be a President that lives in Washington DC and a bit of the Boston to Washington city is all it actually has control over - but still claims the whole contiguous continental US.
Holy
RomanAmerican EmpireLike I bet there will still be a President that lives in Washington DC and a bit of the Boston to Washington city is all it actually has control over - but still claims the whole contiguous continental US.
Gorbachev in Autumn 1991 basically
I bet there will still be a President that lives in Washington DC and a bit of the Boston to Washington city is all it actually has control over
There's gonna be a bit of resentment in the air if the federal government governs an area spanning 10 states but is still voted on by people from 50 states. Like, two-fifths of the Senate will spend virtually all of their time just trying to pass the cruelest and stupidest shit possible, knowing that it will only be enforceable in places populated by people they and their constituents don't like.
The "Cool Zone" won't arrive until Super-Hurricanes begin to permanently wreck multiple cities, US institutions in their current state cannot handle millions of internal refugees
I think this country has four Katrinas left in it before it shits itself and Balkanizes
Under Obama the Department of the Interior bought millions and millions of rounds of ammunition. What would they possibly need that for? Department of the frickin' Interior?
And ammo doesn't go bad like bread. You can keep it for decades. My Mauser happily fires ammunition from 1947.
It can go bad depending on storage, gunpowder can lose its potency over time (if you're really using 70 year old ammo you run the risk of getting a bullet lodged in your barrel). It can lead to hang fires, where you pull the trigger but ignition is delayed - pretty rare but the risk goes up the older the ammo apparently. But if you keep it properly stored it'll be fine after decades yeah.
It's unlikely there will be one event that will be The Fall of the Empire. Those are usually decided after the fact with hindsight.
It's even possible the American Empire has actually fallen in 2004-2008, and what we're seeing is the effects of that.
As much as the parable of the starfish seems tone-deaf here… we kind of need to have that energy so we don’t go crazy. If we can’t change the world we can at least try not to be shitty to our neighbors. In a miserable in-between era waiting for rocks to fall, that’s all we can really do.
It's a good reminder, in the end all we have is each other and while it's nice to shitpost with yall or learn something online or get mad about the world - we do have to lean on actual irl neighbors and comrades.
If you are only capable of feeling empathy towards other socialists then you are a legit psychopath.
These are people who will report me to the police the instant a revolution begins and I declare my support for it. Why is it wrong to be suspicious of them?
I actually wasn't familiar with that parable, somehow. It made me feel a bit better, thank you
No problem. That’s the communist attitude right there; no one person is going to save everyone, it’s all of us saving each other.
That's one reason I'm so fixated on joining an existing leftist aid network of almost any stripe when I move to the PNW. Especially starting up a network to evacuate trans people from the shittier parts of the country - most people can't leave Missouri or w/e because of a lack of money and support at their destination. It'd be nice to alleviate that problem for people (greyhound tickets, a bunk bed and some food while they find a job). As commies or lefties, we all want to save the world. And we can't. None of us are going to be Lenin or Castro or Sankara, leading the masses to victory. I can't save the world, but I can make a small corner of it that much better for at least a few people.
Roman empire took centuries to collapse. British Empire never finished collapsing. It's slow. It's not a catastrophic marvel movie type event. It's boring. Nobody woke up in 1175 BCE and said wow I am living through the Bronze Age Collapse right now. It's a continuous and almost imperceptible decline in quality of life that is made all the more invisible by the fact that you age alongside it.
If I'm being completely honest, the only thing that stopped me from [fedposting] a few years ago is the realization that I would 100% be sent to a male prison. I've been on HRT for years, I'm not doing that
Predictions that the US will balkanize on the model of Europeans states seems strange to me, given that there isn't the kind of ethnic or national distinctions between states that is as ideologically powerful as those that lead to wars in Europe between different ethnic, national or religious groups.
Also, barring like actual societal collapse, I don't see the yankie powers that be actually allowing that to happen. The deep-state and executive would surely declare a national emergency before they let states actually leave the union, it seems to me. An actual US civil war strikes me as so horrifically destructive at this point that it's difficult to imagine, but perhaps that's just the concrete form that the death of global imperialist capitalism would have to take, so a more concrete version of capitalist realism.
I do think that there's a kind of religiously fetishistic yearning for apocalypse that the modern left displays where we just want the damn nuclear and eugenistic wars to happen already, which i'm also guilty of, but on reflection I can't not see it as romanticization, given the actual unimaginable horror and brutality that will inevitably be involved. People, far-left included, are not going to like it when society breaks apart.
I do think that there’s a kind of religiously fetishistic yearning for apocalypse that the modern left displays where we just want the damn nuclear and eugenistic wars to happen already, which i’m also guilty of, but on reflection I can’t not see it as romanticization, given the actual unimaginable horror and brutality that will inevitably be involved. People, far-left included, are not going to like it when society breaks apart.
I truly don't think I'm romanticizing it. Maybe the aftermath in my most wild daydreams, but my viewpoint is a bit different. I view The Cool Zone as an inevitability. Nothing you or I or anyone else will do will change that. If that's the case, why wait? This slow grind down is torture
If that’s the case, why wait
I'd like to maximize the closest to bearable civilization part of my kid's childhood, and the same for my nephew. I have several other family members I love who might not survive "the cool zone" and I want them to have as long and fulfilling life as possible.
I kind of have trouble understanding how it's baffling that just because our society is horrible and progressing toward more horror, people might prefer that the worst possible outcome not immediately happen?
Predictions that the US will balkanize on the model of Europeans states seems strange to me, given that there isn’t the kind of ethnic or national distinctions between states that is as ideologically powerful as those that lead to wars in Europe between different ethnic, national or religious groups.
My impression is different, mainly it will be caused by climate change not just the ideological/political differences.
We saw the attacks on the power grid right? We saw the Texas snowstorm. For me putting 1+1 together is very simple. The right wing states will face some severe climate disasters. The state can't and perhaps isn't even willing to do what is actualy necessary to save lives.
You can't solve climate disasters with money, giving people checks. So far this is literaly the only thing the US can do. I strongly believe COVID was litmus test for not just the US, but the whole capitalist world and they failed, obviously this is preaching to the choir here too.
But for the US specificaly, COVID relief was money instead of actually enforcing measures to save lives and the whole "essential workers" shit was just libs spitting on the face of the working class.
So what is the collapse scenario? A series of yearly climate catastrophes, the government wont help, chuds will be forced to migrate and those that don't will retaliate against the "government" by attacking liberal cities and infrastructure. That will give the government a reason to put troops on the ground and then you'll have the beginning of a conflict, chuds will feel the government is more willing to protect the major "liberal" cities while the poor/rural areas are devastated by climate change.
Of course I could be wrong, but point is I don't see any of this based on EU style politics/cultural differences at all.
I don't think you understand, there isn't going to be a breaking point. Everything is moving along as normal for the vast majority. The cool zone was 3 years ago and did nothing, all the rad libs got jobs. Any semblance of a real movement was mirage. You are going to live your life as normal within the system.
Revolutions don't come out of nowhere and in the states there is literally nothing. Maybe in 10 years we will have the start of something?
I'm thinking around ten or so years for the US as well. But at the moment it's exactly as you said. Way too complacent.
