the states that border the Colorado River go to war over water rights
Have you read “The Water Knife”? This is basically the background to the story (though they’re in a cold war, and the US nominally still exists, but is allowing states to close their borders to each other).
I remember reading about that book but have no memory of the details and I bet it stuck in my subconscious
Please dont read it. The author is a huge misogynist and sadist and a total raging lib. The premise is basically the whole book, there are a few points of intrigue that are passingly interesting and the rest is just really fetishistic and male gazey portrayals of extreme torture and sexual violence/exploitation including of minors. I am mad at myself for reading three quarters of that book expecting it to get better and it never does and it is my mission in life to make sure no one ever reads it.
It’s really good! Classic noir in a realistic near future apocalyptic Phoenix.
I don’t think any of the factions in the US are going to be regionalized enough to make a war with borders and territory. Instead there’ll be a lot of parallel, unrelated conflicts, happening more often and occasionally overlapping. So the police vs BLM clashes of last year, the battle of Blair Mountain, white supremacist terrorist attacks against governing buildings (last year again lol), all that stuff happening at once. There’s a bit of city vs countryside in that, but it’s not 100% consistent, and neither of those groups has the ability to take and hold territory, so it can’t really become a territory dispute.
That’ll all continue onwards while the federal government does less, city governments do more, and state governments get used as proxies by their most powerful cities. The federal government won’t officially collapse, it’ll just do less and less until some group gathers enough power to do something on a national scale again. Then some leader from that group gets elected president, and the official structures have continuity so we can pretend the collapse didn’t actually happen.
America has the least politically engaged population on the planet and conflict generally isn’t regional. They wont balkanize. usually when countries fall apart they don’t split into a bunch of different countries. the reason why they call it balkanization is because it applies strongest to former yugoslavia. There would be civil war but whoever wins would control the whole country. maybe a state or two will split but it’s not going to be each state against each other.
This is a good take. I’d also imagine that the military, feds and intelligence agencies would become more powerful, more corrupt and more openly organized crime operations.
A state is a monopoly on violence. Our states do not have monoploies on violence.
Our cities do. You know how the police have over the years been turned into occupying armies? This has been accounted for.
So it would become rome. A collection of losely affiliated city states. With petty squabbles and trade deals.
Where it gets intresting is in the bandit country. Out in rural places where there is no monopoly of violence it will fall down to clan structure. Which isn’t far off from what we have in tbe Philippines from what I understand. So in rural places you will see a stepp like churn of groups trying to come to power and then being displaced.
I think mexico is way more self sufficent than us and will probably take a good chunk of their land back.
Most places would need to lose a lot of population. The west and the south where we grow food could do okay. But new york is completely unsustsinable. So I can’t even being to happen how the east will pan out.
I don’t see the army being a big factor as its heavy industry has been distrubted across the states for pork reasons. So good luck keeping cohesion when half the soldiers family are dying and there are no more specially made fancy tires for the trucks.
I wonder about hawaii and what they will do.
this is close to my thinking, except the city police paramilitaries are all right-wing extremists. the liberals have no one guarding the gate. they think guns and violence are too icky, but not even 1/6 or the kidnapping plot against Gretchen Whitmer has caused them to consider cleaning out their police forces of fash and, i dunno maybe arming and deputizing a bunch of communists or anfita. clearly, it’s not ideal for them to keep servicing capital, but at least commies aren’t in a frenzy fantasizing about putting them against the wall the way the fascists are.
Maybe. I think when the time comes the cops won’t bother with the pretense of ideology and just go full warlord. Might just be the cops I know in my area though.
Like, I knew the guy that sold my city’s swat tream their steroids. When the time comes those guys will be no different than they are now.
I also wonder what the Hawaiians will do to Zuckerberg’s compound on Kauai.
:freedom-hater:
From San Diego to Boston, it’s the same corn syrup brain. The US will never balkanize.
Unaccounted in this calculation is New England. They’re more the maple syrup sort, so they get annexed by Canada.
