Exactly. The blue states that want these things will build them. But they'll find significant obstacles in both federal law, and the demands of federal taxation. At some point, they're going to want reclaim both the freedom and the cash to do things their way. And that's when they'll come into conflict with red states who are determined to keep them hogtied and paying the bills. How that resolves is anyone's guess.
California's been fighting these battles since the 70s, mostly over environmental standards. They're the place this future emerged first. But the fast-heating front right now is the tussle between blue and red states over abortion laws: what's perfectly legal in some states is tantamount to a death-penalty offense in others, and the latter keep trying to extend enforcement jurisdiction into the former. The last time anyone (actually, mostly the same states, in fact) tried to do that, it was the Fugitive Slave Act, which was the final match that ignited the Civil War. So that's how that goes.
"Fuck it, we'll do it ourselves" feels like the most likely scenario to me, given the pressures at work. But I wouldn't put down money on the odds that the nation will survive that path intact -- especially since the red states now seem just as determined to force their will on the blue ones as they were in 1860. (They've made it clear that they're quite happy to see us dead, and they've got the guns and a well-developed narrative that would justify doing it.)
They're not going to let us go our own way without a fight, possibly one to the literal death. We should take that seriously. After all, they've done it before.
I've been known to indulge myself with as many scenarios as seem to crop up, at least in the beginning. Seven or eight, yeah, not uncommon.
But what I invariably find is that as I start to build them out, some of them begin to congeal into others. Variables that looked independent on first blush turn out to be more connected than they looked. Often, it's because there's a single third- or fourth-order background driver that's the root cause creating several apparently disparate effects, sometimes very covertly, across several of the scenarios. Indulging multiple early scenarios and doing five-questions and implications wheel work on the common threads that emerge is a good way to surface those deeper, less-obvious forces.
Those dependencies become the bridges that link Scenario 2 to Scenario 5 -- a synthesis that leads to a smaller set of merged final scenarios that gets at the deeper roots that are driving change in the domain.
There’s another scenario, and I don’t know how it fits into the matrix. I call it “fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves.”
If both parties are in essence two or three camps, and no consensus emerges from either party about what they want to do and how they want to do it, the Federal government drifts along on a series of continuing resolutions and incremental debt-ceiling increases, but doesn’t manage to accomplish much else. Neither party can achieve enough of a majority to break the stalemate.
That opens the doors for states that DO have majorities of one party or the other to do their own thing. Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado and a few other relatively wealthy blue states with traditions of good governance decide to introduce state-wide single payer health plans that start incrementally—the uninsured are covered at first, and gradually small employers and then larger employers are invited to opt in. Federal funding for higher education falls apart and states have to up their subsidies for state universities. This is done via lowering tuition vs. giving financial aid awards. Research grants are made by a public/private partnership where the state matches private funding from pharma and tech companies.
States give up on Federal matching funds for infrastructure and start funding road and rail via user fees.
Red states like Idaho, Tennessee, and others with R supermajorities continue to roll back social insurance like Medicaid, food assistance, and education. Employers like the low tax/low regulation environment but they can’t persuade people to move to those states, so they put pressure on the state governments to lighten up and not make life so intolerable for average families. That forces the reddest states to quit racing for the bottom.
The result will be a patchwork of states that provide high quality of life along with higher taxes and states that provide higher independence where the wealthy can purchase services but the poor and uneducated are miserable. That may lead to internal migration to the more generous states. The US looks more like it did between 1900-1960–you may even see another “great migration” out of the South as the lack of education and health care and the effects of climate change—more storm damage and flooding and less government help in the aftermath—force people to move. Drought in the southwest leads to water rationing, which drives the population north into Utah, Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas. This leads to political changes in these states.
The problem here is that it exacerbates one of the core problems we already have, which is a lot of poor, depopulated states that still have tremendous clout in the electoral college and the Senate. The shift you mention will probably just accelerate that, leaving rich states even more at the electoral and Congressional mercy of the poor ones than they already are.
The statistic that gets at the problem is this: There are about 3100 counties in the US. About 500-600 of them, mostly in blue states but also the metro areas of red states, vote Democrat. The other 2500 or so vote GOP. Unfortunately, that small proportion of blue counties generates nearly 3/4 of the nation's entire economic output. (A decade ago, it was 2/3. That's how fast it's changing.) So the people who are making the money, doing the innovation, and moving the country forward are increasingly being shut out of democratic process, even though they're the ones supplying all the money that makes the US a viable nation.
This isn't stable, and it cannot go on very much longer without forcing some kind of essential re-negotiation of the Constitutional bargain. You cannot have California living according to federal laws set by Alabama without California rebelling. Any population re-sort probably won't happen quickly enough to match the pace of deterioration, which is already acute and accelerating.
What form that rebellion takes is a core variable in all of this. Either the blue states figure out how to get what they need within the US framework; or they realize that's never going to happen, and find a way to leave it (and that will likely be very very messy). California's now the fourth-largest economy on earth, and would make a fine country in its own right. I've long toyed with a scenario in which it secedes, and agrees to take any contiguous state with it. It re-writes a 21st-century constitution that corrects some of the weaknesses of the old one; and over time, most of the western states join. If something similar happens in the northeast (perhaps congealing around NY/MA/IL/MN), the remaining United States would be a hollowed-out husk dominated by the south and southern midwest. (Texas, the other viable proto-nation within the US, may choose to stay in and run that show, or finally make good on its perpetual secession threat.)
Shorter me: I'm not sure how the US gets out of this with its current contract between the states intact. It's just been abused and violated so many ways at this point; and the people with money and brains have increasingly powerful incentives to seek other relationships. They simply can't go on like this. And the day is coming soon that they won't.
I am not sure how the electoral college and Federal laws prevent a state from standing up their own health care plan, or deciding to generously fund state universities, or building highways with state money.
My scenario assumes that our system continues to be deadlocked, and divided government is present more than half of the time. We’ve lived with Federal tentacles getting into almost everything and states ceding control, and that’s been fine until we get a malevolent Federal government—just like the small government types in the past were worried about. In the 20th century the fear was that the left (socialism, communism) was going to create an authoritarian Federal government—turns out the right ended up actually doing it.
Welcome to Night Vale is an amazing thing to quote, appropriate for Pride Month, and my favorite. Will be taking 2 of my offspring to see them in Raleigh in September - my oldest’s 4th time seeing them live!
Have you read this one? https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/kamala-harris-won-the-u-s-elections-bombshell-report-claims-voting-machines-were-tampered-with-before-2024/articleshow/121732679.cms?from=mdr
Also, consider reading William A. Finnegan's The Long Memo substack.
Eight sides! Brilliant- and ancient. The Chinese Baqua, and it’s use with the I Ching in divination. I’m INTRIGUED with what You come up with 👍🏼😎❤️🎵
Exactly. The blue states that want these things will build them. But they'll find significant obstacles in both federal law, and the demands of federal taxation. At some point, they're going to want reclaim both the freedom and the cash to do things their way. And that's when they'll come into conflict with red states who are determined to keep them hogtied and paying the bills. How that resolves is anyone's guess.
California's been fighting these battles since the 70s, mostly over environmental standards. They're the place this future emerged first. But the fast-heating front right now is the tussle between blue and red states over abortion laws: what's perfectly legal in some states is tantamount to a death-penalty offense in others, and the latter keep trying to extend enforcement jurisdiction into the former. The last time anyone (actually, mostly the same states, in fact) tried to do that, it was the Fugitive Slave Act, which was the final match that ignited the Civil War. So that's how that goes.
"Fuck it, we'll do it ourselves" feels like the most likely scenario to me, given the pressures at work. But I wouldn't put down money on the odds that the nation will survive that path intact -- especially since the red states now seem just as determined to force their will on the blue ones as they were in 1860. (They've made it clear that they're quite happy to see us dead, and they've got the guns and a well-developed narrative that would justify doing it.)
They're not going to let us go our own way without a fight, possibly one to the literal death. We should take that seriously. After all, they've done it before.
I've been known to indulge myself with as many scenarios as seem to crop up, at least in the beginning. Seven or eight, yeah, not uncommon.
But what I invariably find is that as I start to build them out, some of them begin to congeal into others. Variables that looked independent on first blush turn out to be more connected than they looked. Often, it's because there's a single third- or fourth-order background driver that's the root cause creating several apparently disparate effects, sometimes very covertly, across several of the scenarios. Indulging multiple early scenarios and doing five-questions and implications wheel work on the common threads that emerge is a good way to surface those deeper, less-obvious forces.
Those dependencies become the bridges that link Scenario 2 to Scenario 5 -- a synthesis that leads to a smaller set of merged final scenarios that gets at the deeper roots that are driving change in the domain.
Looking forward to seeing where this takes you.
There’s another scenario, and I don’t know how it fits into the matrix. I call it “fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves.”
If both parties are in essence two or three camps, and no consensus emerges from either party about what they want to do and how they want to do it, the Federal government drifts along on a series of continuing resolutions and incremental debt-ceiling increases, but doesn’t manage to accomplish much else. Neither party can achieve enough of a majority to break the stalemate.
That opens the doors for states that DO have majorities of one party or the other to do their own thing. Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado and a few other relatively wealthy blue states with traditions of good governance decide to introduce state-wide single payer health plans that start incrementally—the uninsured are covered at first, and gradually small employers and then larger employers are invited to opt in. Federal funding for higher education falls apart and states have to up their subsidies for state universities. This is done via lowering tuition vs. giving financial aid awards. Research grants are made by a public/private partnership where the state matches private funding from pharma and tech companies.
States give up on Federal matching funds for infrastructure and start funding road and rail via user fees.
Red states like Idaho, Tennessee, and others with R supermajorities continue to roll back social insurance like Medicaid, food assistance, and education. Employers like the low tax/low regulation environment but they can’t persuade people to move to those states, so they put pressure on the state governments to lighten up and not make life so intolerable for average families. That forces the reddest states to quit racing for the bottom.
The result will be a patchwork of states that provide high quality of life along with higher taxes and states that provide higher independence where the wealthy can purchase services but the poor and uneducated are miserable. That may lead to internal migration to the more generous states. The US looks more like it did between 1900-1960–you may even see another “great migration” out of the South as the lack of education and health care and the effects of climate change—more storm damage and flooding and less government help in the aftermath—force people to move. Drought in the southwest leads to water rationing, which drives the population north into Utah, Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas. This leads to political changes in these states.
The problem here is that it exacerbates one of the core problems we already have, which is a lot of poor, depopulated states that still have tremendous clout in the electoral college and the Senate. The shift you mention will probably just accelerate that, leaving rich states even more at the electoral and Congressional mercy of the poor ones than they already are.
The statistic that gets at the problem is this: There are about 3100 counties in the US. About 500-600 of them, mostly in blue states but also the metro areas of red states, vote Democrat. The other 2500 or so vote GOP. Unfortunately, that small proportion of blue counties generates nearly 3/4 of the nation's entire economic output. (A decade ago, it was 2/3. That's how fast it's changing.) So the people who are making the money, doing the innovation, and moving the country forward are increasingly being shut out of democratic process, even though they're the ones supplying all the money that makes the US a viable nation.
This isn't stable, and it cannot go on very much longer without forcing some kind of essential re-negotiation of the Constitutional bargain. You cannot have California living according to federal laws set by Alabama without California rebelling. Any population re-sort probably won't happen quickly enough to match the pace of deterioration, which is already acute and accelerating.
What form that rebellion takes is a core variable in all of this. Either the blue states figure out how to get what they need within the US framework; or they realize that's never going to happen, and find a way to leave it (and that will likely be very very messy). California's now the fourth-largest economy on earth, and would make a fine country in its own right. I've long toyed with a scenario in which it secedes, and agrees to take any contiguous state with it. It re-writes a 21st-century constitution that corrects some of the weaknesses of the old one; and over time, most of the western states join. If something similar happens in the northeast (perhaps congealing around NY/MA/IL/MN), the remaining United States would be a hollowed-out husk dominated by the south and southern midwest. (Texas, the other viable proto-nation within the US, may choose to stay in and run that show, or finally make good on its perpetual secession threat.)
Shorter me: I'm not sure how the US gets out of this with its current contract between the states intact. It's just been abused and violated so many ways at this point; and the people with money and brains have increasingly powerful incentives to seek other relationships. They simply can't go on like this. And the day is coming soon that they won't.
I am not sure how the electoral college and Federal laws prevent a state from standing up their own health care plan, or deciding to generously fund state universities, or building highways with state money.
My scenario assumes that our system continues to be deadlocked, and divided government is present more than half of the time. We’ve lived with Federal tentacles getting into almost everything and states ceding control, and that’s been fine until we get a malevolent Federal government—just like the small government types in the past were worried about. In the 20th century the fear was that the left (socialism, communism) was going to create an authoritarian Federal government—turns out the right ended up actually doing it.
Welcome to Night Vale is an amazing thing to quote, appropriate for Pride Month, and my favorite. Will be taking 2 of my offspring to see them in Raleigh in September - my oldest’s 4th time seeing them live!