Like, CIA troops are fighting Pentagon troops in Syria. Suppression of the political opposition and creeping hard power is being carried out by local police departments and unions. The historectomies in ICE camps were being carried out by a rogue contractor. It doesn’t even feel like a movement so much as the aggregate effort of thousands of disparate forces.
All of that comes crashing down when water shortages start to kick off. When infrastructure on every single one of those decentralised fronts begins to fail simultaneously and no amount of money can resolve geographical problems the entire thing destabilises and collapses inwards on itself.
I’m not so sure it would shake out that way. The government has consistently signaled that it will abandon local regions to their fate when times get rough. On the other hand, the Fed has said pretty much explicitly that they will be printing unlimited money for banks, hedge funds, major institutions and large corporations for the foreseeable future, inflation be damned. Instead of “collapsing in on itself” I see regions competing for attention and resources. So political fights turn into fights for survival. Not everywhere in the United States will feel the pain equally.
What’s really odd to me though, is that people seem intent on moving into and staying in areas that anybody with a brain can see are going to be experiencing huge challenges in the future (Phoenix , AZ and about 90% of Florida being the obvious examples). Arizona has been locked into battle with Colorado and most of the rest of the southwest for several decades over the water issue. There’s no shortage of blame to go around, so the natural tendency of Americans to find an enemy has been well-exercised.
The DoD thinks it will shake out that way. They have explicitly stated the entire military is at risk of collapse due to water shortage in a recent report
Good summary of report here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbmkz8/us-military-could-collapse-within-20-years-due-to-climate-change-report-commissioned-by-pentagon-says
But without urgent reforms, the report warns that the US military itself could end up effectively collapsing as it tries to respond to climate collapse. It could lose capacity to contain threats in the US and could wilt into “mission failure” abroad due to inadequate water supplies.
Water is currently 30-40 percent of the costs required to sustain a US military force operating abroad, according to the new Army report.
Water is the biggest threat to every single tendril of the US abroad. And every tendril at home is going to be threatened by displacement of populations and food scarcity as worldwide shortages as well as California no longer being able to produce food will leave the US with massive food insecurity.
If a MASSIVE investment and infrastructure planning does not begin to prevent this, right now, the stresses their whole system are under will not survive it.
