There are plenty of stories that take place in a “Post United States” North America; where for some reason the government and nation has collapsed. The reasons range from war to nuclear holocaust to . . . all kinds of stuff. I’m wondering if those could really cause our nation to fall apart and if not, what would? (Not an end to civilization necessarily, just the US).
I don’t see foreign invasion being practical. Our military, two oceans (no offense Canada and Mexico) and million of citizens with guns would stop it.
If there was a nuclear attack, why would people choose dissolution over trying to rebuild? If someone did take out the President and all 18(?) people in the line of succession after him we still have state governments (and militaries) to control people, with force if necessary.
Could corrupt people in the government conspire together to destroy the system? How would that work? Would a group of politicians be able to create a tyranny and then keep it?
Would the current economic situation getting worse do us in? What would the result look like? (I know there has been a lot of talk about this recently).
Perhaps zombies will cause our doom?
Personally, I haven’t decided on one yet; I’m hoping some of the discussion will help me choose. I’m not worried about the nation literally going to pieces in my lifetime though.
I just started a thread about the situation in Europe and what might lead to the collapse of democracy there. It seems to me that the same logic applies here, though the circumstances are much farther away from bringing such a scenario into being on this side of the Atlantic. Most of have lived all our lives with the assumption that we’ll always have food, water, electricity, gas, plumbing, police protection, fire protection, and other basic necessities. This is part of our daily reality and we rarely stop to think about what we would do if society were unable to provide us with these things. If anything–nuclear attack, economic crisis, major natural disaster–caused our supply of day-to-day necessities to cease, most of us would respond by running around like chickens with our heads cut off. After that, all kinds of bad things might follow.
Last Scientific American had an article about solar flares. They presented a scenario where a solar flare similar in strength to the one that happened in 1859 would knock out most of the US power grid and leave it in a state that would take at least months if not years to repair.
I am trying to imagine my area (Maryland, between Baltimore and DC) without power for months. Not patches - entire area. With no help coming from outside because they have no power either. I can’t. It would be horrendous.
I think it takes more than just a disaster to cause the disolution of government but actually something that makes the people completely lose confidence in the government. I think this is where we get these sorts of distopian future worlds post war or nuclear holocaust. People get separated from government due to breakdown in infrastructure or the government just can’t provide what the people need and we start to see a rise of people on a more local scale filling in with order and/or services. Afterall, if you’re in a small community in the midwest in this sort of environment, why would you invest the time and effort in trying to rebuild a central government hundreds of miles away when it’s difficult enough just trying to survive where you are? It makes much more sense to build a small local government for your community to help manage the resources you do have access to. Only after the crisis has passed would it make sense.
That said, if the economic crisis were to suddenly take a much steeper downturn with unemployment getting three times worse and a number of services we’re used to having getting interupted, I could see some sort of revolt starting. And with that econimic downturn, the government would be less able to do anything to provide or quell an insurrection.
While an invasion force coming into the US is completely unimaginable, I don’t think it’s completely beyond possibility that some rogue nations or terrorist groups could get their hands on nukes and do enough damage to create the chaos necessary. But that’s still pretty far fetched and unlikely.
I think some nearly global catastrophy setting it off though, like the aforementioned solar flares taking out the electrical grid for perhaps months or an asteroid large enough to cause climate change and massive destruction by not wipe out life or the Yellowstone super volcano or the like.
That all said, I don’t think it’s anything we’re at all near seeing.
**Nuclear attack: **Unlikely at this point, but theoretically possible if somehow we had a nuclear war with Russia. Destroying one city or several cities wouldn’t destroy the country, but losing every major city might well do it. Especially since there’s a good chance the survivors would blame the national government for screwing up bad enough to cause such a disaster.
Civil war: Not particularly likely any time soon, but as demonstrated by history America is hardly immune to it.
The eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano: Much of America would be outright destroyed, a lot of the rest laid waste. A big enough asteroid impact could do the same.
Ecological devastation: One of the worse environmental nightmare scenarios comes true; of course, it isn’t just America that would collapse.
Tyranny, followed by rejection of the national government: If there’s an outright federal tyranny, after it’s overthrown the people may collectively decide they don’t want it any more and the nation breaks up into successor states.
Ideological/structurally driven collapse: The government drives society and itself into collapse out of ideological fanaticism, or we just suffer some Great Depression Plus that brings everything down.
Nations don’t “collapse”. They go through upheavals, and maybe undergo periods of chaos and uncertainty, but collapse? When was the last time that happened?
Iceland pretty much just scrapped their government & constitution and rebooted, but didn’t seem to descend into post-apocalyptic anarchy with a barrel full of burning debris in the corner of every scene.
To some people it’s always 476, and every country is going to go the way of the Roman Empire. Except for the problem that the fall of the Roman Empire was a unique event in history. Other countries go through wars, invasions, are conquered and sacked, are ruled by foreigners, change governments, suffer economic catastrophes and currency debasements, except it never seems to happen that they just fade away to be replaced by nothing.
Just imagine for a moment what “increasing national debt” that bankrupts the country would mean. It would mean that the government would default on all those T-Bills, and lots of people would go broke, and we’d have years of economic upheaval, and then we’d muddle through. Lots and lots of countries have gone through disasterous inflations and debt crises and defaults, and they survived. Maybe they changed governments, maybe they lost a war, maybe a dictator took over, maybe a lot of people died.
When we look at actual “collapses” that have occured in the last 100 years, what do we see? The collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to the independence of the Soviet Republics and Russia? Maybe you could argue that Russians were better off under the Soviet system than they are today. Or maybe not. Or are we talking the collapse of the Republic of China, and its replacement by the People’s Republic of China? Or the collapse of the British Empire? Or the French Empire? How about the collapse of the Third Reich? Or something more like Pinochet’s coup in Chile? Or maybe the collapse of Iraq in 2003 when the United States invaded.
I’d say the likeliest scenario is something that causes there to be multiple centers of government with no clear consensus on which one is the legitimate national government.
Suppose, for example, a terrorist nuclear attack destroys Washington DC. The President, the Vice President, most of Congress and the Supreme Court are all dead. Who’s in charge? Is it the Secretary of Agriculture, a previously unknown political lightweight? Is it the guy selected by fourteen out of the twenty-two surviving members of Congress? What happens if the sole surviving Supreme Court justice rules that somebody’s Presidency is illegal - can he legally make that decision by himself? What if some General or Governor or ex-President says that there’s a war going on and we need immediate leadership - so he is temporarily going to run things until we can schedule emergency elections in six months? In a situation like this you could easily have a lot of people who don’t know who they should be loyal to.
If the demands of the federal government became too heavy combined with the government being too weak to meet them that could cause collapse.
What could lead to that? I guess a mix of natural disasters, pestilence, hyperinflation, etc. if that led to a much stronger movement for local government which was actively hostile to the federal gov. that could speed up the process.
Then again, who knows. Governments all over the world survived the 1918 flu. European government survived the black plague. North Koreas regime survived the 90s famine (where the majority of the population was starving and it brought the entire economy to a halt). Russian federal gov survived the 1910-1953 period without descending into anarchy.
So who knows. I think governments are pretty resilient.
Actually, I understand that the “Bronze Age Collapse” was another period in history where everything fell apart; like the fall of the Roman Empire but if anything more severe.
And what about failed states? In some cases they seem to qualify; the old government is fallen or impotent, and instead of something rising to take its place the chaos just goes on and on.
IMHO, it would take a systemic collapse…i.e. something fairly epic, perhaps biblical. Could be something like the super-volcano in Yellowstone going tits up, or maybe a giant asteroid strikes off one of our coasts. Something that causes a complete breakdown of both communications, infrastructure, distribution…the whole smack. Anything less than that, again IMHO, we’d muddle through. We might not be the nation we are today afterwards, but we’d be some nation still…just one in a much less dominant position. C’est la vie.
Well, probably going to step on some toes here, but again IMHO, if the US goes down that large I’d say that it WOULD cause a general collapse of ‘Western’ civilization on a pretty much world wide scale. Anything that could completely bring down the US is going to collapse markets everywhere, and if it happened fast enough for the US to go completely tits up I have serious doubts anyone would be able respond quickly enough to keep their own system going or shift markets.
Definitely not any sort of invasion and conquest, not in this reality. Possibly all out nuclear war would do it, but it would have to be pretty epic in scale to cause a complete collapse of the US…and, like I said, if we went down then IMHO everyone else would too. At least the way things are today. 10 or 20 years from now markets might have shifted enough that this won’t be the case anymore, but today? I think, as Billy Joel would say, ‘we all…go down…together…’.
Well…one possible scenario could be some outside group or nation state doing a systemic cyber attack on our infrastructure. It seems stupid, but it could happen…people really have no idea what the actual risks are or how dependent they are on the technology (something I’m constantly trying to get my own bosses to grasp…sadly, they don’t) or how bad things could be if it all went down at once. I’ve done some scenario planning at the local and state level, and it’s surprising (to some) how just a few critical systems going down can have a wide ranging effect. Multiply that with a systemic attack and it would be VERY ugly. Enough to bring down the US? Depends on how widespread the attack was, but I’d say it’s as likely as a dinosaur killer smacking off the coast of California…which is to say it’s pretty freaking unlikely, but if it happens it could really spoil your weekend plans for the next several thousand years.
I’ll tell you in a few years when someone resurrects this thread to add something that’s probably already been discussed.
The most likely scenario I envision is actually very sad. First Americans become more politically aware and active as a result of a historically exceptional run of events. The people demand more power over the workplace and government yet before they are able to secure control the wealth of the nation flees to other places in the world to hide and protect their power and money. The nation is attacked by a coalition of new allies around the world to ensure that the political wave does not spread (The domino effect from the USA infecting the rest of the world), we fall into ruin and subjugation of foreign powers assisted and lead by ex-patriots.
Implausible; no one is going to attack a nation with thousands of nuclear weapons. The wealthy are unlikely to find a more rich-person friendly nation than the US; and it’s highly unlikely that America will become as much or more hostile to the wealthy than most of the rest of the world any time soon. And if they fled, they’d have no power.
The nuclear defense does not guarantee maintained global dominance, the soviet union would wish for that alternate reality. There are plenty of rich-friendly nations around the world, it’s quite an oddity for a nation not to be, and with enough money a nation is easily transformed into even more of one. (In addition it is not as if a future could not exit where technology allows for acceptable rates of nuclear weapon nuetralization and the majority sympathizing nation will be the least likely to want to engage in such a war since they are the ones who will suffer the most not the ultra-wealthy who can afford to take measures to protect themselves and their families)
The wealthy are already very uncomfortable with the US citizenry, far too much freedom in their thoughts and time. It’s one of the reasons why there is so much money spent on the media here vs anywhere else. We have exceptional tools for democracy and therefor must be more subverted against ourselves to the greatest degree. The wealthy always have power anywhere they are except in the rare case of arrest (which just mens they weren’t very good at being wealthy). The traumatic exodus isn’t even required, as the world becomes more unified and codified economically national borders will become less and less meaningful to the wealthy, just as it becomes more and more meaningful to the herded masses.
You notice that Romney’s family spent lengthy portions of their family history in other nations of the world yet he had no problem getting the Republican nomination for President of this one. Obama was raised for much of his childhood in a foreign country. Powerful people in the world work much more together with similar interests in political and economic outcome than they would ever have with natives of the country they happen to be in at the time. It used to be less so before communication and transportation developed to erase the final barriers to their collaboration but now that is over. They trust each other’s greed and distrust the common person’s integrity.
Thinking that a Socialist country or communist country are not run by a wealthy elite is blindness. They simply have different social contracts to pacify the minds of their flocks, with the same objective.
