less than you think

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Going based on pure vibes and ass-pulling:

• Irreversible decline: We are here.

• “The sick man of [continent]”: By 2050s.

• Losing most imperial possessions: A few decades after “The sick man of [continent]”

• Minor Balkinization (secessionist movements): ~2070s

• Major Balkinization (rump state surrounded by successor republics): 2100-2110s

• Formal end of these United States of America: The rump state could easily truck along for centuries, especially if one of the successor republics manages to conquer the rump state and retroactively claims itself as a continuation of the rump state.

My vibes-based analysis is unable to incorporate climate change into its analysis, but climate change will obviously speed up the timeline.

3 - 10 years

I say this because climate change and the Holocene extinction are going to be a lot worse than people realize. There is going to be more disease, more fire. Capitalism’s rabid growth and consumption has started hell on earth. That’s not cope, I don’t actually want it to happen that way because it’s not just the US that will collapse, it’s all of us, humans, animals, plants. That’s my opinion as a training ecologist. It is so much worse than what they’re telling you.

This isn’t just about economics or war anymore. There are different forces at play than with other falling empires.

Long term possibility (aka ‘the bad ending’) is that the fash project comes to full fruition and the US is able to circle the wagons in the north and stay alive another 50 years before the full biosphere collapse.

Short term possibility (but not a ‘good ending’) is that a black swan event happens, like a nuclear exchange or a devastating disaster like the clathrate gun going off, and supply chains are disrupted so heavily and so fast that the federal government can’t maintain power. This I could see happening ten years from now.

Defining collapse, to me this means US balkanization.

IMO it will happen when the US gets a few large scale climate related disasters like the Texas snowstorm etc but over a dozen(more than 1 a month) going on continuously for about 3-5 years would be enough to destroy the country.

I believe it is a certainty because the US government is not capable of mobilizing resources to deal with these disasters, at the end of the day the capitalist class will not allow it. This already happens anyway, Puerto Rico got fucked and Trump withheld resources, nothing was done anyway. You’ll be told to leave or flee or get fucked. Everyone will cheer when Florida goes underwater but will they deal with the consequences of mass migration etc? You can expect headlines like this in the future Trump complains to senators that Puerto Rico is getting too much hurricane relief funding If this isn’t a sign of collapse than what is it? The “richest” nation in the world counting pennies for disaster relief while e.g giving unlimited no questions asked funding for the military.

Anyway as for the timeline, well climate change is showing signs of nothing except getting worse, nothing is being done and nothing will be done until it is too late, you can look into solar reflection is the goto example, I am all but convinced the US will do it unilaterally and fuck up everything because literaly better to gamble the fate of the world than to talk about changing capitalism, degrowth etc.

So if you want a date? It is hard to say, we are on the very pessimistic path, you can look at all the depressing headlines if you want confirmation, everything is always “faster than expected” or “scientists shocked” etc even accounting for the usual MSM sensationalism this message is even stronger among the academic circles, before 2050 is already quite likely, but almost certainly “collapse” will happen before 2080.

Climate change dictates this will happen and to argue against it like saying its “cope” and whatnot would be saying that a country going through multiple disasters and mass migrations has not collapsed yet because technically there are still 50 states and some geriatric dipshit 80 year in sitting on a table somewhere being called a “president”.

What does that look like to you? The US’s capacity for imperialist projection is currently retracting rather quickly. Is that collapse? Does it need to be totally incapable of anything other than local projection?

Or is this internal? Truly dramatic political change? Revolution? An end to the formal entity The United States of America? Food systems failure?

This is leftist cope pretty much.

Some people say China will collapse imminently.

USA is strong in many ways.

5 long

Long enough to kill us all

I dunno, how long did it take for the Roman Empire to be at its peak to when it just became references in the history books of the nations that came after?

About that long.

Long enough to outlast your youth and the best years of your life, if you still are in the prime of it.

This reminds me of how there’s multiple dates that historians place the end of the Roman Empire at and all say something slightly different. The date picked creates a certain interpretation for the end of the empire. For example, some often use the moving of the capital to Constantinople under Constantine (i think like 310-ish AD) as the end of the Empire in the sense of a cohesive entity centered in Rome as we think of it. The Western Empire still existed for 100+ years and the Eastern Empire for like a 1,000 years after that. I think that paints an interesting picture of what decline looks like on that scale.

Timeframes in the modern era are sped up for a lot of reasons (communications tech, and climate change mostly) but its really hard to put a timeline on something like decline and collapse, even in history, let alone when trying to predict future

In a lot of ways, i feel that what American Balkanization is going to look like has already occured to a significant degree. The Federal government took little real action or responsibility during COVID, and is choosing inaction as a minority party overturns abortion rights ceding more power to states. They’re also inactive while wild slates of anti-trans laws get passed in the most reactionary states and their extreme abortion restrictions. The Federal government’s policy is basically “your on your own citizens consumers.” I think that process will continue, but i think it looks more like this than states breaking away and forming new countries. I think the federal government will continue to be a middle man for collecting and dispersing tax dollars and running the military to keep the war economies going and facilitate imperialism. When the US can no longer do the later we’ll be deep in collapse. Hard to imagine when it will be, or what that will look like

Something i noticed in Texas thst i think highlights another aspect of this process. The US has a rural urban divide in political affiliation. In Texas the Republican stare government has been trying to extert more power over the major city governments that are run by democrats. They withheld Federal disaster relief money from Harris County (Houston) after Hurricane Harvey and recently took over Houston’s school district. No federal intervention on these overstepping of powers.