always most likely going to be a whimpering collapse into further and greater dysfunction than some blaze of glory. Geopolitically, North America’s a good place for a country as big as the US if you can control sea to sea, but otherwise the environment quickly proves challenging to control and
you prob end up with something more along a United States of Europe of varying nations of a largely similar identity, but the local and sub-national differences harden into distinct identities in a resource-scarce and competitive environment absent mutual cooperation.
I should note, this fate is far from sealed and if the US has a strong Democratic Party focused on the whole of a nation and rebuilding public goods and services and bring these ultrawealthy and megacorporate entities to heel instead of being run over roughshod by them, then I think you largely
can keep the US as is intact. The Dems were always going to fracture (imo back in 2015) it was just a matter of when, and the 2024 election might’ve been the breaking point. It’ll essentially take a new New Deal to keep the country together but the alternative is prob more clearly worse that
even ideological opponents prob have to concede it and play defense to what they see as government excesses. Doesn’t guarantee we stay on top as world leader but that’s largely a function of US policies since the fall of the Soviet Union and was always going to be a 21st century challenge for us.
Kinda feels like a better case scenario for this is more like how the end of The Wire was, but hey, even Baltimore’s gotten its crime rate down so that could serve as something of an abstract model for how we might want to go forward.
History’s rarely chock full of grandiose moments (if it was then would those moments still be grandiose?) and the reality will probably much muddier and boring than we hope, but such an outcome would still present us with the opportunity to iterate on what we’ve done
and maybe steer ourselves out of falling back into a loop like the one we’re in.