So anyone got any guesses about how the USA will collapse or what will happen after
Posted by skyward_diamond@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 111 comments
I’m just curious what people think and speculate how the good old US of A will go down and what will happen to states or we just stay as we are just more Smokey just curious and here are my three theories.
Honestly h5n1 or it name bird flue will become a pandemic and a very bad one due to rfk probably being over the cdc and anti vax.
Good old war we might just got to war with Canada or the whole of South America talking about how we want Panama Canal back or we might go to war with Canada let see where the night takes us .
Solar flare we’re going to have a solar maximum this July so who knows if the light will stay on or not .
Knowing all my guess I want to hear yours see if we are sharing the shame Brain cell.
MattyTangle@reddit
Martial law within four years
Retrosheepie@reddit
I have been proud of our democracy, but I would not be that upset with a military dictatorship. We have some very capable general officers in the Pentagon who could effectively run the country (and possibly enact measures to make a meaningful change on climate change). They could modify the Constitution to address the obvious deficiencies we have suffered from and then eventually return the US to a democracy (minus the traitors).
But martial law under someone like Trump or Vance would be a disaster.
DissedFunction@reddit
I think it will start with some market collapse and then bailouts for the bigs. Like bailout for crypto and some other bubble bursting. Then the a combo of not enough workers for agriculture and reconstruction of various natural disasters. Tariffs and rising food prices will ruin consumer confidence. layoffs. covid will continue to spread throughout the population but without testing/reporting the public wont know the extent of the damage but critical areas like medical/dental care will continue to lose valuable members of their profession. the economic pressures will grow and foreign investors and hedge funds will buy up property. Increased unemployment w/no relief. Increased medical needs but cuts in ACA and SNAP will cause massive desperation. Protests will happen and Trump will get his wish to turn troops onto protestors and then all hell will break loose. Stock market crashes, more bailouts, inflation rises. Climate change will bring increasing disasters with insurance companies continuing to bail. Fights over FEMA funding. Trump's lack of coherent foreign policy other than to help Russia will cause world economic chaos. Putin dies and his successor wont have the same goals as Putin but will have the dirt on Trump. Trump will commit US military to a pet project and it will fail miserably causing various enemies to continually test the US --stretching our capability mostly because of incompetent appointees in the admin. Consumer confidence will continue to fall which will cause a depression as well as inflation. Unrest will cause the corporate class and oligarchs to fear for their lives and focus on terrorism will switch from foreign actors to domestic paranoia with the creation of prison camps not just for illegals but for protestors or anyone increasingly fascist local and federal and state police suspect to be a Luigi or just a so-called radical or even too woke. At this point, it's collapsed.
And frankly, the way that Trump was elected, the rise of the oligarchs in buying an election, the responses by the right to the disaster in Los Angeles, shows us the collapse has already started.
jbiserkov@reddit
What dirt could the Russians have that would hurt him in the eyes of his supporters? More than listening him talk for 60 seconds? More than his 1st term? More than the last 4 years? More than his 2nd term?
Get real, there is no dirt. Except in his head. And in the heads of his supporters. Decades of American culture and "education" made sure of that.
Retrosheepie@reddit
Whether there is dirt or not is immaterial at this point. We live in a post truth world now, so whatever factual / justified criticism of Trump, or Russian claims will not matter. The MAGA faithful (as well as a good portion of the joe q. public) have been brainwashed to the point that they will immediately discount/deny and denounce any "dirt" on Trump. He is virtually untouchable at this point and his fans think he can do no wrong. The RW propaganda has spread from fringe outlets and personalities (like Alex Jones, etc) to the MSM and SM platforms like X and Meta.
There is no going back. We are living in a "1984" or "Fahrenheit 451 world". Truth is for suckers and losers.
Decent_Ad_3521@reddit
This is a good prediction
fedfuzz1970@reddit
Well stated and on the "money". Having spent a career investigating financial crimes, I think everyone should be wary-the insiders will take theirs first and leave everyone else holding the bag.
DissedFunction@reddit
good point.
BabyStepsWest@reddit
Yep! 👆
Dembigguyz@reddit
This absolutely
ThroatRemarkable@reddit
I would bet on social collapse. Internal caos. It's underway
Less_Subtle_Approach@reddit
External pressures like you've listed OP don't typically bring down empires with the geographic advantages of the USA. The two main ways we'll see the formal end of the republic in our lifetimes:
Note that I don't really like using future tense in terms of the collapse of the USA given that we've seen how badly material conditions have deteriorated just in the past 20 years, and we're about to swear in a would-be autocrat for the second time in 12 years, but I get that processes are less sexy than dramatic singular events.
jbiserkov@reddit
Second time in 8 years, no? 2017 and 2025.
Less_Subtle_Approach@reddit
It feels like 16 years so let's split the difference
jbiserkov@reddit
Can't argue with that!
iwatchppldie@reddit
Basically the fall of the Soviet Union but American style. people are gonna be stealing your car batteries or you’re going to steal them kinda up to what ever your luck is. I’m not sure where it goes from there.
NadiaYvette@reddit
I don’t know. I don’t feel like it’s very close of a parallel. The USA isn’t the loser of a 70-year-long siege and spy war and series of non-stop proxy wars. The USA’s internal dynamics like Cold War liberals vs. neoconservatives vs. Christofascists are entirely internal, not the products of foreign subversion like Yeltsin et al. The beneficence of the USSR as a project was radically different from a crass rebellion of slaveholders seceding from the Kingdom of Great Britain (as it was then known) to forestall the abolition of slavery, claw back land the colonies’ local plutocrats speculated on that got ceded to the indigenous by the crown, and otherwise just plain dodge taxes. And that all the while staging sham plebiscites to defuse opposition to plutocratic oppression, and laughably calling it „freedom” while carrying out mass imprisonment so extreme its only historical competition is WWII mass internment of civilians that at any point in time imprisons more than ГУЛаг did during its entire history. You get the idea.
jbiserkov@reddit
Marry me.
NadiaYvette@reddit
Could I get Irish citizenship and/or an Irish work visa by so doing?
jbiserkov@reddit
I'm am from an EU member country (Bulgaria), legal resident in Stockholm, Sweden for the past 6 years, I'm applying for Swedish citizenship in February.
¯_(ツ)_/¯
despot_zemu@reddit
We’ve got serious USSR in 1986 vibes going on
vagabondoer@reddit
My money is on christofacists starting wars to bring about the end times. Starting and then escalating until the mushroom clouds rise everywhere.
NadiaYvette@reddit
My various connexions have been screaming bloody murder that the real crazies have taken over. A fair amount of the logic underpinning how strenuous my efforts to flee are is defending myself against their domestic agenda because the end of the world is subject to logical conundrums that motivate ignoring it altogether in the absence of any way to prevent it.
richardtrle@reddit
I suggest you watch the movie I Am Still Here.
You can see what happens when a government is surrounded by crazy people. Crazy people in power are the same thing as Witch Hunting
The way those people are obsessed with Drags and LGBTQ is beyond concerning. They want to have the enemies, so when they put their genocide act in practice, people are going to be so dull that they won't even complain that minorities are being mowed.
NadiaYvette@reddit
I can’t find the film you’re talking about on IMDb, but I’m interested.
richardtrle@reddit
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt14961016/
jbiserkov@reddit
8.9 out of 12K people.
richardtrle@reddit
Is that good?
jbiserkov@reddit
Well, the 8.9 would place it in top 10 movies of all time if it held that high after more people rated it. https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/
Jorgenlykken@reddit
Some facts: - price elacticity for oil & gas is marginal. Current society/ way of living only exsist in a Window of cheap energy. - the cost of extracting oil&gas is rising ( deminishing reservoars) and the margins for the oil companies gets worse by the day and will soon cause trouble for both companies and consumers. - Climate changes will cause more and more serious damage to infrastructue, houses and properties and the cost for repair will rise and rise do to the damaged infrastructure and energy crisis. - Climate changes, energy prices, fertiliser prices, etc will make it very difficult to farm, and food prices will go through the roof. - The world ( BRICS countries in the lead) will wake up to the fact that USA runs all its mighty power on defisit budgets due to the Dollar being the «world currency» and therefore in demand. This poncy sceem cannot continue forewer.... - There is a brutal race for achiving AGI by the tech companies. Everyone of them knows that a very strong model will internally be able to help inventing the even stronger model. The first company to reach AGI will soon get AGI to create ASI (Artificial super intelligence) - people will lose jobs when stronger and stronger AI models take their jobs. AI companies will continue reliesing them to finance further development and other companies will continue implement AI workers to stay in competition. - Social upheval on a massive scale will be the result of all this, and AI will be used to hold the uprising down.
All of this will not only affect the USA, but US willl be in the front of it. Good luck with the Orange man and his administration to navigate this.....
(Sorry my mis-spellings and bad English due to Norwegian mother language and spell check)
jbiserkov@reddit
AI will be used as an excuse to fire workers, then replace them with cheaper, out-sourced workers. AI is outsourcing 2.0
There is no AGI. There will be no AGI. Let alone ASI. We will run out of water for cooling the data centers decades before we even have a conceptual idea how to create AGI. There is no amount of compute that you can throw at haLLucination Machines to achieve AGI.
Profits/stock price were somewhat proportional to company output which was somewhat proportional to number of people working there.
But Musk's Twitter showed that you can fire an obscene amount of people, and due to their excellent engineering investments done in the past, the company can continue mostly working, on auto-pilot, for some time. Many other tech companies saw that and started doing layoff after layoff. The stock market responded by increasing their valuations.
Gingerbread-Cake@reddit
Like everything else in the USA, it will have more to do with money than any other cause.
MounTain_oYzter_90@reddit
Yeah, collapse always starts with economics. That's usually what halfway keeps order in a society. Everything else quickly follows after.
hagfish@reddit
I tend to think ‘economics’ is a measure of underlying systems. If we look at large-scale migrations and conflicts over the last 20 years, the underlying cause is not just oil or religion - it’s climate shocks (Syria).
jbiserkov@reddit
Did you mean "CIA operation"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
The_Tale_of_Yaun@reddit
It collapsed a long time ago, but the inertia of the system continues to make the national corpse shamble around.
Meph514@reddit
Like Biden, Trump, Pelosi and the rest of the gerontocracy dinosaurs.
fedfuzz1970@reddit
Don't forget 91 year old Chuck Grassley of Iowa; Kay Granger, TX representative with in dementia care (still voting), and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who disconnects from reality on a regular basis.
LuveeEarth74@reddit
F— Grassley has been there since I was in 1st grade?!?! January 1981.
Low_Relative_7176@reddit
That created quite an interesting picture of a giant literal weird zombie in my head… thanks
Dreadsin@reddit
People like to compare America to Rome but I think it will end up being more like Spain. We’ll continue to make a bunch of absolute dog shit decisions, falling further behind the rest of the world with each bad choice. One day we’ll look up and see the entire world has moved on without us
Specific_Emu_2045@reddit
It’s going to be gradual, and I know Reddit hates hearing this, but the US is too important to fail. Much of the world will be crumbling before the US dies.
If we’re talking major events, I do think the value of the dollar will plummet on a global scale and cause chaos. This will be just as bad for other economies as it is for the US.
As climate change worsens, equatorial people will migrate north. If you think the border is bad, wait till people start running up on beaches.
Food will be scarce and production will be owned by gigantic corporations, who will in turn make it scarcer. Housing will be just as bad and you’ll start to see massive homeless cities.
All this leads to one outcome: totalitarianism, and the US will probably go the fascist route with this. The US will see a fascist regime before it sees roaming Mad Max bandit hordes. It will be a not-so-last-ditch effort to deal with the realities of a global superpower collapsing.
slayingadah@reddit
The start of one is less than 48 hours away
Pythia007@reddit
It has collapsed. Do you think a country that allows a creature like Trump to have supreme executive authority is a fully functioning society? Collapse is death by a thousand cuts.
slayingadah@reddit
It's appalling and funny in the horrible way things are funny these days that he won again. Like, this is round fucking two.
Strangepsych@reddit
Yes. His "election" is the proof of The collapse.
boomerish11@reddit
Totally this.
jjaacckk8577@reddit
Exactly we are like frogs in boiling water
redditunderground1@reddit
After things collapse and the greedy have destroyed America; there will be legions of disciples of Luigi roaming the land to distribute reparations, equity and justice! After all they will have nothing to lose, nowhere to live and nothing to do.
In the average neighborhood trying to hand on, werewolf preppers will kill their neighbors to steal their preps and then eat them and their dog.
wyatt3333@reddit
Read Parable of The Sower. It lays out everything. 25% of the book has already come true. It is a well read audiobook too.
boomerish11@reddit
This book chilled me like no other dystopian novel (and I love dystopian novels) because of how it lays out shit that's already happening. Here. In what's left of Amerika. Olivia Butler was a visionary.
STL_Tim@reddit
Either:
a) Continued and somewhat accelerating enshitification of everything, or
b) Some major event or combination of smaller events, not restricted to climate catastrophes, bird flu pandemic, insurance industry collapse, massive economic downturn, social unrest, etc. combines to cause a major, 1930's or worse (depression + dust bowl) economic/environmental collapse involving large scale population displacement, joblessness, hunger, ubiquitous tent cities (Trump Towns, in the tradition of Hoovervilles), etc.
I really think it will be a) followed by b), I just don't know if it will be this year or a few years from now until we hit b).
CerddwrRhyddid@reddit
They're going to empty the public purse right into the hands of a very few, very, very rich people around the world and their hangers on.
Nothing is going to stop them, and there will be no consequences.
They will ruin the U.S goods and services economy in order to move astronomical sums of money, much of it borrowed, from public funds to private hands.
For example, watch as the landholdings of corporate farms go mental as they buy up farms that are untenable due to lack of workers, or Property Owning Corporations that just rake it in due to owning all the property people couldn't afford to keep.
There's probably a whole chaos of things that are going to happen.
KeebRealtor@reddit
Isn’t it funny? Americans are realizing that the Chinese and our ‘enemies’ are just average families and citizens who all want the prosperity peace and opportunity just like us.
But the media and govt portray them as evil. Just look at the red note phenomenon.
I predict, Americans will be sold out (or currently sold out) to the rich and powerful and we will be drained of every resource before it all collapses.
Unless…
throwawaytrumper@reddit
When it gets bad enough we’ll start murdering the worst specimens of humanity. It’s coming.
benjunior@reddit
The Full Luigi
ChartMurky2588@reddit
Oh, the chinese government is legitimately evil. Look up Tiananmen square, uighur genocide and what they did to hong kong 💀
Meph514@reddit
No government is inherently evil. Only the person in charge at the time. There are plenty of examples where the government is a positive force for its constituents.
KeebRealtor@reddit
Governments are very likely always going to be evil. The people and the citizens aren’t
ChartMurky2588@reddit
Glad we agree 👍
thedelphiking@reddit
I heard a tech podcast talking about how Americans can only see about 5% of carefully moderated rednote users in China.
ElectricRanko@reddit
They will acquire the ravaged neighborhoods of Los Angeles at literal fire sale prices
jjaacckk8577@reddit
I wonder how much has been bought up in Hawaii and North Carolina. The media coverage is severely lacking after the initial devastation
apparentlyintothis@reddit
I’m in NC and god ‘n everybody has gotten calls and texts from property firms going “are you looking to sell after your house got swept away?” Even if that persons house is perfectly intact
fedfuzz1970@reddit
We had lived in S. Miami where Hurricane Andrew went through in 1992. We drove into our old completely devasted neighborhood 3 weeks later to find construction companies already there rehabbing homes (our old one too). Buyers had swept in, buying up properties for a song, and would soon have them back on the market at a large profit. Owners took their payout and ran for Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
SoapyRiley@reddit
I get sometimes 5 calls/day asking if I have any properties to sell. The address they usually ask about isn’t even a property I own. Last time they asked about my house, I told them I’d sell for $500k. The guy got all excited and said yeah they could probably do that but once he pulled up my house specs, hung up on me because it ain’t worth that much! 😂
thumos_et_logos@reddit
Best part is the ones who benefit will just leave for somewhere they didn’t wreck because they have no loyalty to this country, leaving all of us behind in the ruins.
Pythia007@reddit
Accumulating “assets” to exploit in better times which will never come.
Johundhar@reddit
I was just wondering if anyone had tallied up all the ways we are gonna be fucked beyond all the ways we have already been fucked. Here's a few:
Communicable diseases will be having a field day, as masks, vaccines, and many other public health measures will be abolished
Given the above, the entire medical system, already on the ropes, will finally be pushed beyond collapsed, so that even if you manage to avoid the above mentioned communicable diseased, you are likely to die from any number of otherwise easily treatable conditions
Every other system imaginable will be underfunded, neglected, understaffed, staffed with people who don't know anything about them...including power grids, nukes, dams, ports, airports, water systems...
Failure of any one of these will likely be locally catastrophic. There will pretty much inevitably be lots and lots of them.
There will be lots and lots of new and unusual ways to die in the US in the coming years.
Here's hoping that those that inevitably catch up to you and your loved ones are not among the more excruciating
Logical-Race8871@reddit
We'll see how long the shaky neoliberal-fascist coalition can keep the lights on without a total war economy. Personally, I don't see it lasting that long.
The main problem facing both these converging political movements right now is that there's no one to shoot at under the guise of righteous warfare. "Woke" isn't a country or even a geopolitical bloc, BRICS owns 70% of world manufacturing, muslims don't have tanks anymore, and China has nukes and very few mortal enemies or ride-or-die allies to even proxy war with the US. China has spent the past 50 years focusing on non-alignment and the option to sit everything out.
It's like the whole chessboard is all queens and kings. There's no gameplay to exploit here. Both parties definitely want to go to war with Iran, but they could actually do some serious damage to us and ensnare us if the population really wanted to. That'd be like Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan in one country.
In terms of economic growth and extraction, our domestic fossil fuels have probably peaked. We can try to expand to Greenland and Northern Canada, but we'd basically have to colonize them overnight to get ROI. The reason we extract minerals from poor countries is because of the massive cheap labor, not because they're the only deposits. Greenland is unpopulated, has no ports, and is covered in fuckin ice. Northern Canada is equally remote and unpopulated, and there'd probably be a civil war going on.
The tech industry is about to crash from massive over-leverage on AI, and the housing sector from insurance collapse. We can maybe buy a few years by cannibalizing our economy with tariffs and mass deregulation, but that pentuples the bill that comes due when the cash runs out.
And then yes, all the pandemic risks and mandatory climate disasters over the next few years, each costing a not-small small percentage of our annual economy.
It really is a recipe for implosive empire collapse.
I think if there's one prediction you can make, it's that it's gonna be pretty dumb how it all goes down. I'm putting money on a couple states seceding just to protect what's left of their economies. Somebody is gonna balk at going down with the rest of the morons.
fedfuzz1970@reddit
Since we have never accepted responsibility for anything, we will end by lashing out at everyone, while maintaining the fallacy that we are a benevolent nation. The vote for POS Trump is the latest sign that we've given up. Watch how everyone kowtows and looks the other way when he lashes out in his childish, revengeful rage.
AClaytonia@reddit
Martial law, extreme police state so when class consciousness is finally awakened, they will be able to squash all levels of resistance.
runningraleigh@reddit
Balkanization and it's already started
Ghostwoods@reddit
It's going to go the same way Russia did -- everything stolen by the very few, with most areas destitute and semi-lawless, and a few glittering playgrounds like Manhattan kept functional for the elite.
Sabiancym@reddit
Attacks on Democracy and extremism in general will eventually go too far and civil unrest will follow. There's a significant amount of Trump supporters out there who just straight up want to abolish opposition and go full totalitarian. Trump regularly mentions his admiration for Putin and dictators in general and constantly floats the idea of ignoring the constitution and running again. If he thought he could, he'd go full dictator. He just might try it.
Even if we're all still around in 4 years, we've already passed the point of no return. The population will only continue to get dumber and eventually it will be too much. Only question now is if that takes years or decades.
jdjfjakb@reddit
My bets are either on a slow decline into poverty for the masses or world war 3
richardtrle@reddit
I posted this a while ago.
We are actually witnessing the collapse of the US and it started roughly after the US dealt with the invasion of Kuwait.
After the Kuwait invasion the US meddled where it should not have meddled and the repercussions were obvious.
It was involved in nearly all conflicts, Bosnia, Somalia, Yugoslavia in the 90s and then Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, again in Somalia, Lybia, Niger, Syria.
Now the US is involved again in the Israel-Palestinian conflict and it is acting as a proxy in the Ukraine-Russian conflict.
This will come to bite the US later, because they are investing large sums in those conflicts while neglecting its own civilian rights. The ban of TikTok is a severe regression for civil rights and freedom of speech.
You don't take away stuff, taking away stuff is what dictatorships do. And from there the fascism door is only open and people are shoved in.
Meanwhile the US citizens are totally disconnected from reality and are not ready for whatever crisis hits first. I hope that it is not too grim, but nothing is stopping the next 9/11. In fact they are doing quite the opposite.
By having a fascist pig telling that he is going to annex Canada and Mexico and will invade Venezuela and Panama. Things are bad for them.
trivetsandcolanders@reddit
The rural/urban divide will continue to worsen. Rural areas will become hotbeds for domestic terrorism (even more than they are) as people are increasingly left behind by the government and look for targets to blame their problems on.
LitOak@reddit
I don't know about collapse but the great depression that the orange abomination deliberately causes to be able to create a massive fire sale for his mates and the global impact of that is my main concern. The horrifying stuff that he's going to do like use the military on US citizens will just be a local impact that we will mostly hear about years afterwards. There's also the possibility of a hot war that involves Europe.
Another pandemic seems tame right now.
sblackbird2020@reddit
Bird flu seems more of an issue for the food supply which we depend upon. If culling animals and disposing of their products are the only way to stop the spread in animals that will eventually catch up with us. Surely humans catching it seems deadly as well but I think most people will starve or die some other way before dying from bird flu specifically.
jprefect@reddit
I don't know how it starts, but it ends with balkanization
darkstream77@reddit
It's not an event. It's a process. The United States is collapsing right now and has been for decades most likely. Collapse is a stupid word.
skyward_diamond@reddit (OP)
I always thought it would be more flashy
Sxs9399@reddit
At this rate my (lack of money) is on an economic collapse. Climate change to me is an existential real threat that will be an apocalyptic level collapse based on our current rates of green house gas emissions. However, even at 2c, even 4c! we're looking at a "gradual" collapse over the next 50ish years.
Conversely the US could collapse economically within the decade. I am in my mid 30s and I feel like I was one of the last ones to "make it". I check tuition at my college every now and then, it's about 3x what I paid a decade ago. I also know new hires at my company make maybe \~30% more than what I started at. To be fair I think the starting pay has risen roughly in line with inflation, but those new grads presumably have 3x the debt I had. All of this is for smart college educated folks playing by the rules. I feel like the job opportunities for high school grads are basically a death sentence.
IIJOSEPHXII@reddit
Nuclear 9/11 and the American defense systems will be "away on exercises" followed by atrocities of mass murder. This is what all the post-apocalyptic fiction is culturally conditioning the US population to accept as a natural progression.
4saganearth@reddit
I picture the dystopian world in Margaret Atwood's Mad Adams Series where mega corporate control communities, resources, and lives, while the masses live in neglected, lawless regions. These same corporations also engineer designer diseases for profit, creating pandemics that decimate populations.
MidwestException@reddit
Observe what the Soviet Union was like 1960-Collapse. We are them in maybe the early 70s so however it was living there as a commoner you can pick some pieces out of that to get a picture
jibberwockie@reddit
Why speculate when the inauguration of a convicted felon is only a few days away? You get to experience collapse in real time! Exciting ( until you run out of food)!
PeanutTraditional568@reddit
Political polarization keeps going and even more extreme ideologies will emerge. I think conservative extremists will go nuts with religion. Infrastructure decay keeps going on. No more bread and circus to keep the population domesticated, then a bloody civil war which will be the end of the US and balkanization with high hostility as a result.
NyriasNeo@reddit
Everyone has his/her guess from civil war to nuclear war. No one knows for sure. Anyone saying otherwise is lying.
Express-Ticket-4432@reddit
Okay
ElectricRanko@reddit
OP asked specifically for guesses, thanks for your contribution!
NyriasNeo@reddit
Well, i did say "civil war" and "nuclear war". Those are two guesses. You are welcome!
HardNut420@reddit
Will will probably go to a war last ditch effort for economic growth
HarryMudd-LFHL@reddit
Honestly, wont the US collapse last? It won’t be overrun by millions of climate refugees. Killbots at the border can deal with that. Food production would have to fall by like 80% to have famine.
DisillusionedBook@reddit
It will implode from it's own corruption as the wealth gets concentrated ever more and it becomes more like Putin's Russia. The people will be more and more stomped down on, cowed into submission, and the divisive conflicting misinformation designed to keep everyone unaware of anything real, enabling yet more kleptocracy.
The infrastructure will get worse and worse, just like Russia, until you are all living in squalor and drinking heavily to numb the senses.
Those in charge will continue to lash out at 'enemies of the state' - journalists, brown people, poverty and desperation-caused criminals, women, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, random nations that have little to nothing to do with the US own downfall, like Canada or Mexico or Greenland etc., they will rail against NATO... all the perceived grievances on what has not "made America great".
These exact same tactics were used before. In another regime. 90 years ago. We saw how it ended.
This time, you get to be the baddies.
jigsaw153@reddit
The LA rebuild will give you insight on the health of the USA.
CharleyZia@reddit
Multiple forces moving at different velocities colliding with various impacts, some head on and some deflecting and colliding with several other forces. No single country will be able to hold up alone, and America will be sorely weakened - not a refuge for citizens or immigrants.
This is how our current narratives let us down. It's not just one Godzilla or one cruise ship capsizing or one asteroid ator one economy imploding or one pandemic or one cascading nuclear space junk. It's a lot of these happening at the same time. Meantime, millions of tragedies are already felt on small scales and few are able to meaningfully help.
Sleep well while you can.
GalliumGames@reddit
Likely the bottom will fall out, but unlike the Great Depression, it is unlikely we’ll have a FDR to implement another New Deal or other competent policy for that matter. The current oligarchs are so shortsighted and greedy that corporatization of society will eventually hit a critical mass where regular people can’t afford to consume anymore and the whole house of cards crashes down.
The mighty great white shark can’t survive if all the krill gets wiped out. The elite can’t hold on if no one can afford anything and a wave of collapse propagates upwards. Like the shark, they’ll eventually resort to eating each other when the economy ceases to function at all. What exactly happens in this kind of collapse is anyone’s guess.
Locoman7@reddit
This trade war with canada will be the spark. We will stop sending oil and gas down there.
0xdeadbeef6@reddit
Balkanization for sure. Not sure what will he the thing that does it, but my bet is some sort of economic collapse that cause states to stopping recgonizing federal authority+ the federal government not having the means to enforce that authority. Either that or we end up in a war we were finally get invaded and our shit kicked in. I refuse to rule out a Greenland invasion
cast_iron_cookie@reddit
Watch the movie "Book of Eli"
skyward_diamond@reddit (OP)
Who a little collapse movie night
TWAndrewz@reddit
Collapse isn't an event, it's a process and it's already in motion. It's going to have periods of acceleration, like COVID or the fires and calmer moments. It won't ever really be done, as such.
SoCalledExpert@reddit
It is happening, only little by little.
horror-@reddit
City hall could be on fire and people still gonna ask this very question.
Look around.
Clear_Emergency4690@reddit
Ummm it’s happening right now..
jandzero@reddit
Mommy, Why Did America Collapse?: A Bedtime Story
https://www.amazon.com/Mommy-Why-Did-America-Collapse/dp/B0BTKXY37M
Sinistar7510@reddit
I think, as the old saying goes, it's going to happen 'slowly at first and then all at once.' There will be a decline as the effects of pollution and climate change and just general decay slowly grind us down until at some point something breaks. Then the economy falls apart and the government collapses in such a way that it will never reform again and the United States is pretty much over and done with. There may be *something* that takes its place but it will be a ghost of its former self at best.
TisDelicious@reddit
When it breaks down into multiple sovereign states
prettyfartsmella@reddit
Next midterm election, when it becomes possible that the GOP will not maintain control of the House, they will try to ensure, by hook or by crook, and clear cut violations of law, that they remain in charge. Using their henchmen in Texas and Florida and elsewhere as needed. May well be the last real election for the foreseeable future.