I suppose this is a similar question to "What might happen if America actually does balkanize?" but applied to the present (or near-future) instead of some point in the 2060s or whatever.
I suppose this is a similar question to "What might happen if America actually does balkanize?" but applied to the present (or near-future) instead of some point in the 2060s or whatever.
De Santis leads the South east of Mississippi river with an iron fist. There are roaming death squads capturing LGBT folks that frequently venture outside of their borders. Yes, it does work. Businesses are stable and profit margins are higher. Half the population is homeless.
Would lose to the Amy-Targaryen-Klobuchar Midwestern imperium tho.
American business owners breathe a sigh of relief, Malthusianism takes hold and tens of millions of people die. With real-life productivity going down because of all the death, the capitalists go into the Metaverse and engineer it such that it simulates the perfect capitalist, homo economicus society which generates fake profit which is nonetheless treated as real profit. The people inside that simulation then create their own, even faker and worse quality simulation, and so on, and neoliberal economists laugh at those who said that capitalism's assumption of infinite growth makes it destined to fall. This keeps going until 2135, when the population of America is down to about a thousand people. The last power plant shuts down due to lack of maintenance and all the simulations (at this point we at 45,423 simulations deep) blink out of existence in an instant. The survivor capitalists step out of the bunker and have to start civilization from scratch.