It is in many places, just not everywhere. Appalachia, Puerto Rico, lots of small towns, lots of urban neighborhoods. There was some guy saying, he say his country collapse, and it didn’t happen all at once. i think something about, one day there’d be a bombing, and the next day you’d go to the disco, and it just happened a little at a time so there was no big dramatic moment.

I think the US is already in decline, but I’m seriously concerned about the depression wave taking over our schools. I expect shit to pop off around 2030 when most of the COVID school kids graduate. We’re going to see a lot more people who do not value their own lives acting out. I don’t expect any overthrow of the American government, but I expect there to be a lot of civilian skirmishes.

you will be posting from a crater that used to be Chicago during the 18th Great Lakes Clique–Missouri Government War and some asshole on hexbear is going to be moaning about ‘why hasn’t the US collapsed yet’

As others have pointed out here, collapse is a process, not an event. But that being said, I think that if Trump gets reelected (which is almost inevitable at this point) his aggressive deportation plan might very well be a huge catalyst for inter-state conflict within USA:

Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.

Not to mention deporting as many people as he plans to would take a wrecking ball to the American economy.

It is an interesting question, at what point will the sporadic pointless violence and the constant desperation violence and the disease and the breakdown of public schools and loss of already minimal and difficult-to-access social services and the mass incarceration and disintegrating healthcare system where you stay in tbe ER for multiple days to go into debt and the high prices and the shit working conditions and the unlivable rent and the direct biological abuses of the powerless and the loss of any semblance of a social situation people know how to cope with while reassuring themselves they still have their Individuality™️ or a chance at a life instead of only surviving passes the point of no return into what you’d call collapse conditions. This already feels like the collapse. This is WWIII. That’s why I feel alright. I’ve felt like this since I was 12 years old. I don’t even care about what happens here and I don’t feel guilty about it anymore, so ultimately I am one with the cool cyberpunk future and this is rad as hell actually

2038-06-08 09:15:55 Eastern

As far as causes, I don’t think the current Team Red/Team Blue partisan bickering will have anything to do with the collapse. That bickering is just theater to keep the narrative going. It inspires the occasional random actor to go adventurism mode but nothing organized on the level to get real collapse/balkanization.

I firmly believe it’s going to be the supply chain of treats getting compromised that will trigger the collapse. It’s the only collective national glue, and the combination of climate change reducing productivity in the equatorial third world, the shortage of oil resources with no real transition plan to renewables, international shipping capacity insecurity due to prices, resources, piracy, other countries like China positioning to adapt to that new normal more smoothly, there ain’t gonna be enough treats to go around. That’s going to mean some states/regions attempting to hoard, ports will become points of resource distribution contention, whomever loses out on the federal fight will have motivation to split/rebel/attack opposing states, and we’ve got collapse/balkanization on our hands.

Timewise, thinking somewhere in the 2040-2050 range. There’s enough buffer right now but that’s the range where a lot of the “shit hits the fan” climate points hit and that’s when the equatorial supply chain will be crippled.

Well, if we’re going by the timeline of my satirical short story I wrote a few years back, I think I’d landed on the late 2020s. So, around the same time as the beginning of the Second Russian Civil War, the establishment of the Transgender Republic of Hibaristan, Chinese reunification, the establishment of the Ryukyu People’s Republic, the reunification of Korea, and I think Greenland also declared independence around that time.

Edit: oh and also Palestinian and Irish reunification, but I neglected to mention those.

My prediction is the mid 2040s, because in terms of historical narrative it’s pleasingly symmetrical

pretty soon, the Bell riots are this year

Looking at how other empires have “collapsed” without being invaded or the military dividing up and declaring fiefdoms, it’s been a slow decay of less and less effective centralisation (while still having de jure centralisation) as powerful people and organisations in regions increasingly view other regions as separate.

I think the US military is too organisationally coherent for an Alexander the Great kind of situation. While people do get attached to their commanding officers, it’s not nearly as close to the heroic classical period, and you get used to new commanding officers pretty quickly assuming they’re not complete assholes. We do make jokes about how wonky/privately captured US Military procurement and logistics can be, but this hasn’t translated into factionalism per se, just bloat. I am also willing to be proven wrong on this, especially if the funding dries up or the US Military suffers some major losses. I feel like things like Iraq and Afghanistan, the losses there were lower than the defending population and the type of warfare allows the command structure an easy “out” for its self-confidence.

I also don’t think the US will get territorially invaded. Naval landings suck at the best of times, and it’s surrounded by allies, bases, and intelligence assets. No sane military is going to make that jump. Inasmuch as we valorise guerillas here, they’re only good at defence where there is support amongst the local population. Again, open to see this changing, but I don’t see it for the foreseeable future.

I also don’t see the US Military (as in… The DoD, pentagon, Army, Navy, etc) being divided up territorially. For instance, a portion of the army becomes “The Texas Border Defence Army”. There are a lot of political motivations to keep this the case.

Things like the national guard, police, and other “military”-like forces I definitely do see becoming more separated. Not necessarily with the “border crisis”, but you can see the outline of it with the Texas National Guard. If cops get brought in from out of state as well, which states do this and which don’t will also define these blocks. We’re also partly seeing the outline with abortion laws. Whether or not these issues become “states rights” things, or if new issues are brought in (e.g. banning trans affirming care across all states instead) are all issues that you’ll see further diversification but also weakening of federalism. If, say, a future Republican fed tries to ban trans affirming care and Washington State decides not to follow through, what happens? If DC stops funding to Washington State (I should have chosen different examples), the idea of federalism is weakened. If the law just isn’t followed and local state government doesn’t comply with the FBI, what happens? Do doctors in Seattle stop being able to practice elsewhere in the US? Does DC send in the troops to reign in the Washington state?

The world will look very different with Texadollars and Californibucks, I think that’s a long way down the road. But separated economies and laws which both still sort of use the US dollar (e.g. Seattle would import a lot of USD through corporations, say) is part of the beginning.

Remember that with the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and Feudal lords carried on many of the legal structures even after the Roman Empire stopped being able to be said to be a single entity. Systems of debt peonage carried over, the division between “arable land owning military citizen” and “slave/debt peon/non-citizen” carried over to “lord” and “peasant”. The Catholic Church maintained Imperial divinity even though it was now a pope instead of an Emperor. Not with the exact same things, but that’s what I imagine US Empire will look like in a few hundred years.

This, of course, is alongside the tightening of Capitalist contradictions. Rich get richer even as profits get squeezed (until mono-oligopolies spread around the world), poor get poorer and more numerous and desperate. But the legal and nationalist concept of “The United States of America” I think will look like the above. Also, the US Military and intelligence apparatuses will continue to defend Capital since that’s why they exist.

Lenin:

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Marx:

“Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”

Evolution of society happens like evolution of species. Nothing happens for a long time, until suddenly something does happen. Only one thing is certain, that change doesn’t happen until and unless the conditions are ripe for change. But the conditions do not in themselves precipitate change, they are only a precondition.

The difficult thing is that one can argue the conditions for a total collapse in the US are already here, and that all is needed is the spark. But it could also be that we are missing some essential condition, like maybe the US Dollar has to be dismantled from international trade, or the US has to lose its access to nukes. We can’t know, we can only interpret events in hindsight, even with our dialectics and our science.

Another vote for “things will just get shittier over time”, not total collapse at any point, except for one possible scenario (I will describe below). If we use the Roman Empire as template, they never really “collapsed” all at once. Britain experienced “collapse” when the legions left in the 4th century, but the Roman area around Constantinople did “collapse” until over 1,000 years later. It’s common among Roman historians to not even talk about “collapse” much per se, and focus more on evolution and change. Heck, some parts of the empire actually saw conditions improve after Roman control ended (in North Africa, they could stop sending all their grain to Rome every year, for example).

Now, there is one scenario I could see that could cause a total rapid collapse: if the US could no longer extract value (i.e. exploit) from the global south. I’m on a Capital vol. 2 and MMT kick right now. Basically, the key insight IMO from the first 17 chapters is that it’s only in the sphere of production that value is created. It can be the production of goods or services, but that is the only place where value is created (well, Marx gives some very narrow examples of value being created in transportation of good and sometimes in storage, but those are extensions of production, really). This is where the fact that Americans don’t make anything really comes back to bite them in the ass. Obviously we don’t make things here but what most people don’t realize is even American companies like Apple and Nike don’t actually “create” value. The subcontractors they use in place like China and Bangladesh is where the value is created. It’s just that Apple and Nike appropriate the value from those places and distribute it here among their marketers, lawyers, etc. The entire non-financial sector of the US economy resembles a merchant capitalist (where no value is created, it’s just taken out of productive capital which is all overseas) economy than anything else.

So what does this mean? If Americans aren’t creating value within the country, and it’s just that value is taken from other parts of the world and distributed here… if you cut that off then all of the sudden the US is a country that isn’t creating much value and isn’t even capable of that outside of a Stalin-esque centrally planned industrialization program. The US depends on circulating capital taken from the global south domestically, not producing it domestically. So if that’s not circulating, and Americans have no real capacity to create value domestically… then material conditions probably degrade on a scale that’s hard to even wrap your head around. THAT would be a hard and fast collapse.

Admittedly, the catalyst for that (the rest of the world preventing the US from exploiting production in the rest of the world) is pretty far-fetched, so at this point it’s just academic and why I saw that I really only see a slow motion degradation happening.

Late 2030’s- mid 2040’s depending on how things pan out over the rest of the decade. There is no avoiding it, but if the neo-libs remain in power they may delay the collapse slightly. Climate change will be the predominant factor in the collapse. A one-two punch of a collapse of insurance and housing markets due to the increase in extreme weather events, and the rise In sea levels tanking coastal economies. Add in food insecurity for some additional civil unrest. Starvation, disease, and violence will be the leading causes of a death-toll that will rise to at least several dozen million in a short period.

The federal government may remain nominally in power in parts of the former United States, but will be a toothless puppet of the corporations that weather the collapse (even more-so then it is now). Rural areas that lack any sort of resources that corps desire will become lawless violent wastelands, the only order coming from petty warlords, mostly the remnants of far right militias or criminal organizations that fled the inhospitable global south. Many communities will be migratory as extreme weather makes it difficult to put down roots. Famine will be rampant and cannibalism will become common.

Survivalist and Preppers across the nation will rejoice thinking their day has come, only to find that their choice of location for their compound/bunker was extremely poor. Floods will wash many of them away, and many more will be scorched to the ground by uncontrolled massive wildfires. The rest will be juicy targets for more organized gangs of looters. Many will think themselves smart by heading into the wilderness to survive off the land, only to find several million others had the same idea. They mostly end up shooting each other, and wild game is over-hunted to extinction within 2 years.

Cities across the US may weather the collapse to varying degrees. It mostly depends on their current wealth and location. Those that persist will transition into semi-autonomous neo-feudal corporate police states. The majority of these will be based around the Great Lakes and in the Rocky Mountains. Denver and Salt Lake City will likely survive, with the Mormons turning post-collapse Utah into their theocratic wet dream. Chicago will be the center of a loose alliance of corpo city states around the Great Lakes, and rust belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo will finally have their comeback! The southwest will be completely uninhabitable due to drought and extreme heat. The west coast and southeast are too prone to extreme weather for population centers to survive. There will be a great migration as hundreds of millions become climate refugees. The scarcity of food will make it so the inhabitable parts of the former US will likely only take in refugees with connections or useful skills. Many will be enslaved. Others will be turned away to starve or die violently in the wasteland.

Technology levels will decline as the global supply chains that make modern tech possible collapse. Quality of life as a whole will decline greatly for all even the elites. The elites with more foresight will prepare and relocate, becoming the new feudal lords. Those who do not will find themselves meeting the same fates as the lower classes, their former wealth worthless and lacking the skills to survive. The middle class will be finally obliterated completely, and chattel slavery will make its big comeback! The plus side is there may be some isolated and heavily armed rural communities where life is alright, but none of this will last as the climate collapse continues to worsen triggering feedback loops that will raise global temperatures more then 6 degrees. Too hot for any currently evolved complex life to inhabit the earths service. Humans are extinct by the turn of the next century. GG everybody!

*Edited this to clarify some language and add new ideas.

This might be too outlandish, but Texas will start enforcing its own borders with Mexico while the federal government just looks on and cedes control to the state authorities.