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- cross-posted to:
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they said covid was a dress rehearsal for the next pandemic, but i think it’s going to become standard operations as we keep vacillating between diet-facism w the democrats and full-fat-fascism w the republicans for the next several decades.
I have a hard time seeing how the Us is going to make it through even a single decade at this point.
it bet it’ll survive in the same way it survived before the welfare based improvement of the 20th century; by disposing of generations worth of americans for the sake of the richest and ensuring that their descendants will never be well educated about it enough to realize what happened.
I think it’s entirely possible that the US could break up the way USSR did. There is a growing political polarization within the society, and that’s going to boil over sooner or later.
it’s hard to image given that the largest factions are the maga-conservatives who occupy a continuous geographical area of the country and the neo-liberals who occupy disjointed geographical pockets on the east & west costs along with relatively thin majorites in even smaller pockets the northern midwest around the great lakes and an even weaker majority and even smaller pockets in the western part of the southwest around new mexico & colorado.
if balkanazation were to occur, i would guess that the relative political unity & economic prowess of texas would dominate the territory of the united states since its political identity extends well beyond texas’ current borders already and it’s well positioned at the near center of the country to maintain its hegemony as opposed to it’s largest rivals in california and new york who are too poorly positioned the edges of the opposite coasts and whose economies are dependent on the interior. also, an overwhelming majority of the population outside the neo-liberal pockets within the current geography of both california and new york is dominated by a political identify that’s significantly closer to texas than it is to either california or new york; considerably more so in california.
the only way the united states wouldn’t simply turn into a super-sized-texas is if mexico was somehow in a position to intervene in southern california and canada or europe with the rest of the coasts. however, if the united states is balkanizing, it would likely mean that canada and mexico are likely in not great shape either; so a super-sized-texas is the most likely outcome in all scenarios.
Public opinion isn’t likely going to matter all that much in this scenario. Recall, that 70% of the people voted to stay in USSR when a referendum was held. The political decision to dissolve the Soviet Union was made against the wish of the majority of the people. Similarly, I expect that the oligarchs running the US will exploit social tensions to Balkanize the country and create personal fiefdoms for themselves. Texas, California, and Florida are a few likely epicentres for this sort of Balkanization.
Ultimately, the mechanic here is that the decline in material conditions drives anxiety and political polarization which is in turn exploited by the the oligarchs and opportunists like Trump.
