By —Theo Seeds·
This is Part 2 of a series about the (possible) impending collapse of the United States of America. This is an excellent view on the ways America may collapse. the Bible guarantees us that America will collapse and our people will be enslaved. Here are some ideas. The author is not affiliated with The Plain Truth.
If you’d like to view Part 1, you can do so here, although this article will stand on its own.
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A lot of people — including myself — have speculated that America could collapse soon. That’s because America has a boatload of problems, including:
- High economic inequality.
- High levels of political polarization and violence.
- An unreasonably high cost of living.
- Unreasonably high taxes and wasteful government spending.
- A dysfunctional healthcare system.
- Elites who are out of touch with the average person.
- Thousands of people leaving the country for greener pastures elsewhere.
- Millions of undisciplined people who can’t take care of themselves, live in their parents’ basements, and play video games all day.
- Political parties that care more about fighting each other than solving people’s problems.
But missing from all the articles about America’s (possible) impending collapse is, how will it collapse?
They just take it for granted that one day, poof — there’s not gonna be an America anymore.
This article explores a few of the ways America could collapse, to help you picture what a post-America world will look like.
Collapse by secession (AKA Soviet-style collapse.)
In 1885, Mikhail Gorbachev, the new leader of the Soviet Union, decided he didn’t want to rule with force anymore.
In other words, he wasn’t going to threaten Soviet Union member states anymore. They could do as they pleased.
Turns out, the number one thing member states of the Soviet Union wanted to do with their newfound freedom was leave the United States.
In a manner of just a few years, the Soviet Union went from having 15 member states — to having 0 member states.
Right now, the United States has 50 member states. For the most part, they like being American states, and would pick being a state over independence if given the choice.
But secession isn’t totally out of the question. California openly floated secession after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. 4 years previously, Texas openly floated secession after Barack Obama was re-elected.
If living in the US becomes too much of a burden, secessionist movements might get a lot stronger.
Some people will tell you that the US would never let that happen. “The US military is too mighty”, they say. “If a state tried to secede, they would be crushed.”
But, suppose Hawaii declares independence tomorrow. Do you really think that Joe Biden would order the Air Force to bomb them into submission?
Consider the political cost of doing something like that. It would look horrible in front of the rest of the world. Thousands of people would die because they dared ask for freedom. Is any president going to risk that much scandal just to hold onto Hawaii?
Moreover, given how divided America is right now, a sitting president might want rival states to secede.
Imagine that you’re a Republican and you get elected president. You’ve run a bitter campaign, and a lot of people are mad — so mad, in fact, that California is seriously threatening to declare independence.
You have 2 choices: you can call in the military to attack California. But if California leaves the US, that’s awesome for you: it means you’re way more likely to get a majority in the House, and it takes 50+ electoral votes off the map that are otherwise just about guaranteed to go blue.
So as a savvy politician, your best move would be to tell California “good riddance”, and wish them the best of luck as a sovereign nation.
Now, suppose one state secedes, and it goes great for them. That’s gonna create a huge “proof of concept” for every other state that wants to secede. It’s gonna ease their fears and give them a roadway. More will follow suit.
If all 50 states decide to dip, then there’s no more United States. And if even a large swath of states secede, it could cripple the American economy, and prevent the United States from being a world power.
Economic collapse
At the beginning of Season 3 of Rick and Morty, Rick causes the galactic government to collapse by pressing a few buttons on a computer, and changing the value of their currency from “1” to “0”.
What happens if the United States government can’t pay its bills anymore?
That could happen a few different ways. First, the value of the dollar could drop significantly due to overprinting or speculation. Second, the government could see a significant dip in tax revenues and not be able to pay its bills. And third, hackers could shut down our banking system, which is more fragile than you think.
Now suppose you were a government employee, and the government couldn’t pay you anymore. How long would you keep working?
Needless to say, if all the government employees quit, there’s no more government — and there’s no more United States.
If the federal government ran out of money, it might not affect everyone’s daily life too much. That’s the beauty of having a federal system: if the states act quickly enough, they can take over everything the feds used to do. Each state would naturally become its own country.
If state governments ran out of money, things might get ugly. And if localgovernments run out of money, things’ll get real ugly.
“Sovereign Individual” style collapse.
If enough states secede, it could hurt tax revenues and force the government to radically rethink its budget — something it’s not very good at.
Alternatively, if enough people leave the United States, then the US might have to rethink its budget.
Today, more and more Americans are moving to places like Costa Rica, Georgia (the country), and Portugal to enjoy low (often even zero) taxes.
Suppose this trend spikes like crazy over the coming decades. A majority of America’s productive people get upset with the high taxes and high cost of living, and they decide to get up and leave.
Once that happens, who pays the taxes? How does the government fund itself?
In The Sovereign Individual, James Dale Davidson says that the internet makes large governments obsolete. That’s because they won’t be able to collect tons and tons of taxes anymore, because people will be able to shop around for the best “deal” on protection services.
When the Catholic Church lost huge swaths of followers to Protestantism and couldn’t pay its bills anymore, it had to downsize. But it still exists today.
Best-case scenario for America, it manages to cut its spending before it’s too late, and other than a few angry creditors, everyone turns out fine.
Worst-case scenario, it doesn’t react to the new reality in time, and it eventually hits a point where it just can’t pay the bills anymore. Then you end up with the “economic collapse” scenario I described in the previous section.
National Divorce
Political tensions have never been higher in America. Many right-wingers and left-wingers can’t stand one another, and they hate the idea of sharing a country together.
To solve this, some people have floated the idea of a “national divorce”, where the US breaks itself apart by choice.
If political tensions get bad enough, we might pull the trigger.
The national divorce would probably not work out well for America. That’s because extremist countries rarely succeed, because both liberals and conservatives are essential to making any society function.
So my guess is that if a national divorce happens, the super-left-wing states (like California) and the super-right-wing states (like Alabama) will fail miserably, while swing states (like Florida) will become prosperous.
Military collapse (i.e. war.)
Rome got weaker over the 200 years before its collapse. But ultimately, the Roman Empire collapsed because German barbarians invaded.
Could America be destroyed by a foreign power?
Fortunately, the world today is a much less violent place. Canada is not full of barbarians on horseback who wish to conquer us. There hasn’t been a major war in over 80 years. And no foreign power has attempted to invade the United States since the War of 1812.
But at the same time, peace is a fragile thing — and another big war can happen at any moment.
World War 2 resulted in the total destruction of Germany and Japan. If the mainland United States is invaded, bombed, or attacked, something similar could happen to it.
Alternatively, the war could come from within. Perhaps a bloody political revolution is just around the corner, resulting in the weakening or overthrow of the federal government.
The American Dictatorship.
In Plato’s Republic, he criticized democracy for being inherently fragile. All democracy eventually descends into dictatorship, he says.
Historically, he’s been right. Athens was conquered by Macedonia, which ruled it with an iron fist.
Similarly, Rome was a democracy for centuries, but in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was threatening to seize power. So Roman senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death in the middle of the Senate. But then, Augustus Caesar took the reins, and became the first Roman Emperor.
America may be headed in the same direction: if the founding fathers knew how powerful the office of the presidency had gotten, they’d be appalled.
What happened when Augustus Caesar took over? Well, he wasn’t exactly nice, but he pulled things together — and Rome has another 500 years of glory.
Could the same thing happen in America? Well, imagine if Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer shot Donald Trump with machine guns, and then Jared Kushner became dictator-for-life and ushered in another American golden age. That’s unlikely, but not totally unthinkable.
Of course, an American dictator wouldn’t necessarily be competent. If someone took power, they might be terrible, and they would likely cause the US to collapse even faster.
Assuming America is headed for collapse, can a president save it under the current system, without seizing autonomous power? It’s unlikely.
That’s because the president has too many hoops to jump through to get anything done. These days, most presidents only have enough political capital to accomplish 1 noteworthy thing during their tenure.
A dictator, meanwhile, could pull everything together in an instant by ruling with an iron fist. Assuming, of course, he knew what he was doing.
The Domino Effect
One thing to keep in mind is the domino effect. All of these probably seem like far-off scenarios, because so many things would need to change for them to happen.
But change can happen pretty quickly — and some of this could happen within the next 10 to 20 years.
Case in point: in 1987, the Soviet Union seemed pretty stable. By 1992, it was gone.
That’s because when it comes to human affairs, there are a lot of positive feedback loops. When one thing goes wrong, a lot more things can go wrong in response.
What would a post-US world look like?
Another thing most “America is collapsing” articles don’t try to address is, after America collapses, what will take its place?
Obviously, removing America from the world would completely change the world order. The US has acted as the “world police” for a long time, stuffing out Communism and keeping things the way it likes them.
What would the world look like without America? Here are a few possibilities:
Internet Dark Ages
When Rome collapsed, nothing filled the void right away, and Western Europe went into a dark ages. If no other world power took over America’s void, we might see something like that: the world, or at least the west, will be ruled by many small city-states.
A true dark ages might be impossible today, because the world is so connected. And SpaceX’s Starlink project means the world will have internet infrastructure for a long time, because sattelites in space are kinda hard to take out.
An “internet dark ages” would look a lot different from feudal Europe, though. You could still have a society quite similar to today, because more and more things today don’t rely on government to survive.
For example: in the past, energy production and manufacturing have required major infrastructure. But today, you can make stuff with 3D printing without needing a factory, and you can put solar panels on your house to reduce your dependency on the grid.
In an internet dark ages, the cost of migrating from one place to another would be pretty low, and wealthy people would get to choose where they wanted to live. Cities would offer friendly tax regimes to attract wealthy people, similarly to how different US states bid for corporate headquarters and football teams today.
That means governments would have to operate with a limited budget. The welfare state would likely become impossible.
It’s unclear how major multi-city public infrastructure projects, like highways, would operate in a world like this, because of the free-rider problem involved. Perhaps city governments might band together to create infrastructure projects. Or perhaps people would invent ways to do the same things we already do without relying on public infrastructure. For example, if we had flying cars, we wouldn’t need highways.
Alternatively, if society can’t figure out how to build the infrastructure we rely on, and can’t figure out how to make the world work without it, we might return to being an agricultural civilization — only with much better technology.
EU-Style America
Instead of breaking into a whole bunch of city-states, suppose America breaks into, say, 20 different countries.
They’d probably want to cooperate on some issues, like interstate highways and defense.
An alliance like that could look a lot like the European Union. America would be united, but not as much as it is now. And at the end of the day, each territory is sovereign and can govern itself — or even leave the union, if it wants.
It might even pull in parts of Canada — especially if Canada collapses as well.
Alternatively, if the American states still have major political differences, unity might be impossible. Instead, the nation-states of the former America could assemble themselves into a right-wing union and a left-wing union. (Perhaps the 2 unions would even go to war with one another.)
America Still Exists, But Stops Being A World Power
America is clearly declining, but it might not collapse fully. It’s very likely that America will continue to exist well into the future — but as a second-tier world power, much like Brazil or France today.
Britain and the Netherlands used to be dominant world powers. Both still exist, although they’ve both lost most of their overseas colonies.
America’s future could look similar: it may keep all its continental territory, and its national identity may remain strong, but it may not be able to swing its weight around on the world stage.
If this happens, America may become a very resentful nation. Many formerly great countries have a “greatness complex” and feel it’s their right to be a major world player.
For example, China was embarrassed by its failures with socialism. Today, it’s doing everything in its power to become mighty again.
Similarly, Russia is embarrassed: it used to be a world power, and now it is clearly in decline. Hence why today, they are lashing out and trying to take Ukraine back.
If America loses influence, expect Americans to become resentful over the next 50 years, and perhaps create some scheme to try and regain their former glory.
A New Empire Forms
Usually, when one great power falls, another great power rises to take its place.
After the Assyrians fell in the ancient world, the Persian Empire quickly rose up to fill the void. And more recently, after the Dutch Empire fell, the British Empire rose to glory.
Maybe after America falls, Texas will become mighty and take over a good chunk of what is today America. Or, maybe an Asian country will become incredibly powerful and pull much of the American West into its sphere of influence.
Or, perhaps in the future “empires” will look different. Maybe the next great power will eschew territorial expansion (as America mostly has in the past century) and instead focus on creating economic might and strategic alliances.
Will the world be better without America?
Many patriotic Americans will shudder at the thought of America falling. But if America collapses, it may actually turn out for the better — in the long run.
For instance, it’s probably a good thing that Rome collapsed. That’s because the Roman Empire would probably have stifled technological progress. (China survived from 500 B.C. into the present, and did not industrialize until the 20th century.)
Plus, the Renaissance would never have happened, and the West as we know it might not exist.
Will the world be better off if America collapses? That’s hard to say.
Many will say that America is evil: it meddles in other countries’ affairs, and it treats people poorly.
Others might respond by saying that there’s always going to be a global superpower — and as far as superpowers go, America is pretty benevolent. (To see what I mean, imagine if the Soviet Union were the most powerful country on Earth — or even worse, Nazi Germany.)
Some might say that the federal government has grown too big and too powerful, and that it has too much control over its citizens’ lives.
Others may respond that a strong, centralized federal government is needed to protect the little guy from big businesses that are out to get him.
If America falls, it’ll definitely send shock waves rippling though the world, and it’ll definitely create a major vacuum. What happens next is impossible to predict with any accuracy.
Hi! Thanks for reading — I hope you enjoyed.
If you’re new here, my name’s Theo, and every Monday I publish a story about something that makes me curious.
Topics range from social science to futurism to business trends to culture.
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Written by Theo Seeds
Digital nomad, freelance writer, eternally curious. Join me as I try to crack the code on human nature.
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-Theo