Politics

So what would a fragmented America look like?

Likely similar to America’s early days that repeated itself during the pandemic where the most powerful states were functionally regional authorities. California is the fifth-largest economy in the world. Texas is ninth, bigger than Canada, while New York is eleventh, just ahead of Russia. Florida is the sixteenth largest economy in the world, just behind Mexico, while Illinois is twentieth, just behind Saudi Arabia. Like with the Virginian slave economy of old, smaller states around them would be pulled in by the gravitational force of this power, forming regional governing coalitions along natural economic and social interests.

This splintering doesn’t need a decisive moment where the United States of America all of a sudden is not–it can just be the accelerating result of the degradation of our system we have been watching unfold in real time, as state governments step in to fill the growing void left by the federal government, and one day we all wake up and realize that California is functionally the Western states’ federal government.

But it could be driven by a decisive moment where the American system irrevocably breaks in some way. Imagine a future where California tries to do something really ambitious to try to fight an exceedingly destructive climate crisis, and the Supreme Court tells them they cannot do it. Say California invokes James Madison’s belief, supported by all Supreme Courts before the Roberts Court, that states can defy the Court, and they decide that it’s more important to stop the flames from enveloping their state than to adhere to the partisan whims of a corrupt institution which awarded itself God-like power in the 19th century to functionally declare slavery legal and spark a Civil War. What happens if the fifth-largest economy in the world just goes ahead and does it anyway? Does the Supreme Court send in the army? How does this work?