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As many have said, we won't have a civil war. Because logistically that just isn't feasible. We are split far more along rural/urban lines than one giant chunk of the nation against another. Without geographic alignment of opposing forces, there's no logical way for any military to organize. You'd have to have millions upon millions of people up and migrate into one geographic region that would then cecede, and that's just not how anything works at all.
Instead, divided modern Ireland is a better example. You'll have decades of civil unrest. Terrorist attacks, pockets in different states of shit basically being taken over by militias that reject federal authority.
You'll have total stagnation in the federal government as terrorist antagonists win seats in these areas and work against anything and everything. You'll have secessionist movements that go nowhere but cause huge disruption.
The net result is that the country will not be able to make progress on laws, won't be able to keep up with the times, won't be able to spend tax revenue effectively, and will virtually cease to function.
Government, contrary to some radical libertarian delusions, actually is essential. Laws need to be passed. Conflicts need to be resolved, consensuses need to be reached. Government needs to be agile enough to respond to negative externalities caused by new technologies (like social media). We need government, and we need it to not just be empty seats but to conduct its designated functions. It isn't an option, it is an essential, non-negotiable component of large-scale societies.
Terrorism never really aims to win. They aim to hurt, to disrupt, to stall, to inflame. And it's shockingly easy to do that. And that's what Republicans are discovering. They will not win hearts and minds. Most newer generations despise them and they have long abandoned the efforts to win those hearts and minds, resorting instead to theft, organized crime, and radical terrorism, culiminating most recently in an actual coup attempt at the US Capitol.
They were rebuffed, and that has cost them a lot of political capital. I don't see them really being able to pull out of their party's death spiral in the coming decades. They may pick up a handful of additional seats. They may flip the Presidency to them again. But each time they will try to advance their nightmarish dystopian agenda, and they will cement greater unified resistance against them, and they simply don't have the numbers. Much the contrary to their shared delusion, they are far from the majority, and have an aging population of supporters which declines each day, thanks in no small part to the cruelty and neglect inherent in their own policies.
So, absent any realistic ability to cling to power and build coalition in a meaningful way, they will increasingly turn to the levers that remain to them - terrorism, chaos, and disruption.
We will cease to function as a nation, and as such you will have a generations-long brain drain into Europe and other more attractive areas. The best and brightest will leave, innovation and entrepreneurship will go places with less turmoil, and the country will become a husk mired in intractable, widespread and irresolvable civil unrest. This will be exacerbated by climate change and other factors that will put increasing pressure on the population, fueling discontent, anger, unrest and chaos.
The wheel will come to a halt, and in half a century at earliest, maybe a century at longest, the country will likely fracture without any large-scale war, simply under the weight of its dysfunction, into component states or some arrangement that will depend upon the fault and fracture lines that begin to form between rough geographic centers as increasing political polarization creates mass exoduses between states and organizes people more geographically around political ideologies.
Because of our utter inability to legislate, innovate, invent, or do anything other than pay politicians to sit in total gridlock, other countries will rapidly overtake us as our inaction and their forward momentum compound, and eventually they will leave us behind. The dollar will cease to be the world reserve currency, we'll lose economic power and geopolitical clout, and the buzzards will pick at our fringes.
This has happened to every major world order throughout history. Empires boom, then they bust. The world order shifts. Usually through violence. Countries become overcome by the bloat and greed of their administrators and power-holders, and that greed and bloat mires the country in debt and legislative stagnation until it simply falls apart.
The terrorists will not get what they want. There will be no white christian ethnostate, no Jesus codified into law, no magical harmony free from "liberals." They will simply make everyone else as miserable as they are, and a generation or more of Americans will be born into a country of decline, sporadic violence, dysfunction and collapse.
That doesn't have to be where we end up, but it most certainly is where we are headed, all else remaining the same.
