These are elevated comments by GrimJim.
What’s useful about this is that the estimates are made explicit. — Ian
Eleven percent of Americans use insulin to survive. They are dead within three months of the power going out.
Between 17 and 20% of Americans need weekly if not daily mental health medication. They are all either dead or reduced to needing constant care within three to six months. (Ian-probably an overstatement, many will be functional once they come off, but a non-tapered withdrawal from most ant-depressants or GABA drugs is ugly.)
Altogether, some 66% of Americans take some kind of life-saving or life-supporting medication daily. Let’s say that at least half of those are dead within one year of the lights going out. That’s 33% of the population.
During the Rwandan Genocide, about 75% of the Tutsi population was killed in merely 100 days. Like Rwanda and unlike Bosnia, there will be no one trying to stop it, no outside forces intervening. Imagine the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists killing 75% of the “undesirables” they can get their hands on. Imagine many more of those American “undesirables” being able to fight back as they are being genocided (the Tutsis died en masse, not generally have the resources to fight back). It will quickly become tit-for-tat, with no mercy on either side, as the “undesirables” will no longer grant any mercy once they figure out what the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists plan for them. So that’s about 75% of 40% of the remaining population.
Then there will further be a much more massive death all around due to the lack of medical supplies and services. Add in pestilence and plague, and that increases the number.
And about a year in, the survivors will have used up remaining food stocks. If they have been unable to start farming, on a traditional MINIMAL level of about 5 to 10 farmers per 1 non-farmer, there will be starvation.
So…
345,000,000 Americans to start…
less 33% or 113,850,000 from medical issues = 231,150,000
less 75% of 40% (69,345,000) from Genocide = 161,805,000
less ~10% from plague and pestilence (16,180,500) = 145,624,500
And less ~20% due to starvation (29,124,900) = 116,499,600.
My estimate is that there will be only about 116,000,000 Americans left within two years of the collapse and the start of ACWII. That’s a 66% death rate within two years. That’s a minimum, with my being generous on all the numbers.
Estimates based on an EMP attack that takes down the entire USA power grid have been a 90% death rate in merely one year. So I’m actually looking at things with rose-colored glasses…
And Elevated Comment two (on farms and food)
Note: Right now only 2% of Americans live on farms.
TWO PERCENT.
And all those farms, with the exception of Amish and some Mennonite farms, depend on gasoline and machines. and most of those machines are modern, complex, computer-based machines, which will be useless within weeks or months of the economy collapsing.
During the Great Depression, 20% of Americans lived in farms. This is the only reason starvation was not rampant. Just about everyone was related to or knew someone who had a farm, so they could count on them for some support.
Now, almost no one knows anyone who lives on a farm that is sustainable without advanced technology and gasoline. And the way monoculture has taken over American farms, along with dependency on chemical fertilizers and insecticides, plus the lack of remotely enough dray beasts, classic farming can’t be rebuilt fast enough to service teeming millions.
And so teeming millions will die.
That’s not counting destruction and attrition from refugees from the cities. Refugees are not going to care where or how they get their food; they will take it if need be, over the dead bodies of whoever gets in the way. And they will vastly outnumber the local farmer folk and their local friends. It will be like that end scene in The Day After, when the refugees took the farmer’s cow and slaughtered it, and he went out to complain. He didn’t even threaten them, and they just mowed him down.
That will be played out over and over again, everywhere. 80% of Americans live in a city, which is a literal food wasteland. When they start moving out, it will be like locusts, and anyone who gets in their way simply dies.
Ian – all this assumes a hard collapse as opposed to a slow withering. But that scenario is entirely possibly with hard enough shocks, and we’re doing almost everything we can to ensure they happen.
Soredemos
It’s fascinating to watch the out of all proportion hysteria about the supposed danger of the American far right.
However valid all the other scenarios presented, I won’t be at all be suprised when there is very little from the ‘pseudo-christian white nationalist’ quarter.
ibaien
this is absurd lefty millenarian “come quickly lord jesus” fantasy and y’all should stop it. reminds me of kuntsler’s peak oil panic of the early aughts. everyone just wants a reckoning to separate their own worthy from the damned.
GrimJim
I hope you are right, Soredemos.
I hope I have to eat crow over every prediction I make.
I want to be wrong.
But, the modern Pseudo-Christian White Nationalist movement is not merely some modern knee jerk reaction. It is the culmination of 160 years of unending Lost Cause propaganda merged with American Exceptionalist Evangelical Pseudo-Christianity, emboldened by the NRA, and the Republican rejection of traditional politics, in a storm of anomie produced by social media and the immiseration of the middle and lower class, timed with the cycle of the counter-revolutions against Civil Rights, Liberal Democracy, and the Enlightenment, amongst other movements.
And that’s not even including the continued hangover from the end of the Cold War and the pissing away of the opportunities thereof in trying to establish the USA as a Unipower.
It is, in a word, a Moment of Great Reckoning.
At the very least, we are looking at a century comparable to the Roman Crisis of the Third Century.
Potentially, we are looking at complete collapse in the level of the Late Bronze Age Collapse combined with massive Climate Collapse such as witnessed in the Eocene–Oligocene Extinction Event.
In the end, it is likely to be sooner than later, and harder than softer. It will be, at best, periods of slow, gradual decline punctuated by extremely fast, massive local and regional collapse. It could all fall in a few years, it might take a century.
But civilization as we know it will end. There is no happy Star Trek future for anyone. Even Bladerunner, it turns out, was a utopian dream.
What will come out the other end for humanity? With luck, a new Dark Age at worst. Most likely, reduction to Stone Age savagery for the few survivors, if not extinction.
Arthur
Another thing to consider is how much in fighting there will be. Take religion. Conservative Catholics think they share a bond with rightwing Christian fundies because of a shared hate of all things sexual. Wrong. Fundies don’t think Catholics, conservative or otherwise, are even Christian. Too much Virgin Mary and saints and other things. They’d be be at each other’s throats pretty quickly. And of course there are other groups that would play out the same scenario.
Daniil Adamov
Re: PCWN, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were exterminationist militias in America in a collapse scenario. But I don’t it’d be anywhere near as uniform and organised as what you seem to be suggesting. America isn’t Rwanda; it’s much larger and more diverse, and so whatever happens there will be much more complicated as well. I don’t think a hard collapse would see a nice, clean fight between two sides. It would see a dirty, messy fight between hundreds of “sides”. Yugoslavia is a step in the “right” direction, analogies-wise. Russia post-1917 or China post-1911 might be even better. The Russian Civil War is sometimes misrepresented as a fight between Whites and Reds, which ignores that there were many other factions involved and that both Whites and Reds themselves consisted of many odd sub-groups and allies of opportunity that were only very gradually brought under any kind of central control. China’s chaotic warlordism is rather more famous.
Thinking about all of those examples, I’m a bit more optimistic as far as genocide goes. “Hate” in the American sense is a luxury of well-to-do people. Once proper chaos sets in, there will be many atrocities and some deliberately genocidal groups. But overall I’d expect to see petty warlords who would be willing to cut bargains with other groups for the sake of survival. Even in Bosnia, there was a remarkable amount of cooperation across ethnic lines between theoretically ethnonationalist warlords. They’ll kill civilians, of course, but they won’t seek total extermination of other groups, if only because it’d be beyond their abilities. There may be a few individual Ungern-Sternberg style crazies, but they would be exceptional.
PF
Christian White Nationalists?
Are you kidding? Sounds like a CIA trope
Most actual Christians(99.8%) are not violent and xenophobic, do spooks get off on their fictional creations?
c1ue
Bad math. Among other things – there is enormous overlap between those taking insulin and those taking other drugs.
Equally, bad math on supply chain destruction due to EMP or what not. The US has a lot of food – and transportation is still possible after EMP attack, you just need to replace a certain parts.
The only scenario that would approach what is being posited is a magical/supra technological change where electricity stops functioning in the US a la the book “Dies The Fire”. Only this type of truly physics-changing effect would do it – no water, no sewage, no food, planes falling out of the sky and never going back, only animal power to supplement human power.
GlassHammer
“on a traditional MINIMAL level of about 5 to 10 farmers per 1 non-farmer, there will be starvation”
The more traditional the farming the lower the yields per field. Irrigation, pest control, disease prevention, fertilizers, just become less efficient as you slide back to more basic technology.
The logistics of moving food to food deserts (cities) just doesn’t work create as much of a return on money spent, so the entire logistics network gets much smaller.
dsr
I don’t know what percentage of the population would die, but I don’t think it would be as catastrophic/violent as depicted. I agree with Dmitry Orlov that something parallel to the Soviet collapse, but worse would be in store. I think a lot of people would choose to die, as they presently do with the fentanyl crisis. I think that in the absence of social media and the internet a lot more people would choose that path. As for city people storming farms, most people don’t even know how to cook a chicken, let alone kill, pluck and gut a chicken. I think most people would hunker down waiting for help to come and miss the opportunity to act. As in the Soviet collapse, organized crime will step into the void created by lack of governmental power. All bets are off if the nuclear power plants aren’t put into some form of longterm shutdown.
different clue
If we have the catastrophic megadeath hard collapse envisioned in this scenario, then I have no realistic hope of survival and I won’t even try to prepare.
If we have the catastrophic megadeath hard collapse envisioned in this scenario, then Canada should prepare for millions of American refugees to try getting into Canada to escape it all. Millions of Illegal Aliens from south of the border! Don’t you love it?
The most I could possibly prepare for would be a years long slow fade into gray decay. I can certainly try to prepare to survive through that.
FamousDrScanlon
I’m a blond haired blue eyed Gen-X with a brother and sister the same. I have 2 bi racial nephews and 1 openly gay niece and my family is not alone as formerly all Caucasian , but now with bi racial kids in the family – we are legion in Canada and the US. I have 2 white boy friends I grew up with who married non white foreigners (Laos & Filipino) and have bi-racial kids (great kids). For me, this alone cancels out any chance of wide spread race war.
BUT, no need to panic because the humans will always find another way to find out-groups they need to hate and kill.
Soredemos
I think there’s way too much taking the internet seriously going on here. The web is a megaphone for weirdos, and makes normally much saner people extreme in the spur of the moment (Twitter is especially bad for this). Outside of the internet, it can be very hard to actually encounter the most absurd fringe. We’ve always had a strange fringe (eg John Birch Society; Eisenhower is a commie agent and all that). The internet just amplifies that ones that actually exist, and the media also has an extreme incentive to manufacture supposed drama and danger (as someone who grew up on 4chan, the elevation of that occasionally amusing (the quality depended heavily on which subboard it was; /tg/ was a legit good board in its heyday) dump into a supposed ‘dark web of evil hackers’ was nothing less than hysterical. That site was peopled by at least 80% shitposters who were being entirely sarcastic).
I think when a collapse comes the lines delineating the fracturing aren’t going to bear much relation to any sort of current culture war.
Closely related to this by the way is the idea that Handmaid’s Tale is some sort of prophetic future documentary. It isn’t. The number of people who would actually want such a world is very small and would quickly get overrun by another, larger faction in any collapse scenario. ‘But the right is restricting women’s abortion options’! Yes, they are. And right wing women are often at the head of such movements. There’s a Liberal delusion that wants to frame pro-lifers as all being old white men who hate women and want to control their bodies. No, mostly it’s just people, often women, who genuinely think a fetus is a baby and that aborting one is murder. It isn’t more complicated than that.
I’m not a pro-lifer, but to effectively fight an opponent you have to start by correctly identifying them.
Willy
Frank Schaeffer is the guy most associated with kick starting the pro-life movement. Back when he was the dutiful son of pop theologian Francis Schaeffer, he persuaded dad to preach Christ-centered humanitarian views about societal roles in supporting all children, unborn and born.
When they persuaded Jerry Falwell to come on board, for political purposes, the power-crazed Falwell radically morphed Shaeffer’s ideas into involving only fetuses and added his own prosperity gospel and empowered the euro-racism found in American evangelism. Maybe that was Falwell’s pragmatic way to increase his own power, to ally with plutocrats and fuel mob rage. Trump noticed all that and doing what the more cunning of the malignant narcissists do when the opportunity presents itself, successfully crowned himself as their next Dear Leader.
People freak out because they’ve read about Hitler, how a street artist wearing brown boy scout uniforms, was able to take control of an advanced nation with only about 1/3 citizenry support. They saw how the Iranian democracy movement got coopted by similar numbers led by old men wearing dark age robes.
I’m wary because I’ve noticed that too many humans are of the ‘go along to get along’ traditional mindset temperament. They’d rather moo along with the herd than stop and think for themselves about right and wrong and go their own way.
But then, I do see the truth behind Americans being exceptional, in the way of wanting freedom from domination by others, in at least a slightly higher percentage than seen in other places. Maybe it’s just enough to disable the most obvious of autocrats (but not enough to avoid being suckered by covert plutocratic machinations)?
It gets more complicated, muddier, when I see so many bitching about skyrocketing costs of living. They might be willing to roll the dice and give autocracy a try.
Arkady Bogdanov
In my observations here from rural Appalachia, I don’t see a full blown genocidal race/religious/ideological war happening. For one, conservatives and liberals each make up less than 15% of the population (Only 60% of adults are registered to vote- of that 60%, generally only 50% turn out, and most elections are squeakers- leaving about 15% being motivated to vote for each side, and a good chunk of that 15% are just LOTE voters who are holding their nose- so the ideologically motivated are minorities, any way you slice it). Further, if you pay attention, most people that have been propagandized to hate those “other” people, of whatever stripe, are all talking about people from “away”- They do not generally consider people local to them as part of the problem (and when you get to wherever “away” is, those people see it the same way). Even if such a genocide starts, I can promise you that it will be driven by a very small number of people, who have names and addresses, and I can further promise you that that there are many quiet, unassuming, yet very pragmatic people who will come out of the woodwork, and take care of the problem, be it in broad daylight, or dead of night.
As to the rest- I don’t know if many have looked around or not, but we are already in a full-on collapse. People are ALREADY dying due to an inability to access insulin. People are ALREADY dying due to power failures. People are ALREADY dying because they cannot get into a hospital. Deaths of despair have been rolling for nigh on two decades. I guarantee you birthrates are collapsing too.
The Jackpot is here. Thank you capitalism!
someofparts
This will work out really well for the wealthy. They know from decades of experience that carnage can turbo-charges profits, so it’s all good from where they sit.
Also wondering, as the right-wing evangelical hordes go on their killing sprees, exactly who do we imagine they will encounter? In Atlanta, the only corner of the country I know well enough to speak about, I promise you any hordes of menacing yokels will get a fight from the black community here that will put a stop to that nonsense right out of the gate. They also take a back seat to no one when it comes to being communities that organize themselves around a church or mosque.
There are also large counties in the metro area that are majority Hispanic and majority Asian, respectively. Again, extrapolating from this city that I know well, there is so much diversity here that it is starting to have big impacts on local policy. How will an Hispanic or Asian population respond to rampaging yokels? It may come to blows if things get dire enough, but the lines of conflict, and the forms they will take, are certain to be more complicated than whatever we can see from our armchair today.
Maybe we forget that other cultures, if they are Hispanic or Muslim for instance, put a greater value on strong inter-generation family ties than we do. I’m thinking that as the great unwinding gathers steam, citizens of this place who have continued traditions of having large, close-knit families will have a robust survival advantage. They will be good neighbors to have.
As to food my first thought is that, yeah, cities as we have become accustomed to them won’t exist. The large populations will be obliged to disperse, but they might not have to go farther than the suburbs. Urban adult children and their families will move back in with parents in the burbs and every household will be busy producing some kind of food. All of the suburban houses in this city have enough land to have big gardens and chickens or even small livestock. If the adult children and their kids have moved back in there will be no shortage of people available to do chores, like weed gardens or feed livestock. Cities will remain but be much smaller. They will be trading centers but not places where it will be safe or affordable to live. Each suburb will have their own commercial center and the trading center in what used to be the old city will become a place one goes to now and then for something that is hard to find locally.
Plus, all of this will be going on with a much smaller and healthier population. People eating food they help each other grow in the neighborhood will be healthier than those of us who have fed on the toxins on offer in the supermarket. In fact, even though lack of insulin or lisinopril will be fatal for many, it will be a godsend for children to stop getting maimed by the tsunami of profitable vaccines that are inflicted on them right now. Between healthy food from their own gardens and no longer being the victims of medical profiteering, the levels of diabetes or autism among children in the larger population could become as rare as they are among the Amish.
Anyway, that’s the way my imagination unspools on this.
GrimJim
Daniil,
I take it you’ve never taken a walk through Jesus land, or a White Belt?
Hatred elsewhere might be the luxury of the well-to-do, but here in the USA, it is mother’s milk in certain parts. I grew up in Indiana, the infamous Copperhead state that was once ruled by the KKK.
Hatred in the rural areas is a matter or religion; hatred in the urban areas is a matter of tribality.
Lake County is infamous for its racial strife and the outright destruction of cities by retreating whites after black folks moved in. Redlining is an ancient and still honored tradition. Whole towns were formed just to keep out the “undesirables,” and even to this day nothing is done about it. Hoosier suburbiana is still whiter than vanilla. Indianapolis is a checkerboard, with elites, commons, and gangs alike keeping to their own territories, and no God can help you if you are in someone else’s territory a the wrong time. Chicago and Milwaukee are pretty much the same, Chicago on steroids and turned up to 11.
That’s not even mentioning the rural divide, which is even greater. I laughed, sadly, at how integrated the fictional “Indiana” town of Hawkins was supposedly in the ’80s. That was the greatest fiction of all, even moreso than psychic extra planar hijinks. The KKK may not still rule Indiana, but it remains at the core of the Hoosier spirit, Bloomington, Muncie, and Terre Haute aside.
And that is the “Northern” state of Indiana, which is Southern in all ways save geography.
I’ve also lived in a number of other Midwestern states — Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio — and things there are little different.
I can only imagine what it is like in the South, or, Lord have mercy, the Deep South.
Oh wait, I don’t have to imagine, I can read about it every day. Louisiana remains an outright slave state. All the Southern states have done everything they can to reverse every advancement of the Civil Rights era. And this is just in the political arena, where the Lost Cause now rules and is having its revenge.
The genocide will vary from place to place, group to group. I’ve no doubt that some of them will seek to enslave Blacks, if not also Hispanics. Whether that works depends on how well armed and organized their would be victims are.
If Trump wins, if course, we’ll see that player out on and industrial level with the “Illegals,” after all, they are going to put them in camps, so why not make them “pay for their comes” like all other slave convicts? After all, the Republicans live their cheap labor, they just don’t want them to be seen or heard. So I expect that the prisoners will be bussed out to work the fields, as they already do, but as with the Slave Prison system, the profits of their labor all go to the old, rich, white owners.
Then the camps will be expanded to include any “political dissidents,” as Trump has already said he plans to change the jaws so no one can speak ill of him or his policies…
And once they make homosexuality illegal again, in go the LGBTQIA. And then probably Muslims. And then who knows, once they’ve run out of scapegoats, someone will be next.
And then they will realize that even with all the labor, it still costs them to much money. So they will have to come up with some other solution…
But that’s if Trump wins, and can keeps things together long enough. Otherwise, the collapse, and then it will all be the same, writ small, with no few groups even bothering yo deal with slavery, as they haven’t the manpower or even desire.
Never, ever underestimate gate in the USA. In some places, tying people you hate to the back of your truck and driving around till body parts fly off is considered a fine way to spend an evening…
We are, after all, the nation if Strange Fruit…
Soredemos
@GrimJim
Yes, if he wins a second time, I’m sure Trump will do the immigrant genocide he never quite got around to doing the first time.
In reality, any number of his donors fundamentally rely on large amounts of cheap immigrant labor. As with Biden, nothing will fundamentally change. I expect we will see some sort of return to a pre-Biden border policy though, because that genuinely was a giant screw up that made things worse, but the earlier policy was still letting plenty of people through to do crappy jobs.
Just, I’m sorry, but Trump, Hair Furher, Il Douche, Cheeseburger Adolph, etc, he’s literally already been President. It was largely four years of bumbling nothing. The most lasting legacy was a bunch of judicial appointments (and Democrats voted for a bunch of them), deregulations, and tax cuts (both standard neoliberal trends). He blathered a lot and signed a bunch of executive orders. But just saying ‘I decree X’ doesn’t actually make X happen.
There is absolutely nothing that leads me to believe his next term will be substantially different. The fear mongering that was already pretty silly in the 2016 election about encroaching fascism falls even more flat with me now, because there is no theoretical this time around. We already know exactly how Trump ‘governs’: he’s lazy and petty. ‘But Project 2025!’. Will get derailed the second Trump starts beefing with people inside his own administration. Further, I already don’t like our system of government or the dominant policies. I don’t view DC as some shining bastion of representation that is at risk of being smashed. To tell me to be afraid of the spector of Project 2025 and what it might do to the current braindead neoliberal norm is to ask me to choose between poop and shit.
Harris has already made clear that she’s a warmonger, without even a rhetorical commitment to anything decent domestically to counter balance it. These are our ‘choices’. If anything, Trump might be slightly less likely to get as all nuked by Russia or China (probably not though).
JerryDenim
Good comments. I tend to agree with the posters urging skepticism and not believing the absolute worst about people. Concerning race, this country, particularly the younger generations has made considerable progress. I do not think the progress extends much to the over 40 crowd however. The majority of the Trump supporters I know are mostly “nice”, but low-information voters that have had a tough slog through the minefield of neoliberal “meritocratic” America. ( some are quite wealthy and just dicks) Trump counts some salt-of-the-earth type people as his supporters, including minorities and immigrants, but Trump’s MAGA equivalent of brown shirts are a nasty lot of aggrieved white supremacists, christian fascists and non-idealogical criminal/sociopath lumpenproletariat that respond to the criminal/sociopath kindred spirit they recognize in Trump. These people are dangerous. I know a fascist movement when I see one, and post-2020 election MAGA checks all the boxes. Post 2020 Trump Org is a different beast from its 2016 roots. All of the moderate Republicans with respect for a liberal, laws based democratic order that checked the worst urges of Trump and his small nasty cabal of fascists (Stephen Miller for example) have been driven out and replaced with sycophants willing to aid and assist whatever horrors may be necessary for Trump to seize and abuse power in his third run for chief executive. I think everyone should regard the threat of wide-spread political violence and terrorism as a real threat at the end of this year. I don’t think a new Civil War is pre-ordained but you would have to be foolish or in denial to dismiss it as a possibility given what we have seen already and what we know about the efforts under way to enable a Trump victory by force. 147 Republicans voted to throw out the 2020 election results and none of them have been punished. I think the “3%” militia people may be underestimating the number of people it takes to win a revolution or launch a successful coup, but if you’re more ruthless, more organized and you have 95% of the guns and perhaps a good chunk of the police and military then I would not rule out a “Hand Maids Tale” type of scenario. I have been a bit surprised this past year to see a number of reliable populist left personalities and websites actually start stumping for Trump under a “lesser of evils” apologist type rationale. This already without the threat of violence. The Neville Chamberlain’s are among us now and already prostrating themselves without a shot being fired. I do not think now is the time to be dismissive of the threat posed.
shagggz
I think JerryDenim provides good reason to think Trump 2024 would be very different from Trump 2016. Groundwork has been placed. However, Soredemos is also correct that it is still a choice between poop and shit. Things are so dire that a roll of the dice looks attractive, even if it looks tilted in the direction of making things even worse. Maybe things have to get worse for a chance to get better.
JerryDenim
Things get worse right before they get worse. There’s nothing to suggest anything positive would come of a new American civil war. It could just be another collapse followed by a dark age. Catastrophes don’t always offer renewal. If you have a roof over your head, food to eat and you feel safe going to sleep at night, there’s nothing to be gained from a civil war. The I’d-pol grievances gripping Americans are silly in comparison to what they stand to lose. Even the homeless and dispossessed could be worse off if a new fascist regime deems them to be disposable “useless eaters”. The only people who can reasonably afford to gamble on instigating a civil war are those with a private jet, a second passport and vast liquid assets to ease their arrival in a new home country.
Seattle Resident
The issue I have with people who say that things have to get worse before they get better, i.e., a second Trump President may be good in some way, is that I foresee a second Trump administration (the apparatchiks in particular since Trump is lazy) putting in the institutional Police State framework to totally destroy the change agents who could help things get better – lefty “political dissidents”, will likely be sharing the camps with the illegal immigrants (which will include a lot of legal brown people who look the part). Not to mention instituting some executive orders and legislation to keep itself in power and keep democrats out of power for the foreseeable future.
I can also see the Trump police state apparatus (and some happy as pigs in slop MAGA citizens) dealing with black people in a way similar to what racist white southerners did after the Hayes compromise of 1877. Vigilante attacks on blacks on steroids with a Justice Department that will look the other way.
The present 40 something and up generations will likely be dead or close to dead from climate change before there is a potential for improvement, but if the environment is decimated so that the average person can barely survive, what hope is there?
Daniil Adamov
GrimJim, I’ve never been to any part of America. However, by global and historical standards, the US is an extremely fortunate nation where a majority of people has been unusually safe and comfortable for a very long time. My suspicion, and granted without actual experience it is tenuous, is that this gives rise to luxury beliefs even among the COMPARATIVELY poor; beliefs that would be quickly abandoned by most if an actual societal collapse, something the US had never experienced before, came to the land. Certainly the other comments here, by people who do apparently have some direct experience of America, seem to reinforce my view that far from all of what you say would actually bear much fruit. Yes, even small militias can terrorise much larger numbers of people effectively, but the people you are talking about aren’t the only ones who can form militias, and they really will have to be small, especially in conditions you describe (for reasons of logistics and mass die-off if for no others, though others have been furnished too). I don’t doubt there’s a lot of hate in the US now; I doubt it would survive and thrive for very long outside of the greenhouse conditions in which it has emerged and existed all this time.
Daniil Adamov
To be clear, a civil war isn’t something I’d wish on a country of my worst enemies, nonetheless. I don’t think it would make things “better”, if only because a lot of people wouldn’t be around to enjoy it, and the enjoyment of many others may be soured by all the deaths, especially those of friends and well-liked relatives. Even if there is some positive societal outcome, which I suppose I won’t dismiss but find unlikely. Almost anything else would be preferable.
GrimJim
How in the Hell did anyone get the idea that I think any of this would lead to anything BETTER?!?
There is no end to the Collapse. It is all, always, downhill from here, a vast death spiral. It is not a case of things getting worse before they get better. There will never be better again, ever.
Humanity has peaked, as far as technological and social “advancement.” It is all retrograde from here.
Humanity stared out into the depths of space, got a glimpse of infinite possibilities, envisioned liberation from want and superstition, and almost in a united voice, cried out, “Oh Hell No!” and fled back into their tiny little monkey brain out of fear and mutual loathing.
Some fled so deep they have retreated to the reptile within, eschew all ideals of society, and now cannot view others save as prey.
Humanity is doomed. All that’s left is the unwinding, the Great Endarkening, whole societies seeking thought death, the cold embrace of ignorance where unity destroys individuality and fear stifles thought.
And then, combined with other factors, the end of the species as what is left is exterminated by internal and external factors. The long slow death of a dozen hammers and a thousand cuts.
Left, Right, Centrist, Radical, Moderate, Disinterested. It does not matter. When the economy collapses such that the food factor supports X number of people, and there are 100X people, there will be war. It’s simple math that makes Malthus seem kind.
When the population is reduced to X, production on an industrial scale becomes impossible, shrinking food to Y, when population is at 50Y.
And then there’s loss from climate change, Z.
And so forth. Endlessly down. No recovery, just further crashes down, a brief plateau, and another crash, continually, until n = 0, or close enough that it does not matter.
GrimJim
C1ue “The US has a lot of food – and transportation is still possible after EMP attack, you just need to replace a certain parts.”
Unfortunately that’s science fiction. You can’t make a modern vehicle run just by replacing a single solenoid. There are far too many computerized bits in vehicles today, even diesel trucks, to make it a quick and easy fix.
Besides, even if it was, with the JITS, there’d be maybe enough parts in a shop to repair one truck. More like one truck per three or four shops, as inventories are even lower today.
So, as chaos reigns, you’d have to make a run to four shops to get the parts, just for one truck. Then you have a truck.
Where do you go to get the food? How do you know where the food is ready to be shipped? There is no more Internet, and there are no more phones; all the copper systems were ripped out a decade ago.
If you can find food, how do you purchase it? What do you use for currency? Do you just take it?
Where do you get the gas to keep the truck running? No one is delivering gasoline any more. How do you get back home?
Assuming you somehow got somewhere and got food, how do you get past all the locals in between who want the truckload of food you somehow got?
When you get the truck home, how do you distribute the food? What kind of society remains to when most folks have been without food for a week or more?
Most Post-Apocalypse fiction is just that, complete fiction. Jericho, for example, which tried to show done effects of an EMP, was still such a terrible joke. One little shop with a scrappy kid who found a train full of goods and somehow that kept a whole town running with people doing… What, exactly? Walking around pretending life was normal on 10% normal rations? Everyone still clean and tidy. Ha!
The YA PA stuff is the worst. Even with the science mostly wrong, they need to reshow The Day After and Threads. Road Warrior was most accurate, but even then not realistic, as it was centered around the last working oil well in Australia.
Where were the marauders getting the gasoline to run their vehicles?
Gas only lasts so long before it breaks down. Usually up to six months (and worse, three months for modern ethanol blends), up to a year for diesel. And they were somehow mixing gas and diesel!?!
Nope nope nope. Road Warrior societies will only survive where oil is still easily gotten and refined, and there are enough old vehicles to be refurbished and jury rigged… Say, Texas and parts of the Great Plains, certain areas of the Midwest. And then as parts go and cannot be replaced, this go the road warriors…
GrimJim
Some food for thought on hunting after the Collapse.
Hunting won’t last long before most animals in the USA are locally extirpated, if not exterminated.
Wisconsin, for example, has about 1,800,000 deer… And officially, about 800,000 hunters. That keeps the population somewhat in check when there are hunting limits on time and kills.
No time limits, no kill limits, and every family needing every bit if food they can get?
Deer would become endangered in Wisconsin in a matter of weeks.
What happens when the local fauna is all but extinct?
Where do people go to get their protein?
somecomputerguy
I respectfully disagree that the reason more people didn’t starve to death during the Great Depression was that “20% lived on a farm”. I believe that 20% is nowhere near enough.
Until the 1900s more than half the U.S. populations was rural. I believe that is why economic depressions didn’t result in didn’t end in famines, as they frequently do elsewhere. Amartya Sen was awarded a Nobel for showing that famines often aren’t caused by a shortage of food, they are caused buy shortage of cash to buy the food.
What happens is that the price of labor falls below the subsistence level. It is a feature of laissez-faire markets, and completely self-correcting; once enough people starve to death, the supply of labor decreases and the price of labor goes back up.
If you are unemployed in a laissez-faire, free-market society, you don’t eat. At 25% that was many millions of people. When FDR took office, any and all private sector alternatives had long since been exhausted or overwhelmed.
The Great Depression would have been the Great American Famine, without the New Deal.
Nix Tamale
Just in case, folks living in the suburbs might want to think twice about killing all those edible weeds in the front yard with lawn chemicals. Purslane, pig weed, wild plantain and dandelion are a lot more nutritious than grass.
Carborundum
It is not a mystery why you guys keep getting owned politically.
Willy
No communist who doesn’t worry about Trump’s single most defining feature, a complete disregard for the Rule of Law, is going to be taken very seriously. But then, Trump’s handlers choosing him to discipline the fascist holy trifecta (military, corporate, religion) into cohesively backing them, are going to be taken very seriously either.
shagggz
On balance, as a chaos agent, Trump disrupts the current commitment towards geopolitical irreconcilability. On a long enough timeline we’re all dead, but this would seem to postpone that inevitability.