(starts from https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/561/State-of-the-World-2026-with-Bru-page06.html#post138 and goes through #145)
If you're American, you don't need a summarized briefing from ChatGPT to get it about American collapse. Just watch the romantic blockbuster movie, "Gone With the Wind." That movie is hugely popular in the former-Yugoslavia. I had to look at it with Belgrade eyes on to figure out what the film was about. Of course it's all about state-failure. "Everything Jefferson Davis Touches Dies."It's not "the wind" that destroys Scarlett O'Hara's stately and privileged white-chick life. It's her unjust social order underwritten by slavery, first of all. But it's also about ethnonationalism, and the obscurantist grip of a hick religion, and a stark, denialist unwillingness to realize that the skeptics are quite right about the infrastructural advantrages of all those enemy railroads and cannon-factories. They're owned by the people who shouldn't even by your enemies, but you're eaten up with blind resentment and you can't adapt.
It's actually "Gone With the Ignorance, the Aggression and the Administrative Incompetence." That doesn't fit on the marquee banner.
What's the worst-case scenario in "Gone With The Wind?" (he said, licking his chops in standard WELL SoTW fashion). Well, here it is. You're Scarlett O'Hara. Your dad is mentally ill and lacks health insurance. You're underwater on the mortgage on the big Tara McMansion. So you decide to fake-up a posh costume and go to the only guy can hit-up for ready money. He's a smuggler and a war profiteer. Also he's in jail. But he's got that cash and you need it.
So you sashay over to Rhett's jail all Mar-a-Lago Face, doing your crypto-banker please-launder-my-money thing. You offer to prostitute yourself to Rhett to make the needful real-estate payoff. But Rhett sees through your bullshit, because he's seen a thousand Trump-doxy liars like you — a defeated nation of women, reduced to your squalid level. He tells you to your made-up face that you're not even worth it.
"The personal is political" and this is the personal aspect of state-collapse. This is how it impinges on the personal lived experience. Your privilege, your identity, your pride and your sense of self-worth all collapse, and instead of being sexy Scarlett from Tara, you're just stripped-down: personally, socially and culturally. You're like a naked two-legged beast standing just outside a jail-cell.
But if you don't violently poison or shoot yourself (that's especially common behavior in failing societies that happen to be fascist), you do not die from the shame, remorse and general deep anxiety. You won't think about your situation clearly (you're still too pious and too much of a denialist to achieve any cultural-analytical objectivity), but you dump the hoop-skirt and you go work in the lumberyard. You become a "rubble woman," post World-War-II style.
After the collapse, there's a lot to rebuild, and that's what involves you. You might even marry the too-truthful guy after he leaves the jail cell. He always knew you were a raw, two-legged beast under the lace, so he's cool with your harsh but appetite-driven realities. He can deal with a courtier lady if he has to (a "lady" is your best-frenemy, Melanie, the hapless child-of-privilege who never catches on and dies from lack of contraception), but your guy's a pirate captain. He's at his ease in a feral, transitional society. Your everything collapsed and it blew away in the smoking breeze. Eventually it turned out there was a different, rougher, regretful-but-real everything. You wouldn't have chose it, or voted for it. But you survived.
That's not a great movie in terms of its world-cinematic auteur virtues, but it does portray what happens. The Red States are the Confederacy. Invading Minneapolis might be their Gettysburg, or it might invading Denmark or whatever, but it's not gonna work out. Ethnocentric civil war and wild acts of embezzlement didn't work out in Yugoslavia, either, which is why they really love that movie.
It's awful to contemplate life in a post-fascist state, but the lived reality is different than the worst imaginings. I spend a lot of time in Italy, which is *the* post-fascist state among them all. Spain, where I'm writing, is also a post-fascist state. Ibiza, the hippie Lotus-Eater island of languid ease here, used to be the offshored political prison where Franco exiled the gays and the leftists.
Life is not so bad or sinister in Italy and Spain nowadays. They have a high quality of life and extensive lifespans, even though dreadful things have happened in those polities. They don't have "American exceptionalism," but neither does America; they just thought they did.
Tomorrow is another day.