I mean hopefully it can be delayed by a year or two until I can get SRS and move to Seattle and integrate into some leftist networks. But we're all just stuck in this limbo of waiting for the evil empire to implode and it's still tottering along, smashing thousands of lives daily. I'm not romanticizing the Cool Zone, I'm just tired of being kept on the edge - waiting, waiting. Let's just get it the fuck over with
On the other hand, consider that the Soviet Union collapsed and although Russia still hasn't fully recovered from the 90s it's already once again a 'distant 3rd Great Power'. Even if the US was stripped to the fundamentals of it's geography it remains a contender for world-class power. It has a large population, it has the best river networks in the world, the infrastructure is in desperate need of renewal and modernization but at least it exists, it's an entire continent's worth of good arable land, it commands rich client states across the world, and it's on the northern hemisphere so it suffers less from climate change.
I think that as bad as things get in the imperial core (and at the core's margins, as you've described), nothing short of full on balkanization of America changes that calculus.
The US is practically designed to balkanize, given the way the state system is arranged. It wouldn't even be the first time we've tried.
I could very easily see the states start cracking up, particularly if there is any infighting within the US military.
That's not too say the new constellation of power would be weak, but modern Russia pales in comparison to the old Soviet Bloc or the rising Chinese and Indian states in terms of raw industrial power.
I think that raises two questions.
First, Balkanization: sure, but how? It's not gonna be along state lines. So even if the states become power centers in their own right, we have to factor in some interesting things. Geographically the US is rather united by the Mississipi River. Culturally the US is a new world diaspora nation, divides are ideological and racial rather than ethnic, and those divides are spread out between cities and rural areas.
Finally, will there be in-fighting in the US military? If there isn't any then the country won't balkanize and the states won't ever become centers of hard power. My impression, looking from outside, is that the US military retains the institutional wherewithal to discipline itself. Should it become politicized, then it will be as in Latin America. They'd launch a coup to 'stabilize the situation', but the national territory won't be under negotiation.
To give you an example. Brazil lacks the unifying geography factor of the US (quite the contrary, it's disunited as such), and during the First Republic (1890s-1930s) it was practically a confederacy. The states weren't just autonomous. They had their own armies, foreign relations and debt. The federal government did not get involved in coups launched inside the states. It was that decentralized. When the 1930s crisis hit the result were army junior coups, followed by the rise of a strongman, followed by a rebellion by the strongest state, followed by a purge of the army. Brazil in the latin american populist era not only recentralized, but embarked on a nationalist building campaign that involved burning state flags on tv. Countries the size of ours go through cycles like these. The question ultimately is wether national identity is strong enough (and here Brazil and the US both have an advantage over the 'old world'), and where the public institutions are headed.
I've been giving that some thought. Given the present course of things, my own amateur best guess it that as the federal government is stripped of more and more power, the states themselves will be forced to take on more and more responsibilities. The states that have stronger bureaucracies and material economic bases (agriculture, manufacturing, transport networks, etc) will naturally arise as power centers. I think California and the West Coast at large will be good examples of this. From there, it all depends on how things crack and break up at the federal level. Maybe it'll be closer to the pre-Constitution 13 colonies' confederation, maybe even the extreme Brazil example.
To return to the California point, I've been thinking about how that state's borders are the top contenders for making geographic sense in the nation (besides like Florida and Hawaii). Big mountain ranges protect an extremely agriculturally productive central valley, not to mention the incredible ocean ports. If it were an independent nation, its number one priority would be securing the outside water supplies it desperately needs for that agriculture and the large, parched cities on the coast. That's a big deal, especially with the Colorado River getting smaller and smaller each year. The federal government is already barely able to keep CO, UT, NV, AZ, and CA to come to terms about that water usage. That's a potential wedge point in future balkanization.
This is where I think the brazilian parallel becomes more interesting. You've shown how a California must secure the nearby states due to the Colorado River. Let's think about the implications of that. This means water rationing in times of climate change, most likely against the interests of the rest of the Colorado River states. This means finding a border with Texas and other states which might be carving their own sphere of influence. This game theory can blow into all out war, but doesn't have to. Just as it didn't in Brazil.
The First Republic followed the Brazilian Empire. The Monarchy, specifically during the reign of Pedro II, had morphed into what historians like the call the 'saquarema era', or the era of conservative consensus. All the hardpower in the first decades after independence had been in the hands of the landlord class. And they often tried, here and there, to carve their own countries, or to carve some autonomy for themselves. There had been many rebellions in the first decades of Brazil's existence. The ultimate victors were the factions closest to the capital, and they and their provincial supporters came to a simple conclusion: liberalism (federalization) doesn't work as it breeds more rebellion, and we have to stop and set up a highly centralized system to pacify this nation which, in reality, was a multitude of colonies wrestled into one.
So the Brazilian Empire had been a country where all power rested in the landlord's hands, and to maintain their economic means was why the regime existed. But actual rule was centralized away from the rural areas, into the capital and into the provincial capitals, and was vested on an urbanized bureaucracy. The abolition of the monarchy came into being as local oligarchies grew prosperous enough to outcompete the heavily indebted imperial boy's club in Rio, and as the monarchy itself also lost even the capital landlords' support after abolishing slavery but failing to enact federalism in the late 1880s.
All the monarchists believed that the end of the centralized regime would balkanize the country. It ultimately didn't. There are many reasons why, one of which that the monarchy had lasted long enough to create at least the foundation of a common brazilian national identity. And yet, in the turmoils after the military coup that ended the Empire, the oligarchies of the new United States of Brazil found themselves making the same game theory as we presume the oligarchs of California, and New York, and Texas all will. The result, was this: you notice that I said the First Republic was practically a confederacy, but formally it wasn't. What held it together was that part where I said that the Federal Government would not intervene in coups that happened inside the states. This was the so called Governor's Policy. The second informal policy that marked the era was 'Coffee and Milk' politics: the Federal Government thereafter was to be alternated between the two strongest states, São Paulo and Minas Gerais. Altogether what we have is an Oligarchic Republic with a pecking order. São Paulo and Minas Gerais are at the top; Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul are somewhere in the middle with their own provincial spheres of influence; Rio de Janeiro becomes an 'occupied capital' of sorts and lives off prestige and everyone else is at the bottom.
Can you imagine something similar in the US? California and Texas agree not to go to war over the Colorado because they can just do what oligarchs do and shake hands while hiding knives behind their backs? And so the country decentralizes and balkanizes in anything but name.
Speaking briefly on CA / TX and Colorado water, note that the largest water source that originates in CO for Texas is the Rio Grande. That flows down into New Mexico and then into Texas. So CA needs to secure water from CO, UT, NV, and AZ. TX needs to secure water from NM and CO. A lot of those states will struggle greatly in a more confederated or even free-for-all balkanized setup (can you imagine AZ or NV surviving for long in their current configurations outside of the existing federal support structure?). CA and TX could come to some kind of agreement where they keep these "lesser" states subjugated by various means.
Are you Brazilian, or do you have any further reading I could look into? This is all fascinating and very new to me. You're definitely convincing me that Brazilian history can provide pertinent clues into reading America's potential future.
National identity will be a tricky issue. The PNW would have a secession problem if the Republic of Cascadia idea gains actual traction. Texas used to be its own literal nation, if only for a short while. I don't think it'd be hard for them to whip up a new Texan identity that outshines (or even positions itself as the rightful successor of) American identity. My outsider's perspective has always been that CA kinda does view itself apart similarly to NYC.
I'm Brazilian, yeah. I haven't read this one but I remember liking what the authors wrote back in uni. It should be a pretty good primer.
Thank you!
In a balkanization situation, I see southern California seceding and joining Mexico. If it was put to a popular plebiscite, like the UN does all the time, it would pass in a landslide.
Never underestimate the power of white worshipping POC to throw themselves under the bus
doesn't 90% of California's water come from the Sierra Nevada ice and not the Colorado river
It's complicated. It's a big state and water comes from many disparate sources. For the Central Valley, the linked article quotes 30% of the agriculture coming from Sierra Nevada snowpack. Meanwhile the Colorado river is more important for the southern portion of the state (so presumably leaning towards urban use and less agriculture)- "The Colorado is a critical source of irrigation and urban water for southern California, providing between 55 and 65 percent of the total supply."
I mean, for the most part all the Confederate states held their own lines. West Virginia was only an exception because it was an edge case.
There would have to be in order to see any kind of real split. You might get an outright coup, with some cartel of generals or spooks removing a sitting President and replacing them with Their Guy, but historically that just means a dictatorship for some number of years. You'd need a real divide between powers within the military to get a geopolitical split in the nation. I suspect that's a real possibility because (a) lots of military brass are pilled af and (b) the branches are already naturally antagonistic because everyone's pulling from the same Pentagon pot of money. Infighting can be papered over so long as Big Number Always Goes Up, but as soon as you start seeing one branch or the other up for a serious set of cuts, its going to be viewed as a power grab and people in the other branches are going to respond.
Brazil has a substantive native population, though. A lot of the power struggles in the country fall along ethnic lines. I don't really see that in the US. Yes, there's something of a racial divide. But there's still more than enough crossover to produce candidates of mixed ethnicity in both parties. A lot more of the divide in the US is economic, with particular industries favoring one state over another and business interests squabbling over turf through legislation and regulatory capture. You can kinda see this in the Crypto bullshit and the fight over regulating AI. Or how a state like Delaware has functionally monopolized the entire credit card industry.
That's where I really see dividing lines. Texas being a petro-state and energy exporter puts it at odds with California which is a heavy electricity consumer and Georgia which is leaning hard into lithium battery manufacturing. Great Lakes states that are fiercely defensive of their fresh water reserves are under threat from drier states that want to pipe it out. Mississippi states have a variety of conflicting interests based on whether they're agricultural or mineral or shipping centers.
The Feds ostensibly keep all that in line, but as soon as a military conflict enters the mix you can see the contradictions sharpen noticeably.
Oh no, self proclaimed natives are not a factor in the story I was telling. Frankly their numbers are actually too small. The victories of the native communities are very recent and rather rare. Consider that Brazil is different from Mexico. The native population was much smaller and much more sparsely distributed. But then you may ask: aren't there a lot of black, brown and native looking people in Brazil? Yeah. But that's where Brazil is also different from the US.
When you consider racial relations in a country like Brazil you must understand that the model has the same assumptions as in the United States, but it follows a different path. The foundation is white supremacy. The assumption of the superiority, desirability and even the fetishization of european-christian cultural norms, which for most of our history meant catholic christianity. But unlike the United States, the portuguese colonies were built on minority european communities. That lead to a different sort of social order.
Let me tell you a little story. During the American Civil War there was this judge, I think, from Virginia. He sold off his posessions and moved to the Empire of Brazil. He settled with his fortune, bought a bunch of slaves and invested his fortune in a farming estate. From what I remember he sent two letters home. In the first he'd proclaim that Brazil was the future of civilization, that slavery would eternally remain an institution in the country. He exaggerated of course, but his feelings didn't come from nowhere as Brazil would only abolish slavery in 1888. The second letter, a few months later, he proclaims the opposite. Brazil is a twisted nation. His reasoning? Blacks could be soldiers and police down there. Of course one imagines that the real reason for his pessimism is due to the fact that his farm mcfucking failed. But the culture shock is self evident. This isn't an isolated event either. During the Christie Question, when the British Ambassador threatened war on us, one of his complaints was that british sailors who went drunk and became rowdy not only were taken to a normal prison, but were escorted by black bailiffs.
So from an american perspective you can fall into a pitfall of putting Brazil and the US on a spectrum and saying that Brazil is less racist, somehow. Remember however that we took decades more to abolish formal slavery, and know that we never truly ended informal slavery in the country. Only a few months ago the most expensive vineyards in the country were caught practicing slavery. So what gives? It's simpler. These societies are just different. If whites are a minority for centuries, then instead of the One Drop Rule you've got a caste system. You don't prohibit mixed marriages, you encourage them so as to whiten the population.
So why did I tell you all of this? Because the same thing happened to the natives. Unlike Mexico or Perú, the portuguese colonies would slowly either settle or enslave different native tribes, which were much less numerous than elsewhere. That was our version of the american frontier. So when a Brazilian says they are black or brown, or even white, odds are they have something of native in them as well. But their self identity is brazilian.
Furthermore, given that Brazil is a class society, the divisions of class are felt in that assimilation process as well. The traditional elites of the state of São Paulo are mostly white today. They've married with white people for a long time. One of them includes the queen of Sweden. And they generally descend from a native chief called Tibiriçá. Who was a portuguese ally. Though his case was rarer, what happened generally is that whenever the jesuits would set up shop and settle down weaker or defeated tribes from the frontier, the leader of that tribe was elevated into the colonial order. He went from chief to patriarch in a quasi-nobiliarchical system. He built alliances with colonial governors and colonels. He was the 'first' of the village, and ruled his people together with a jesuit 'tutor'. If, for an example, the native patriarch fought against colonial authorities against some decree of public works (where the natives of his village need to build a ditch or a bridge somewhere), he's not just doing it for the good of 'his people', he's doing it because thats the people whose labor he has some rights to.
Our system of white supremacy is more insidious, diabolical even. Assimilationist and whitening in character. Best symbolized by the horrible expression. 'A black man with a white soul'. So of course, racial struggles are present in every period of the last 200 years. But with most people integrated into that class system we end up in a situation where in pivotal moments of time the minority rights groups were either sidelined, or empowered only as part of a larger populist project. Things only began to change after the fall of the military regime in 1988.
Someone has been watching Peter Zeihan.
You know he used to work for Stratfor, right? He wrote a ton of stuff for them.
I haven't actually read anything from Peter Zeihan. In fact, my immediate circles tend to meme on him a lot for being wrong all the time and I can't even join in on the fun.
In any case from my reckoning those are not really 'Peter Zeihan arguments'. The territory in which the United States was formed is geographically excellent for a great power. Abundant resources for all periods of the industrial era, more natural ports than anybody else, more river navigability than the rest of the world combined, a river network that connects the extremes of the country, and an abundance of plain terrain with temperate climates for food production.
I'm sure Zeihan used those arguments for his own purposes, and I don't know which. But these points are also actually made in contrast with Latin American history. We are rich in iron but we were poor in coal during the era of steelmaking, we had difficult terrain which broke our countries apart, we have few natural ports and many highland rivers (good for power dams, bad for transport), isolated pockets of fertile soil surrounded by mountains and in a tropical climate. The big stark contrast was always with Argentina, which in many ways felt like a mini version of US conditions, explaining their productivity at the beginning of the last century.
Now the demographics is harder. I believe the US is below replacement rate, it's only growing because of immigration. Now I don't see that situation changing so soon, but it would seem that in a world of population decrease the US should decline less than many. They have the language, the cultural cachet and the financial means to keep it going. And they'll suffer less due to climate change than some places in Europe, most definitely less than anyone in south asia, africa or south america. Ie, places that would supply cheap migrant work to the US.
Stratfor used to go on and on and on about these "points" and people used to dunk on them over and over and over (on blogs, social media wasn't here yet.) All about these rivers and other shit that absolutely nobody writes about or cares about. Then Zeihan struck out on his own and lo and behold, he didn't change his tune one wink. He also trots out that demographic chart all the time.
Well, I don't know if bloggers don't care about these things but we definitely wish we had the profile of the Argentina or the US. Even our portion of the platine region couldn't compete with Argentina for the longest time because mountains cut them off the river. I am somewhat proud of what we've achieved with the cards we were dealt with (and utterly ashamed that we have done so little in terms of rail transport and so on), but we definitely could have used a break.
I suppose the problem with someone that writes for Empire is that they are basically arguing that the US's position is natural and eternal. They don't really build on geography or demographics and hardly talk about society beyond mottos like freedom and innovation and rule of law. It's like the reverse of the argument that the PRC government doesn't really matter for development since China is just returning to it's 'natural place' in the world, with the implication that everything prior to opening to western capital was just holding China back. I'm a historian so I think that's wrong on its face. The US was dealt a good hand, and it's government was ruthlessly efficient in exploiting it. It didn't have to be this way necessarily, and it doesn't have to stay that way forever.
OK Zeihan
what the fuck
No one here knows who Zeihan is. No cares if he's been dunked on. If the rivers and demographics points Catboy is making are so laughable, why aren't you pointing the flaws yourself?
Because the fact that Zeihan is a joke has been extensively covered elsewhere and I assumed everyone was familiar with it? He worked for Stratfor! Remember them? The people that think wars start because of rivers?
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