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How Is America Going To End?


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This looks like it will be an interesting series. I'll try to remember to post the follow up articles.

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2223851/pagenum/all/#p2

 

How Is America Going To End?A weeklong thought experiment on the United States' demise.

By Josh LevinPosted Monday, Aug. 3, 2009, at 2:32 PM ET

 

Illustration by Jason Raish. Click image to expand.Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina submerged my hometown. The storm broke my heart and messed with my head. With close to 2,000 dead in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region, the government response close to nil, and then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert questioning the wisdom of rebuilding below sea level, it seemed plausible that the city could perish: Here today, drowned tomorrow.

 

In 2009, New Orleans is still suffering. The city has no comprehensive reconstruction plan and whole neighborhoods remain abandoned; as of July 2008, Orleans Parish was at 69 percent of its pre-Katrina population. But while the Crescent City isn't exactly thriving, it resolutely exists. There's a human impulse to rebuild after a catastrophe, and the United States' relative prosperity gives us the means to stand our ground. An American city, it turns out, is a hard thing to kill.

 

Hurricane Katrina proved that modern America is resilient. It didn't prove that we'll be around forever. After watching the place where I grew up avert total annihilation, I can't help but wonder what course of events will eventually wipe out New Orleans and America as a whole. When it comes to human civilization, entropy conquers all: Rome fell, the Aztecs were conquered, the British Empire withered, and the Soviet Union cracked apart. America may be exceptional, but it's not supernatural. Our noble experiment, like every other before it, has to end sometime.

 

The pessimists among us could be excused for thinking the country will run aground tomorrow. The U.S. military is understaffed and overstretched, global warming threatens to Atlantis-ize our coastal cities, and the strongest fundamental of our economy is that we need China to keep lending us money. General Motors—once an indomitable symbol of American might and ingenuity—filed for bankruptcy, and Glenn Beck, Fox News' ascendant superstar, makes ratings hay by forecasting the apocalypse, American-style. Russian political scientist Igor Panarin has even predicted that the United States will break apart in 2010.

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Sure, Panarin is crazy—if he wants me to believe that America will split up in the next 12 months, he'd be advised not to suggest that South Carolina and Massachusetts will be part of the same breakaway republic. While Panarin's particular scenario defies belief, it does reflect a mainstream American impulse. In 1999's Is America Breaking Apart?, John A. Hall and Charles Lindholm write that "Americans like to be scared about the fragility of their society, despite its obvious stability and power." Perhaps that explains why the end of America is eternally popular fodder for movies and television series.

 

The best-seller charts are also full of fatalism. Hall and Lindholm, admirably self-aware, point out that books on America's disintegration are "bound to sell—which is the reason we did not entitle our book Why America Isn't Breaking Apart!" In 2007's Are We Rome?, Cullen Murphy ponders whether we can avoid the fate of our Roman forebears. Jared Diamond's 2005 Collapse, a tome on civilizations that destroy themselves by destroying their environments, is a not-so-veiled warning about America's possible fate. We're also at a moment of anxiety about America's decline relative to the rest of the world. Fareed Zakaria believes we're on the cusp of The Post-American World, and Paul Starobin's After America argues that "the global economic crisis, in exposing the tarnished American model of unfettered free-market capitalism, is hastening the transition to the next … phase of global history."

 

Maybe the book-buying public is a mite too susceptible to the idea that America is half-dead. Still, it's hubris to assume the United States is too big to fail. Over the next five days, I'll be thinking through what it's going to take put the Stars and Stripes on the shelf forever.

 

What exactly do I mean by the end of America? I'm not particularly interested in the geopolitical pecking order—I'll leave the question of whether the United States will lose its global pre-eminence to Zakaria and Tom Friedman. Rather, I'm looking to answer the admittedly more oddball question of how the United States will cease to be entirely—or, at a minimum, will deviate so greatly from the country we know today that it would no longer be recognizable to a contemporary American. It's possible that the end of America will be good for Americans—perhaps the United States and every other nation will melt away as the global community comes together to build worldwide peace and prosperity. (Chance of this happening: rounds down to zero percent.) It's also conceivable that we'll die along with our country: If the United States gets annihilated by nuclear weapons, a lot of us won't be around for the next phase of North American civilization.

 

Before I commence this end-of-America thought experiment, a couple of thoughts on what won't bring us down. No matter how long this recession lasts, the United States of America won't get wiped off the map by a near-term economic collapse. (If Iceland didn't destroy itself, I like our chances.) It's also absurd to suggest that the Bush administration inflicted irreparable damage on the country. It's telling that George W. Bush—who brought America to war under false pretenses, presided over a financial meltdown, and inflicted tremendous damage to the country's global reputation—left office peacefully and has been replaced by someone who repudiated his policies. If, as many have argued, he's the worst president in U.S. history, then it's a sign of America's strength that we have survived his reign.

 

So how is America going to end? The project kicks off today with a look at how futurologists think through a problem like America's last gasp. Once you see how experts think the country will go down the tubes, you'll get a chance to have your opinion heard. Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" interactive feature lets you choose from 144 possible end-of-America scenarios. Select the five factors you believe will contribute to the country's dissolution, then find out instantly what kind of death scene you've envisioned—a bloodbath or a nonviolent end, an end wrought by man or by nature—and compare your choices with those of other Slate readers.

 

Later this week, I'll look more closely at three specific scenarios. On Tuesday, I'll run through different theories of how America might succumb to global warming. Could we survive in a world where the Great Plains turns into a desert and Buffalo, N.Y., is the country's most-desirable place to live? On Wednesday and Thursday, I'll present parallel pieces on secession and totalitarianism—one case in which America falls to pieces, and another in which an autocratic state puts an end to democracy and local governance. The series will conclude on Friday with a look at who or what might be left behind when the United States goes away. (I'm guessing the Mormons won't be going anywhere.) I'll also let you know what I learned from "Choose Your Own Apocalypse"—what your most-popular scenarios can teach us about the country's prevailing mood and where we might be headed.

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How Is America Going To End?We could be crushed by a climate strongman.

By Josh LevinPosted Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2009, at 7:06 AM ET

 

 

For the doomsayers of the 1950s, there was no doubt how America would end—the only question was how big the mushroom cloud would be. Climate change is the nuclear war of the 21st century. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock, inaugurated in 1947, has long charted the waxing and waning of the nuclear threat; in 2007, the clock operators started working the climate menace into their calculations. And just as political scientist Herman Kahn was the bard of nuclear terror, scientists like James Hansen and James Lovelock lay out our coming environmental apocalypse in gory detail: the droughts and fires, the drowned cities, the massive die-offs. In his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Lovelock writes that "global heating may all but eliminate people from Earth."

 

There's a danger in believing that our generation's existential crisis will be the one that destroys us. In a Weekly Standard piece on "The Icarus Syndrome," Jim Manzi notes the parallels between Britain's 1860s "Coal Panic" and the modern disaster scenarios of peak oil and climate doom. But the fact that coal shortages and the Cold War didn't vanquish the modern world doesn't prove that climate-change fears are overstated. It just means we survived long enough for something else to destroy us. So, let's assume we can't stop climate change with policy, changed behavior, or by dumping iron into the ocean. How could global warming bring about the end of America?

 

Illustration by Jason Raish. Click image to expand.It's reasonable to argue that climate change alone couldn't possibly kill the United States. Earth won't become a superheated sphere all at once, and we should have the wherewithal to adjust to a warmer world. Manzi argues that, given the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimate of a 3-degree increase in global temperature by 2100, "the United States is expected to experience no net material economic costs [from anthropogenic global warming] … through the end of this century." At the other extreme is the specter of swift weather cataclysm. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, who wrote a brief on "abrupt climate change" for the Department of Defense, argue that climate chaos will be nonlinear—that "clear signs of environmental catastrophe will be evident in a few decades, not centuries."

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Even if Manzi's calculus is correct—temperatures increase gradually and we learn to adapt—climate change could still melt America. It just won't happen in the next 90 years. Even in the best case, global warming has the potential to get worse over time, and to exacerbate a bunch of other potential America-killers. It is, in military parlance, a "threat multiplier": It will increase energy demands, intensify water shortages, and strain international relations. In a 2007 CNA Corporation report on climate change and national security, retired U.S. Navy Adm. T. Joseph Lopez predicts that global warming will bring on "[m]ore poverty, more forced migrations, higher unemployment. Those conditions are ripe for extremists and terrorists."

 

People around the world will, in short, be poorer, thirstier, and more desperate. This isn't just an educated guess—past societies have collapsed because of changes in temperature and precipitation. In The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Brian Fagan documents the demise of the Pueblo Indian civilization at Chaco Canyon (in what's now New Mexico) during the Medieval Warm Period (roughly between 800 and 1300 A.D.). Faced with massive droughts, individual families set out in search of more water and better land. Eventually, no one was left.

 

Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, 1935. Click image to expand.Dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas, 1935.The Dust Bowl is modern America's closest analogue to Chaco Canyon. Okies began their migration slowly, with movement from the South and Great Plains to the West Coast picking up as droughts got worse and the national economy collapsed. Robert McLeman, a University of Ottawa geographer who studies climate migration, says the rich mostly stayed put, not wanting to abandon their land holdings. The poor couldn't afford to leave, instead packing into makeshift communities close to home—the Depression's version of refugee camps. The most mobile group: the working middle class, particularly those with Californian relatives.

 

Depression-era climate migrants didn't get a friendly reception. In 1936, the Los Angeles Police Department set up a "bum blockade," forcing new arrivals with "no visible means of support" to turn around and go home. While the police claimed 60 percent of the travelers had criminal records, later LAPD research revealed "the 'Okies' were mostly religious, hard-working agricultural laborers with families." The blockade ultimately ended after just two months, both because it was completely illegal and on account of bad PR—a movie director named John Langan sued the police department when he was mistakenly stopped at the border. (He was wearing dirty clothes.)

 

Even if America sells its soul to keep everyone else out, the country will have to contract. The Great Plains could turn into a Sahara-style wasteland. Cities like New Orleans and Miami—and maybe Boston and New York—could be abandoned once recurrent storms and rising sea levels render them too expensive to save. (Recent climate models suggest that America's East Coast might see sea levels rising higher and faster than any other population center in the world.) There's also an unfortunate overlap between America's fastest-growing regions and the most-likely focal points of climate Armageddon. Phoenix, Los Angeles, and the rest of the West will have to deal with drought, extreme heat, and water shortages; Florida and Houston will get attacked by superstorms. Even worse, the U.S. population is expected to double by 2100—and those extra folks will continue packing into Arizona and California and Florida.

 

All of these people—a new generation of Okies—will need somewhere to go. Americans certainly have proved capable of big moves: the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the industrial North, the drift from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, the mass evacuation of inner cities for suburbia. A migration brought on by climate change would have a different tenor, however. The push to the frontier helped form America; the movement away from the frontier would unmake the country we know today. As more people pack into a smaller space, scarce resources will become scarcer. Those who stick it out in the inhospitable hinterlands could become a new generation of pioneers, heroes and innovators who work to once again make this territory hospitable for the masses. Or these die-hard localists could become impoverished and estranged from America—survivalist guerrillas who fight and scrounge for whatever they can get.

 

It's possible the government of Hot America would buckle under the weight of such a disaster. With those in the most-livable zones unwilling to pay for the rebuilding or relocation of vast swathes of the country, the nation could split regionally. Areas with common interests and problems—coastal areas in need of massive flood walls, the arid Southwest and Great Plains—could pool their resources and form locally focused, regional governments within the former United States. The places hit hardest by climate woe might offer hazard pay and other enticements to settlers in order to prop up the tax base. America's few oases, meanwhile, might build walls to keep the teeming masses out.

 

Where might these oases be? Robert Shibley, a professor of architecture and planning at the University of Buffalo, says it's "unconscionable" for people to keep packing into potential climate hot zones. His alternative destination: the shores of Lake Erie.

 

Temple of Music at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, N.Y. Temple of Music at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, N.Y.A century ago, Buffalo was America's eighth-largest city. When the Erie Canal opened in 1825, the city was perfectly positioned to become a transshipment hub and manufacturing center. Shibley, the co-author of Buffalo's comprehensive plan, drives me around in his Toyota Prius, pointing out the landmarks of this bygone age. "Here's where you see us in our heyday," he says as we turn onto Lincoln Parkway, a tree-lined thoroughfare abutting a park laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted.

 

By the time Shibley arrived in 1982, Buffalo was a textbook case of urban decay—one reason he moved was that the Rust Belt city "had every problem as an urban designer and a planner that I'd want to study." Buffalo is now America's third-poorest large city, behind only Detroit and Cleveland. The city proper has gone from a population of 580,000 in 1950 to an estimated 275,000 today. In working-class neighborhoods where grain scoopers and steel workers used to live, close-packed Queen Anne houses are now boarded up and vacant, their former residents having left town along with the manufacturing work.

 

Sattler Theater, Buffalo, N.Y., 2006. Click image to expand.Sattler Theater, Buffalo, N.Y., 2006.Buffalo and Detroit and Cleveland are today's equivalent of old West ghost towns. They are empty husks that have been strip-mined and abandoned, relics of America's manufacturing age. But when the country melts down, we'll remember that these Great Lakes cities were settled in America's early days for a reason. The five Great Lakes hold 21 percent of the world's fresh surface water—an H2O supply that will come in handy in drier times. As for Buffalo's winning characteristics, Shibley notes that "you've got agricultural land around our perimeter, you have the power from the water and [Niagara] Falls, and you have the industrial infrastructure to die for, the roads and railroads." And even with all of those enticements, there's still plenty of primo waterfront land available for purchase. As he points out one inviting tract, Shibley shouts: "Come home, we're ready to go!"

 

In Hot America, Buffalo won't necessarily transform into a balmy paradise. Climate change will make extreme weather more extreme, so it's possible the city's brutal winters will become even less pleasant. But if large swaths of the country run out of water and are covered by swirling sands, the occasional blizzard doesn't sound so bad. It's no accident that apocalypticist James Howard Kunstler, who writes extensively about America's devolution in the post-petroleum age, resides in upstate New York. I "picked the place I live in for a reason," he writes in The Long Emergency. "[W]e are surrounded by excellent farmland here and I think my little corner of upstate New York may remain generally civilized."

 

If the Rust Belt becomes the best spot on the continent, Buffalo and Cleveland will no longer have to worry about massive population losses—their problem will be overpopulation. Of course, there's a lot more land abutting the Great Lakes, just across the border in Canada. In the event that North America's footprint shrinks, the condition of the Great White North will have a huge impact on the Lower 48.

 

There are two wildly incongruent ideas about how global warming will affect Canada. One possibility is that climate change will make the country more hospitable, increasing Canada's agricultural capacity as the rest of the world struggles to grow crops. Thomas Homer-Dixon, Canada's answer to societal-collapse guru Jared Diamond, says his home country needs to prepare for things to get much, much worse. The northern latitudes are "actually very vulnerable to climate change," he says. And while Canada's full of wide open spaces, most of that land is arid. "There's a reason America stopped at 49th parallel," he reasons. "They left England with land that was good for harvesting beaver pelts."

 

The Fire Next Time, 1993In the latter case, Canada will become Mexico—a nation whose citizens are driven to cross the border to improve their lot. In the former instance, in which the most-southerly parts of North America fare the worst, the U.S. becomes Mexico—and those wide open spaces to our north start to look mighty appealing. The Fire Next Time, a cheeseball TV miniseries from 1993, offers one vision of an America that's desperately pushing north. After a Louisiana shrimp fisherman (Coach's Craig T. Nelson) loses everything in a massive hurricane, he pays a mule to smuggle his family across the border on a motorboat, dodging Canada's version of a bum blockade. They all eventually settle in an idyllic Nova Scotian village, though the movie's final scene features an ominous shot of the glowing sun—a raging fireball that will force them to wander north for the rest of their lives.

 

Robert McLeman, the University of Ottawa geographer, says four Canadian government departments have asked him for briefings on climate migration and security. Judging by the push to harden the Canadian border after 9/11, it's difficult to imagine we'd be friendlier neighbors in a hotter world. James Lovelock, never one to shy away from an extreme hypothesis, has suggested that a hot-and-bothered United States might try to take Canada by force.

 

If conditions do deteriorate to the point that humanity's survival is in doubt, nationalism will be put to the test. Man-made borders—between Mexico and the U.S., and between the U.S. and Canada—may well bring out the worst in us. When the cone of unlivability expands, we could all converge on the continent's pools of fresh water and start shooting at one another from gun boats. If we want to ensure the survival of American civilization, however, it would make more sense to form a Great Lakes collective.

 

Canadians have already put down stakes in a hostile environment once. Settling a country despite harsh conditions bred a national spirit of collectivism. You can see it in the proliferation of financial and agricultural co-operatives and in the country's universal health care coverage, which dates back to the 1940s. Homer-Dixon says that even if global warming hits Canada harder than the U.S., the Northerners might deal with it better than the individualistic, entrepreneurial Americans. The best hope for North America's survival: Hope that Canada's socialist tendencies rub off on all of us.

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How Is America Going To End?Who's most likely to secede?

By Josh LevinPosted Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2009, at 7:02 AM ET

 

In the American end times, our government will take one of two forms. One possibility is that federalism will give way to an all-powerful central government. (In yesterday's global-warming thought experiment, this was the climate strongman scenario.) The other option is decentralization—in the absence of a unifying national interest, the United States of America will fragment and be supplanted by regional governance.

 

Illustration by Jason Raish. Click image to expand.America was designed to avoid these two extremes—to keep the states and the national government in balance. The United States will end when the equilibrium mandated by the Constitution no longer holds. Tomorrow, I'll look at how the country might transition from democracy to totalitarianism. Today, I'll focus on America's disintegration.

 

Predictions of modern America's collapse usually say more about the speaker than about the country's condition. Igor Panarin, the Russian political scientist who believes the United States will break into six pieces in 2010, seems to be extrapolating from what happened to the Soviet Union. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who paid lip service to secession at a tax-day rally earlier this year, was less predicting America's downfall than feeding chum to a riled-up, "Secede!"-chanting crowd. "f Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people," Perry said, "you know, who knows what might come out of that."

 

Eric Zuelow, a history professor at the University of New England and the editor of The Nationalism Project, argues that "loud voices" like Perry's bolster the country's strength. The fact that we can debate our country's legitimacy is a sign of national health. For the United States to fall to pieces, Zuelow says, it'll take more than a demagogue on a PA. Americans will have to come to believe they're no longer Americans.

 

It wasn't always certain that the states would be as united as they are today. In An Empire Wilderness, Robert D. Kaplan explains that James Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, envisioned America as "an enormous geographical space with governance but without patriotism, in which the federal government would be a mere 'umpire,' refereeing competing interests." There are regional and ideological differences in the modern United States: People in the Deep South and the Pacific Northwest eat different foods, have different accents, and (generalizing broadly) have different lifestyles and values. But as compared with a place like the USSR, a constructed nation with immense regional diversity, the United States is bound together tightly by its shared origins, a common language and culture, and a widely held belief in the country's mythologies (American exceptionalism, self-reliance, and social mobility). In times of perceived danger, Americans pull together. After 9/11, Zuelow says, "I don't care where you were in the country, the response was We've been attacked. … It wasn't, We eat grits and We eat salmon."

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What kinds of countries fall apart? Jason Sorens, a political scientist at the University at Buffalo who studies contemporary secessionist movements, says that ethnicity, economics, and ideology all come into play. A secessionist sweet spot typically lies in a region with an embedded minority that has a common language and a history of prior independence. Latvia and Lithuania fit those requirements, as do the Serbs in Bosnia and Canada's Quebecois. According to Sorens' models, it's no surprise that there aren't any large-scale movements to break up the United States—the country is too prosperous and too cohesive. (Sorens' own Free State Project—a push to get libertarians to swarm New Hampshire and influence local politics—is "not a secessionist movement," he says, though "there are a lot of people [in the project] who would support that as a last resort.")

 

That's not to say that everyone who lives in America is content with the state of the union. As Wikipedia's "list of U.S. state secession proposals" indicates, there's no shortage of groups that want the country to split up. American secessionism, however, is less a populist movement than a collection of cranky, lonesome idealists. Thomas Naylor, the brains behind the Second Vermont Republic—a group that bills itself as "perhaps the foremost active secessionist organization in the country"—bemoans the fact that his movement shares the separatist marquee with less serious-minded folk. Naylor mentions one squadron of Long Islanders who've given their "new country" a national animal (Atlantic blue marlin) and a national crustacean (blue crab). The League of the South is also a perpetual source of heartburn for Naylor—the retro-Confederate group insists on singing Dixie at meetings and has a strange obsession with returning American spelling to its traditional Southern roots. By contrast, Naylor likes what he sees out of the Texas Nationalist Movement. That independence-espousing organization doesn't appear to be racist, homophobic, or violent, Naylor says, though on the last count "you can never be sure."

 

The Second Vermont Republic's Thomas NaylorThe Second Vermont Republic's Thomas NaylorNaylor is more soft-spoken than you'd expect for someone who regularly refers to America as an "evil empire." He is 73 years old, stands a sturdy 6 feet 3, and has longish white hair that gives him the look of a founding father. A retired Duke economics professor, he was inspired to come to Vermont in 1993 after seeing an Oprah episode on downshifting your life. (One of the guests was a man who moved to Vermont to run a country inn.) In Secession: How Vermont and All the Other States Can Save Themselves From the Empire, Naylor writes that American civilization "promotes affluenza, technomania, e-mania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and imperialism." The Second Vermont Republic aspires to dissolve the union nonviolently and return Vermont to the independent status it held briefly in the late 18th century. Naylor believes the mystique of a free Vermont or a free Novacadia—a secessionist joint venture with Maine, New Hampshire, and Canada's four Atlantic provinces—would catalyze separatism throughout America. Ben and Jerry's is "not in the ice cream business," he explains. "They [are] in the Vermont business. We're in the Vermont business also."

 

I'm eating lunch at an outdoor cafe in Waitsfield, Vt., with Naylor and Rob Williams, the editor of the independence-espousing Vermont Commons newspaper. Secession, according to Williams, is "as American an impulse as apple pie." The Declaration of Independence marked the United States' secession from the British Empire. New England considered leaving the U.S. during the War of 1812, and Maine seceded from Massachusetts in 1820. Up until the Civil War, nobody questioned the idea that breaking free from the central government was legal and justifiable under the right circumstances. Today, Williams admits, mutual revulsion at the idea of secession is one of the few things the left and right can agree on. "Abraham Lincoln did a number on us," he says.

 

Naylor ultimately wants the Vermont legislature to call a statewide convention to consider articles of secession. That's not happening soon, even in the land of Bernie Sanders. Kirkpatrick Sale, the founder of the secessionist think tank the Middlebury Institute (and, at 72, the other grand old man of American secessionism), acknowledges that it was "in the depths of the Bush administration that this secession movement began and gained strength." Sale feared that left-wing enchantment with Barack Obama would hinder his cause, but he's been heartened by the progress of the "state sovereignty movement"—bills being pushed by state lawmakers who want to curb federal authority.

 

Peter Schiff is one of the recession's biggest winners. The Connecticut stockbroker, once a cable news piñata on account of his predictions of economic catastrophe, is now celebrated for his eerily accurate prophecies. Schiff, who has formed an exploratory committee in anticipation of a potential 2010 Senate run, believes America is going under thanks to a "phony economy" built on borrowed cash. The stimulus, he argues, will make things worse by temporarily taping over structural problems with unsustainable borrowing and spending. "After we do the wrong thing and destroy [the value of] our money, are we going to become a totalitarianist country?" Schiff asks. "Will there be a Soviet revolution or an American revolution?"

 

Let's say there's an American revolution—who leaves first? Once the feds "start imposing just huge taxes," Schiff says, the states that have to pay more in than they're getting back out will pull their stars off the flag. Schiff lists Texas and California as potential pull-out candidates, whereas "Florida probably wants to stay because of all the Social Security money."

 

If taxation doesn't cause a mass revolt, economic polarization could yank everything apart. "The Sun Belt states and the interior West are growing faster than the Midwest," says secession scholar Jason Sorens. "If they get rich enough, they might see their membership in the U.S. as burdensome if they have to support dying industries in Ohio and New York." (Sorens apparently hasn't considered the possibility that Cleveland and Buffalo will become America's oases thanks to global warming.)

 

A place like Texas has the means to support itself as an independent country. What it needs is an ideological spark. Northern Italy's Lega Nord could be a potential model. Rather than emphasize a linguistic or ethnic difference, the political party has espoused independence for economic reasons. In Italy's 1996 general elections, the political party won 10 percent of the vote nationwide by calling on rich, conservative northerners to go it alone in a state called Padania. In the last eight years, Lega Nord has moderated its separatist rhetoric as it's become a part of Silvio Berlusconi's coalition government. (Still, the party is regularly accused of xenophobia.)

 

For secession to tear the United States to pieces, somebody has to jump first. "As states leave, more states want to leave," Schiff says, "which is why the government will try to say you can't leave, or we'll invade you." The Second Vermont Republic's Thomas Naylor agrees that someone has to set a secessionist example. But Naylor doesn't believe that the U.S. would try to "enslave free Vermont." (His farcical suggestion: "They could burn all the maples and destroy all the black-and-white Holsteins.") If American troops did invade Montpelier, he says, it would destroy America's moral authority just as attempts to stamp out anti-Communist movements in the Soviet Bloc eventually undercut the USSR.

 

...

 

The Institute for the Future's Jamais Cascio contends that "very few national entities maintain their structural coherence for much more than a couple hundred years." In Cascio's 50-year forecast "The Long Crisis," the United States breaks into eight pieces. By 2054, the Midwestern states have invaded the Gulf and Southern Federation, with New Columbia (the Atlantic seaboard) and Pacifica (the West coast) supplying arms to the Southern insurgents.

 

What could precipitate such a schism? Cascio foresees a shift to localism—a focus on eating where we live, on supplying our own energy (micro-wind and micro-solar), and on fabricating our own products (and possibly weapons) with industrial-grade 3-D printers. Allen Buchanan, the author of Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce From Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec, says that (while he's not predicting this) climate change, a pandemic, or an economic collapse could lead to what he calls sauve qui peut secession—"let him save himself who can."

 

This idea of a reversion back to a time when no kingdom or ruler had enough power to control a large territory squares with collapsists like Dmitry Orlov and James Howard Kunstler, who argue that America will revert to pre-industrial times in the post-petroleum age. In an essay called "Thriving in the Age of Collapse," Orlov writes that a dearth of oil will force people "to stay put most of the time, perhaps making seasonal migrations, and to make use of what they have available in the immediate vicinity." Not one to dwell on the negative, the Russian writer points out that societal collapse boosts one's health and vigor: "[T]he air will be much cleaner, there will be no traffic jams, … [l]ocal culture will make a comeback, [and p]eople will get plenty of exercise walking around, carrying things, and performing manual labor."

 

Canada.What would happen to Canada if Quebec (in red) seceded?In 1995, a referendum on Quebec independence failed by less than 1 percent of the vote. What might have happened if Quebec had broken away, and Canada were severed into Western and Eastern chunks? As in Italy, where tax receipts from the wealthy North prop up the more-destitute South, Canada's richer west side (Alberta and British Columbia) helps support the poorer Maritime provinces back east. Without Quebec keeping the country contiguous, Canada's Westerners might want to go it alone rather than export their riches.

 

 

In the absence of logical borders, how have we stayed intact? Mostly because the Quebecois remain the continent's only serious nationalist movement—a sizable embedded minority with its own identity and its own language. One path to continental disintegration is the radicalization of America's Quebecois: Spanish-speaking immigrants. No matter what immigration laws go on the books, the U.S. will still need cheap labor, and Mexicans and Central Americans will continue to head north to pursue this country's higher wages. By 2050, by which time whites will be a minority in America, Hispanics are expected to make up 29 percent of the population.

 

Can we all just get along? In a lecture at the 2006 Pop!Tech conference, Juan Enriquez—the author of The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future—said it depends on how we treat Spanish speakers. If Lou Dobbs and the English-only crowd become the architects of America's foreign policy, Enriquez argues, America is in peril. "How you treat people today is going to be remembered for a long time," Enriquez says, noting that the license plates in Quebec read Je me souviens—I remember.

 

La Republica del Norte.Charles Truxillo, a professor at the University of New Mexico, says it's too late to save the United States we know today. Truxillo believes this century will see the birth of La República del Norte, a sovereign "Mexicano nation" in what's now the American Southwest. "The U.S. ripped these areas off from Mexico in 1848," he says, and the debt has come due. Rather than fight what's inevitable, Truxillo says North America should toss out the melting pot and learn to love "autonomous sovereign zones"—a French-speaking nation for the Quebecois, a Spanish-speaking nation for the Latinos, and an English-speaking nation for the Anglophones.

 

It's no accident that, when you ponder both secession and climate change, the most convincing end-of-America scenarios involve Canada and Mexico. For the last 160 years, America has been the hemisphere's alpha dog. But the United States is not a closed system—we're tightly integrated with our neighbors, and the forces that might crush the U.S. will also affect them. One conspiracy theory, pushed by loony swift-boat-truther Jerome Corsi, has it that the U.S., Canada, and Mexico will soon share a common passport, currency, and military. While the propaganda about the looming North American Union is completely bogus, it's certainly true that we are not alone. Take away the artificial borders and we're all just North Americans, clinging to each other for life. If America ends, so will Canada and Mexico. And if Canada or Mexico goes down the tubes, we won't be long for this continent either.

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