3 - 10 years
I say this because climate change and the Holocene extinction are going to be a lot worse than people realize. There is going to be more disease, more fire. Capitalism's rabid growth and consumption has started hell on earth. That's not cope, I don't actually want it to happen that way because it's not just the US that will collapse, it's all of us, humans, animals, plants. That's my opinion as a training ecologist. It is so much worse than what they're telling you.
This isn't just about economics or war anymore. There are different forces at play than with other falling empires.
Defining collapse, to me this means US balkanization.
IMO it will happen when the US gets a few large scale climate related disasters like the Texas snowstorm etc but over a dozen(more than 1 a month) going on continuously for about 3-5 years would be enough to destroy the country.
I believe it is a certainty because the US government is not capable of mobilizing resources to deal with these disasters, at the end of the day the capitalist class will not allow it. This already happens anyway, Puerto Rico got fucked and Trump withheld resources, nothing was done anyway. You'll be told to leave or flee or get fucked. Everyone will cheer when Florida goes underwater but will they deal with the consequences of mass migration etc? You can expect headlines like this in the future Trump complains to senators that Puerto Rico is getting too much hurricane relief funding If this isn't a sign of collapse than what is it? The "richest" nation in the world counting pennies for disaster relief while e.g giving unlimited no questions asked funding for the military.
Anyway as for the timeline, well climate change is showing signs of nothing except getting worse, nothing is being done and nothing will be done until it is too late, you can look into solar reflection is the goto example, I am all but convinced the US will do it unilaterally and fuck up everything because literaly better to gamble the fate of the world than to talk about changing capitalism, degrowth etc.
So if you want a date? It is hard to say, we are on the very pessimistic path, you can look at all the depressing headlines if you want confirmation, everything is always "faster than expected" or "scientists shocked" etc even accounting for the usual MSM sensationalism this message is even stronger among the academic circles, before 2050 is already quite likely, but almost certainly "collapse" will happen before 2080.
Climate change dictates this will happen and to argue against it like saying its "cope" and whatnot would be saying that a country going through multiple disasters and mass migrations has not collapsed yet because technically there are still 50 states and some geriatric dipshit 80 year in sitting on a table somewhere being called a "president".
Long enough to outlast your youth and the best years of your life, if you still are in the prime of it.
At least one more century just going off of historical examples, the most recent one being the British Empire/UK
probably before i would be able to get money out of a retirement account
This reminds me of how there's multiple dates that historians place the end of the Roman Empire at and all say something slightly different. The date picked creates a certain interpretation for the end of the empire. For example, some often use the moving of the capital to Constantinople under Constantine (i think like 310-ish AD) as the end of the Empire in the sense of a cohesive entity centered in Rome as we think of it. The Western Empire still existed for 100+ years and the Eastern Empire for like a 1,000 years after that. I think that paints an interesting picture of what decline looks like on that scale.
Timeframes in the modern era are sped up for a lot of reasons (communications tech, and climate change mostly) but its really hard to put a timeline on something like decline and collapse, even in history, let alone when trying to predict future
In a lot of ways, i feel that what American Balkanization is going to look like has already occured to a significant degree. The Federal government took little real action or responsibility during COVID, and is choosing inaction as a minority party overturns abortion rights ceding more power to states. They're also inactive while wild slates of anti-trans laws get passed in the most reactionary states and their extreme abortion restrictions. The Federal government's policy is basically "your on your own
citizensconsumers." I think that process will continue, but i think it looks more like this than states breaking away and forming new countries. I think the federal government will continue to be a middle man for collecting and dispersing tax dollars and running the military to keep the war economies going and facilitate imperialism. When the US can no longer do the later
we'll be deep in collapse. Hard to imagine when it will be, or what that will look likeSomething i noticed in Texas thst i think highlights another aspect of this process. The US has a rural urban divide in political affiliation. In Texas the Republican stare government has been trying to extert more power over the major city governments that are run by democrats. They withheld Federal disaster relief money from Harris County (Houston) after Hurricane Harvey and recently took over Houston's school district. No federal intervention on these overstepping of powers.
Gotta define collapse.
The domestic system of governance? Already collapsing.
The ability of the state to project military power? A decade or two for most of the world, an extra decade for South America.
A formal entity called the United States with structure derived from its constitution? Could be a thousand years.
If collapse is defined as swathes of the country either being abandoned or placed under indefinite martial law and if current trends in terms of housing, education, health, wages, pollution, infrastructure and climate change continue
Then around 20-25 years, 10-15 years if the worse case scenarios for climate change become reality
Byzantium lasted for 1100 years.
Going based on pure vibes and ass-pulling:
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Irreversible decline: We are here.
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"The sick man of [continent]": By 2050s.
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Losing most imperial possessions: A few decades after "The sick man of [continent]"
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Minor Balkinization (secessionist movements): ~2070s
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Major Balkinization (rump state surrounded by successor republics): 2100-2110s
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Formal end of these United States of America: The rump state could easily truck along for centuries, especially if one of the successor republics manages to conquer the rump state and retroactively claims itself as a continuation of the rump state.
My vibes-based analysis is unable to incorporate climate change into its analysis, but climate change will obviously speed up the timeline.
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Long term possibility (aka 'the bad ending') is that the fash project comes to full fruition and the US is able to circle the wagons in the north and stay alive another 50 years before the full biosphere collapse.
Short term possibility (but not a 'good ending') is that a black swan event happens, like a nuclear exchange or a devastating disaster like the clathrate gun going off, and supply chains are disrupted so heavily and so fast that the federal government can't maintain power. This I could see happening ten years from now.
What does that look like to you? The US's capacity for imperialist projection is currently retracting rather quickly. Is that collapse? Does it need to be totally incapable of anything other than local projection?
Or is this internal? Truly dramatic political change? Revolution? An end to the formal entity The United States of America? Food systems failure?
About 47 minutes, if we're lucky.
Sooner than you'd think, longer than you'd expect
Too fucking long
at least 10 minutes idk
Long enough to kill us all
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The country itself won't collapse anytime soon. But it will probably balkanize and become a smaller version of itself in the coming future. I could see that happening by the end of this century or earlier.
Not in my lifetime (genX) nor my kids lifetime.
Decline is happening but will take a while for collapse.
5 long
how long? NOT LONG. because what you reap... is what you sow...
depends on what you mean by "collapse." i think we're probably going to see a constitutional amendment that essentially declaws most or all of the non-military powers of the federal government in the next 50 years. i think we're already seeing the mass social murder of the poor, and i believe it will escalate without stopping as long as it doesn't touch the middle class.
less than you think
Somewhere between two years and two millenia
I think this baby's got a lot of juice still kickin' in her. Probably at least another 50-60 years.
If we mean secessionist movements start breaking off, I feel like it’s be anywhere from very late 20s-early 30s if a full economic depression hits, or the 50s/60s if it declines at a linear pace
Going to copy my answer from lemmygrad
The US has many years left. If anything, Europe will "collapse" before the US as the USA consumes it through the process of vassalisation to keep itself alive. First the US will try win the the inter imperial rivalry between itself and it's allies (the EU and it's biggest member states, Australia, South Korea, Japan), which seems to be going well on the EU front given the Ukraine war. The EU is being successfully vassalised and has lost energy independence after the nordstream gas pipeline bombings, and is being forced to give it's current weaponry to Ukraine, and buy US made weapons to replace those outgoing arms. Then the US will shift focus to China, and try to beat them.
I know people want to be optimistic, but the US is still a superpower. If you asked communists in the 1950s and early 60s, they probably also thought that the US had little time left, given the progress of the USSR, the rise of anti colonial movements, and the US still struggling massively with internal issues. But in the end, it was the USSR that collapsed, and the neoliberals got their "end of history" moment, until 9/11 happened.
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Depends on your definition of collapse; with proper rebranding, what America becomes can still be defined as successful and thriving provided the right image is being sold to the public.
And yes, I'm saying fools can be living under a leaky roof, under constant threat of eviction, no promise of where their next meal is coming, no promise the roof will still be there next week, half competent healthcare, etc. and the prevailing opinion will still be "They WISH they had this in China!"
This isn't to insult the working class, but to mock the liberals and reactionaries who form the majority of the voting base for whom this is absolutely the way their brains work. You can only blame the propaganda so far before you have to ask why they're still listening to people whose lives are infinitely better than their own (MSM propagandists) and who haven't felt the touch of poverty.
