The Devolution of the United States

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 4

God made man

But He used the monkey to do it

Apes in the plan

We're all here to prove it

I can walk like an ape, talk like an ape

I can do what a monkey can do

God made man

But a monkey supplied the glue

The Sunday Reader, April 28, 2024

What is the value of Chicago for Texans?

Oh, sure, Chicagoans are good for a laugh, what with their eccentricities like insisting that their tomato-filled kiddie pool of a casserole is actually a pizza. Adding “deep dish” as a qualifier doesn’t change the fact that it’s a soup tureen made of dough.

What is the value of the Motor City for Texans? Heck, General Motor’s largest plant is hundreds of miles south of Detroit in Tennessee. And Texas has GM’s Arlington Plant: 3.75 million square feet of auto factory churning out Chevy Suburbans (AKA Texas Cadillacs), Cadillac Escalades (Suburbans in Cadillac trim) and GMC Yukons (Cadillac Escalades without Cadillac badges so businesses can buy them without a lot of awkward questions).

What is the value of St. Louis to Texans?

None of this is in any way a knock on those cities, because when you reverse the questions you get the same answers. What is the value of Texas to Chicagoans? To Detroiters? To St. Louis? To Bostonians?

To San Franciscans?

A century ago all these questions had easy answers. In the lull between World War I and World War II the loose confederation of American states began to pull together, and the federal government started to grow exponentially. These trends exploded with the advent of World War II as the United States became the Arsenal of Democracy, which enabled the United States to lead the allies to victory in that conflict, and then the Cold War that followed.

By the end of the century the Cold War was won, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the United States of America stood alone as the world’s sole superpower and the premier power of the Industrial Age.

Which promptly ended.

The states ceded power to the federal government because it was worth the tradeoff to get the Economies of Scale that won World War II and the Cold War. But Economies of Scale was the iron law that ruled the Industrial Age; now that we are entering the Information Age, the value is simply gone.

This has led to anger and conflict and much speculation that there will be another Civil War. But there won’t be; the Civil War was the first great Industrial Age conflict, and that time is over. What happens next will be an artifact of the Information Age.

More importantly, the opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference. And as the Information Age unfolds the hard truth is that federalism has less and less to offer and is sliding into irrelevancy.

Just as the United States evolved into a tight federal system, it is now devolving into a more granular, loosely coupled organization.

Consider Greg Abbott.

Saul Alinsky would have loved Greg Abbott.

Alinsky was a community organizer, a political philosopher, and the author of Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.

https://amzn.to/3WoNEVQ

The 1971 book rapidly became the bible for community organizers, grassroot movements and, of course, radicals. It has since been embraced by governments, Non-Government Organizations, political parties, corporate marketing departments…pretty much everyone who wants to influence public opinion.

There are 13 Alinsky rules:

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."
2. "Never go outside the expertise of your people."
3. "Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy."
4. "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules."
5. "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."
6. "A good tactic is one your people enjoy."
7. "A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag."
8. "Keep the pressure on."
9. "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."
10. "The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition."
11. "If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative."
12. "The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative."
13. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

Someone in Austin – Abbott? An ally? An aide? – must have been reading Alinsky as the Texas state government fought the federal government over how to handle the tides of people illegally crossing the border into Texas. Chicago, Denver, New York and other cities had declared themselves sanctuaries.

Time to make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, which offered border crossers free bus tickets to the sanctuary city of their choice. In the two years since it launched, more than 100,000 border crossers migrated to sanctuary cities, including more than 30,000 to Chicago and 37,000 to New York City.

City officials were not amused. In January New York City’s mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, visited El Paso, Texas and criticized the federal government’s handling of the border, saying he?was “extremely disappointed” in the fed’s lack of urgency in responding to this “man-made crisis” and urged the administration to take action on immigration.

But a good tactic is one your people enjoy; since Texas started Operation Lone Star other border states have jumped on the proverbial bus. Florida even sent a planeload of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, where local officials re-migrated them off island within 48 hours, which resulted in world-wide ridicule.

But this is not an article about the difficult and convoluted border question. This is an article about the fact that Texas apparently now has its own foreign policy, both over the national border and over internal US borders with other states.

But Texas is full of Texans, right? It’s not like California is treating, say, Iowa the way the US treats Chile…is it?

Actually, California went down this road before Texas. And crashed.

In 2016 California passed a bill forbidding state-funded travel to states that California officials designated as targeting LGBTQ people. The idea was that California’s economic muscle would force other states to follow the Golden State’s laws. The ban covered state elected and appointed officials, state employees, academics, and even athletes at California universities.

The ban was a complete and other failure, to put it mildly. The list started with North Carolina. Rather than being forced to follow California, by 2023 26 of the 49 other states had gone their own way and ended up subject to the California travel ban.

Last fall California surrendered, and repealed the travel ban law.

They should have read Alinsky’s book.

Again, the validity of any of these laws is outside the purview of Perfecting Equilibrium. The point is that California set up and enforced its own rules for interstate commerce. Other states fought back and forced California to back down.

This would not be much of a story if it was a conflict between Australia and Argentina. But we’re talking about California and the Carolinas. Or, in the bussing story, Texas and New York.

Here’s the real key: notice that the federal government is uninvolved in both conflicts.

Isn’t the federal government charged by the U.S. Constitution with the regulation of interstate commerce?

The law is a compact among the people who are governed. The foundation of the law is that the vast majority of those people will follow it voluntarily.

When they stop, the system collapses, no matter how many enforcers try to turn the tide.

It’s a question of numbers. There are more than 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the US. There are 2.8 million members of the military.

There are roughly 340 million Americans.

That’s the problem. States are simply ignoring the federal government, leaving the feds impotent and sidelined.

Abbott and Texas have been the most militant. Abbott sent the Texas National Guard into Eagle Pass, and have blocked the feds from the area. Texas laced the Rio Grande with a floating buoy barrier last year; the federal government has been suing ever since to get it removed.

The buoys are still there.

But perhaps the most indicative sign of the state of things is the tit-for-tat razer wire border competition. Texas started barricading the border with razor wire. The feds responded by cutting up the wire.

Texas went to court and got a restraining order that prevented the feds from breaching the wire barriers. The feds appealed all the way the US Supreme Court, which in February vacated the restraining order.

That restored the original United States of Kayfabe professional wrestling bout. Texas remained free to put up all the wire it wants. The Federal Government remained free to cut up all the wire it wants.

The only real losers are the taxpayers footing the bill to put up all that wire, and then another bill to tear it down.

But these conflicts have all the pomp and ceremony of a WrestleMania bout. Immigration and the border are hot political topics this year, so both sides are posturing like The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin pumping the audience and selling tickets for their big match.

The real future is California’s efforts to dictate interstate commerce. All sides simply ignored the federal government and dealt with each other directly.

Entropy is the strongest force in the universe. Without the Industrial Age benefits of economies of scale, the vast edifices that powered manufacturing economies like the United States are breaking down. Without those benefits, the bonds fade into a loose coupling. States are acting more and more independently, and the Federal Government has less ability to respond.

In the end, the opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference. The states are becoming indifferent to the federal government. There’s not much the federal government can do about it, beyond slowly sliding into irrelevancy.

And that’s the other reason there will be no second Civil War. Why fight someone you can just ignore?

Next on Perfecting Equilibrium

Tuesday April 30th?- The PE Digest:?The Week in Review and Easter Egg roundup

Thursday May 2nd?- The PE Vlog:?We’re continuing to build Virtual Grad Student, a Large Language Models — AI — running locally on our own curated data to form a virtual writer’s assistant. For example, to pull together a few paragraphs of background on Roman aqueduct architecture. This week we’re organizing data for our h2oGPT Large Language Model.

Friday May 3rd?- Foto.Feola.Friday

Sunday May 5th — About that time I lost an argument with an article I’d written the previous week