Here's the archive link, forgot to use it for the post
https://archive.ph/aNoMk
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Beyond being another hateful iteration of the conservative assault on trans people’s rights, the bill could have the state of Tennessee losing buckets of money as the legislation would contradict federal guidelines. If it passes the bill, Tennessee could lose $1.2 billion worth of federal education funding, and another $750,000 of federal grants dedicated towards supporting women and children. Other state and local government entities could be impacted as well.
Even with that potentially astronomical loss of funding, the bill passed the Senate 27-6, exhibiting the relentless urge Republicans have to target trans people at any cost.
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I think the overwhelming militaristic police presence in even rural areas is a bit of a chaos factor that might make our situation here unique.
Idk how bad the wealth gap will become between red and blue states, but if bad enough red states will have their own militaries at their disposals nonetheless.
Not exactly like a developing nation
The big "problem" Americans have is that they can very easily move between states. A downturn in a single state doesn't create a hot-house of poverty that culminates in a collective response, because residents simply scatter to the four winds in pursuit of growing economies in other regions.
Incidentally, this has created a ratchet that drives young people into the urban areas and leaves rural counties as these massive retirement communities. The crash in land-value that this creates sets up an opportunity for developers to scope up real estate on the cheap and throw up new developments, which feeds suburbanification. And that cycle has been playing out for 60 years, with urban centers sprawling outward as rural neighborhoods are abandoned, chewed up, and gentrified by state-subsidized private developers.
But now that the Second Wave Baby Boom (ie, Millennials) aren't maintaining population growth and immigration is increasingly difficult, there aren't enough young people to keep selling demolished and redeveloped exurban real estate to. So the rural areas aren't getting redeveloped and the gentrification frontier is retreating back to the urban core.
Young poor people are concentrating in the cities. Urban sprawl isn't dissipating the social pressures like it used to. And so we're left with a larger and larger police presence as a stop-gap to a dissintegrating system.
I agree, that's probably not going to end in balkinization. But I can absolutely see a New American Apartheid system, where we start building walls and cutting highways across the interior in order to corral and confine internally displaced people.
I think the "string of pearls" prediction is still the most salient, you have "islands" of entrenched political power and capital heavily policed and protected from the rapidly deteriorating social conditions of the "peripheries" around between. Rural / ex-burban areas largely defined by a patchwork of overlapping local authorities and jurisdictions like some kind of new-millenium HRE.