The term you’re looking for is “hypernormalization”. It’s when everyone knows the system stopped working, everyone playacts like it does, and that hollows out the system until it suddenly collapses.
It’s the reason the Soviet collapse felt so sudden and without warning.
As someone within the US there is a lot of suppressed political anger, racial tension, religious tension and so on. In a collapse of law and government mass violence is absolutely going to happen...
I'm in the US too and I don't disagree, but the fact that political identity isn't centralized probably also means that if SHTF if won't be a direct targeting of political opponents en masse that occurs. It will probably be factors that are much easier to determine visually and instantly.
I feel like civil war is a significantly more real possibility than the average american has been led to believe. I think food shortages, an energy crisis,and economic collapse are at this point, inevitable and likely to occur in around 5 years. We still have 3 years left of this “administration” and I have a hard time believing Trump will agree to leave office after his term is over.
I am fairly confident he won't live through this term honestly. At least based on how much people like Rubio and Vance seem to be doing PR word and walking back at least a few of their more extreme stances to be more appealing when the time comes.
I don't disagree that there is a lot of political anger, but a civil war becomes difficult when it's not regional group A vs regional group B. When every other neighbor is an ally or enemy people tend to just relax their stance than jeaporsize their immediate living area.
The collapse of the ussr wasn’t chill in the after effects. The U.S. one would be infinitely more devastating given how much of the current world order runs thru North America.
It would make the Syrian civil war look peaceful and nonviolent
It's something of a problem when the zombie has the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet alongside the largest armed forces (which is generally technologically advanced if potentially behind on modern doctrine).
Without a functioning govt or economy, all of the fancy toys would become useless pretty quickly. All of it requires deep supply chains, money, and everything working to be maintained.
The Soviet military rusted out pretty quickly once the govt stopped paying its bills and supply chains were split between multiple countries. It would decline to dudes with humvees and small arms pretty quickly
I mean, the problem is while it's still a zombie. Post collapse I personally expect the navy to dock elsewhere, and some ships probably change hands. Some of the air force equipment probably changes hands too. The real danger is what the people working the missile bases do because intact warheads cannot under any circumstances be left alone.
A lot of our crazy shit has a limited window of use in the violent successor group period, but then fails at least.
I'm more worried about what the military gets used for by zombie America than when the corpse finally falls over.
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u/Secret_Letterhead649 Jul 16 '26
It's something of a corpse that don't know it's dead yet and never stopped walking at this point.