@TIOT12: I did see One Second After in Amazon when I was looking for post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction titles to get inspiration from. The plot summary I read of it seems interesting. Have you read it and would you recommend it?
@Kurgan:: The US, thanks in large part to the influence of oligarch campaign donors and the Deep State (which is not a conspiracy but just the vast bureaucracy of the federal government consisting of all “federal employees” who have a vested interest in keeping things as bureaucratic and imperial as possible in order to preserve their own employment and benefits), is actually very politically stable. So much so that the two parties (republican and Democrat) are virtually indistinguishable from each other in terms of what they actually do once they get into office even if they spit fire at each other during campaigns. The US is so politically stable that voting is virtually meaningless because, no matter who you vote for, you are likely to see the same rollout of events that you would have if one of the other candidates had won.
Both liberal and conservative people have been becoming increasingly aware of this and disgruntled about it since at least the 90s and it is one more reason why, when some state-ending event like a currency collapse happens, the majority of the country will likely be too apathetic to lift a finger to preserve the Union if they do not actively join some kind of secessionist movement themselves.
@911: I don’t see the US becoming majority hispanic any farther north than Texas and Southern California in the next century. Even Northern California is still overwhelmingly white and Asian (I used to live there). When we say “hispanics,” we are almost exclusively talking about Mexicans as they are by far the largest Latin demographic in the US and there is no reason to think that will change in the next century. That said though, most of them tend to stay relatively close to the border and not venture farther north or east in any numbers which would be significant enough to cause them to even approach majority status anywhere outside of the southern parts of those states which border Mexico, hence the “El Norte” idea I mentioned in my previous post.
Another thing to consider is that the majority of the Mexicans who have come to the US illegally over the years do not care about the US. This is why so many of them have generally not learned English and have historically ghettoized themselves into their own enclaves. These individuals I am referring to, who make up the majority of undocumented Mexicans in the US (as well as undocumented people from other countries), are in the US for one reason only and that reason is money in the form of government benefits and jobs. As things have gotten harder in the US and things have gotten better in many parts of Latin America, we have actually seen a great many of these individuals return to the countries of origin and to other Latin countries.
I predict that, if the government becomes unable to provide benefits and the jobs go away, both of which will ultimately happen with the insoluble nature of the country’s financial situation and the impending replacement of many manual labor jobs by various forms of technology peddled by tech oligarchs, the majority of these individuals will either return from whence they came post haste or at least retreat to those areas near the border which are already historically hispanic-dominated areas. I suspect that the rest of the country will be, demographically, not dramatically different from the way it is now. 100 years is a long time but it is not that long and the US does not share borders with any countries which are far more populous than it is. As for the argument that Hispanics breed more than whites or blacks, that is true only up until they are 2nd or 3rd generation, at which point, they are just as sterile as whites and blacks (whose numbers are kept down mainly by the Planned Parenthood clinics which are intentionally located almost exclusively in black-majority areas and neighborhoods - Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was known to have stated that she desired to erase black people from the country through abortion among many other disturbing things that I encourage you to look up).
As for the merger with Mexico and Canada, I don’t see that happening either since both Mexico and Canada are increasingly regionalistic with a number of regions and provinces all but functioning as their own countries already and both of them will likely fall apart before the US does. I predict that all 3 will destabilize each other though. If Mexico falls, it will destabilize the US, if the US falls, it will destabilize all of the Americas (most people don’t know this but much of the wealth of Latin America is stored in Miami’s banks because the rich of those countries don’t entirely trust their native banks - Miami has more banks per square mile than any other city in the hemisphere), and if Canada falls, it will at least cause a lot of trouble for the northern US since, as I mentioned, about 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border.
Basically, I am saying that the US, Canada, and Mexico are all artificially large already in the sense that they have all grown to such an extend that they are essentially numerous separate nations being held together by an imperial capitol authority which is distant from and generally resented by all of them. With that being as it is, and there is no reason to think it will become less the case going forward, I do not see the 3 countries, all of which are already falling apart internally to varying degrees, being successfully united and, if an attempt at such a thing were to be made, it might last all of a month and could very well be the thing which sparks off the secessionist movements we have been hypothesizing if those movements are not already active by the time it happens.
If the European countries, with all that they have in common, can’t hold the EU together for more than a few decades, there is no reason to think that North America, a far more fractious, heterogeneous (ethnically and, more importantly, culturally), and historically rebellious part of the world, will be able to manage such a thing at any point in the next century.
@The Black Knight: I have considered this too but the cities would not be able to break off on their own. This is mainly because they do not produce any of their own stuff. Not only food and water but anything else as well. All products and services must be delivered to them via trucks and trains which overwhelmingly originate from, are operated by people from, and move through regions of the country which are overwhelmingly and increasingly dominated by those who resent the city dwellers who vote for the imposition from the capitol of everything that makes life for them harder and more complex and in the same moment looking down on them while relying on them for absolutely everything.
If the cities wanted to strike out on their own, they would only be able to do so as individual city states because they would have no way to get to each other since they would each be surrounded on all sides by the dominions of those who resent their attempt to take away the wealth of whatever region they are in for themselves and forsake the countryside and small cities that, through their voting, they plunged into economic recession for decades. All that the rural and small city people would have to do to end the independence of these city states is refuse to let them use the roads, train tracks, farmland, etc. and then just wait for them to starve and give up. Most of the firearms, heavy vehicles, military/law enforcement experience, and community loyalty is to be found in these areas as well so it is unlikely that the city dwellers (those who remain after all of the people who have no reason to stay empty out and leave) will be able to do anything about this other than submit, even if they could muster the organization and willpower to offer some kind of brief resistance.
As for the global power of these cities, the power that they have is based only on the globalist aristocrats and tycoons who live in them and the wealth that they command through trade. Both of these things are dependent entirely upon shipping, train, and truck transport to bring their products to other places and bring them all of the things they need to survive (even Singapore has not come anywhere near figuring out its food security problem and there are inherent limits to things like hydroponic and vertical farming such as the fact that a hydroponically-grown vegetable or fruit is not as nutrient dense as a naturally-grown one and that indoor farming with electric lights and such is highly expensive).
These transportation lines can very easily be disrupted and/or cut entirely by pissed off people with increasingly less to lose who live in the areas where the lines pass through and who are resentful of the fact that the city dwellers think that they can abuse and plunder the countryside for decades and then just shove off with all of their ill-gotten wealth, leaving the peasants to languish in poverty fighting for whatever scraps the urbanites did not manage to find during their rule. These transportation lines can be sabotaged, disrupted, and destroyed and there is increasing reason to expect that such a thing might happen in the event of a breakup scenario. For example, the tech monopolies in San Fransisco, and by extension the city itself, seem particularly hellbent on pissing off America’s 3-4 million truckers by developing self-driving AI technology to put them out of work - can’t imagine those people will be anything but resentful of the city and I would certainly not be surprised if they use their knowledge of the country’s transport infrastructure and systems to sabotage said lines somehow. Once the transportation lines go, so too do the cities.
Even the internet for a city like San Fransisco, which basically would not be able to exist in any recognizable form without it, can be shut off by simply locating the fiber optic cables which run beneath the ground and water outside of the city and attacking them somehow. The entire nation of Armenia was taken offline a while back by a single elderly woman in Georgia (Republic of) who, while scavenging for copper to sell, severed the fiber optic cable running under the ground with her shovel. That cable, which ran from Georgia into Armenia, was apparently the only source of internet for about 90% of Armenia as well as some parts of Georgia and Azerbaijan at the time. The internet for most people, hilariously, really is just a series of tubes when it comes down to it. As virtually all trade and banking are done electronically via the internet now, loss of internet or even a major slow down could severely screw things up for any major American city and it would be even worse for them if it was their outlander neighbors doing it to them while also cutting off the transport lines and withholding food, water, and other supplies. Attacks on the fiber optic cables bringing internet to San Fransisco for example have been happening since at least 2015 so this is not a new thing but could easily be increased.
Further, the wealth of the aristocracy and oligarchs in these cities is maintained primarily through monopolies which are enforced through various subsidies, regulations, and other things that originate with the federal/imperial capitol government in Washington DC. Once those things all go away, many of the monopolies are likely to be weakened or dissolved as well.
The only reason Singapore can exist the way it does is because, aside from the obvious fact that Malaysia and Indonesia simply allow it to exist, it happens to sit in the middle of one of the most vital shipping lanes on planet Earth (which means that it technically has no need of land transport and can charge fees to ships passing through), it is an island which makes it defensible, it has invested heavily in its military hardware (which could be the strongest and most efficient in all of SEA), it has invested heavily in its military personnel and in fact has mandatory conscription for all males and mandatory continuing drills for all formerly conscripted males until they reach retirement age (no US city has anything remotely comparable to any of this), and it is on very good terms with its neighbors, any one of which could, even with its superior military equipment and training, probably destroy it in a war simply by blockading it and cutting off the roads that go into Malaysia until it starves to the point that its soldiers are too weak and demotivated to put up a fight against a much larger neighbor like Malaysia, Indonesia, or Thailand that could just swarm it in its weakened state.
By comparison, the major coastal cities in the US are literally an ocean away from any other non-American (in the geographical sense to included all of the Americas) city and would not see maritime traffic by trade vessels from other countries the way that Singapore does if they were no longer attached to the vast wealth of the greater US. In fact, pretty much all of the major coastal cities exist primarily if not exclusively to function as gateways to the rest of the country and consumers of what it produces. If they should become severed from the rest of the country, they will just become stagnant backwaters thousands of miles away from any relevant global shipping lane and surrounded on all sides by resentful peasants until they eventually give up and join whatever state has been formed by the now-dominant rural and small town folk.
Another thing to consider is that virtually all US military bases, and certainly all of those which are important, are located outside of highly urban areas.
All of this being said, I still maintain that I don’t see Americans taking up arms and seriously going to war with each other en masse or military personnel turning their weapons on fellow countrymen. I just don’t think Americans have the stomach for that sort of thing (having been in the military, I can say that I don’t think I met another soldier who would turn their weapon on other Americans either unless the world were truly ending - most of us enlisted because we wanted to do good things, get paid, and get the GI Bill; we didn’t sign up for civil war “you have been orders by the capital to subdue the districts” Hunger Games crap) and the ones who might are mostly NRA members, religious conservatives, veterans, and other similar people who would probably already be organized to engage and neutralize any ISIS or Bolshevik-type threat that might emerge long before it actually manages to. The US also doesn’t have a history, environment, or, in most places at least, culture which would be conducive to such a violent group taking over any significant amount of territory for any period of time longer than 8 minutes.
As I said in my first post in this thread, I see any hypothetical future breakup scenario being conducted in a mostly civil and peaceful way and I only see such a thing happening if and when the currency is no longer viable and/or the government is no longer able to provide benefits and salaries to all of the people who currently receive them. At this time, over 35% of Americans are on welfare as I previously mentioned and there are more who are on other forms of government assistance. Add to all of this the number of people employed in the public sector on the federal level and you probably have around half of the population receiving and, in many if not most cases, relying for their livelihood on some form of money from the government. If anything causes a collapse and a mass movement by people toward anything that gets them off their fat asses and away from their screens, it will most likely be loss of government benefits and a collapse of the currency making their salaries and benefits worth progressively less as they continue to receive the same number of dollars each period but those dollars rapidly decline in value until they just stop receiving anything, at which point questions will require answers.
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