We're the poorest rich country in the world. We have lots of wealthy individuals and an impoverished commons. The latter was looted by the former. https://twitter.com/willwilkinson/status/1247881635942539264

The United States is not a commonwealth, but a confederation. Does it still make sense to say that a Californian is an American in the same way a Georgian is? That sense of being in a shared national community is gone.

The US wealthy have a shared set of interests, goals and norms that don't have much to do with the rest of us. They have no loyalty or sense of duty to the nation. Like Elon Musk, they'll just buy legal citizenship elsewhere when shit gets really bad.

Some political scientists have been kicking around the idea of city-states once again becoming the predominant political unit. If the federal government continues down this path of becoming a pirate state actively hostile to big cities....

Why should New York and Los Angeles continue to contribute disproportionately to federal coffers if the federal government refuses to aid them during emergencies?

This thread has wandered a bit because my thoughts about these things are still inchoate. I think we are seeing in real-time multiple ways that the nation-state is being undermined, from above and below, and from private and public actors.

I do feel safe in asserting that the pandemic is concentrating & accelerating preexisting economic, social, technological and political trends. I don't know what the world will look like at the end of this. But 'normal' is gone. Our leaders need to proceed accordingly