The risk of undoing progress so quickly is only possible after nearly a century spent centralizing the very authority that makes a quick undo possible.

The executive branch shouldn't have nearly as much authority as it does and anything we want to be difficult to be undone should be protected by law, with a legislative body needing something akin to a 2/3s vote to change it.

Instead we have a massive, powerful executive branch and legislators that can wield way too much power with a simple majority.

"for people to find solidarity"

That's not going to happen with the way tech/algos are exacerbating the divide.

The problem right now isn’t the rich. The problem is that half of the electorate is on board with this stuff. You can’t rally the people against this when half the population is in favor of it.

I’m sure there’s a good argument that wealthy people and a broadening wealth divide are responsible for this, but it’s too late to attack that now. We need a huge shift in public sentiment if this is going to change now.

Even if the outcome had been different in November. We’d still be in deep trouble. A lot less, but still a lot. The fundamental problem we have right now isn’t that Trump is President, it’s that about 50% of those who bother to vote think he’s worthy of it.

I never thought that. They have always just played along with society. When LGBT rights were fashionable, they were more than happy to jump on that bandwagon and rainbow wash everything for money. Which, is great, don’t get me wrong, but I never thought for one second it was because the leadership truly thought that was important deep down in their hearts (Tim Cook perhaps excepted, but even then not fully, as he still cares about business more than principals, though he has more to lose personally.)

Most authors that look at the subject have usually proposed 3+ groups post-balkanization. Tends to depend on whether it's simply an "After America" balkanization or a complete apocalypse scenario. Table top roleplaying games are full of speculative fiction on those kinds of concepts. Nukes, or zombies, and sometimes black swan "magic" tend to be rather popular.

After America would be like the Fall of the Roman Empire, or the collapse of the Chinese Jin (romance of the three kingdoms) and Tang (five dynasties, ten kingdoms) eras, usually because of human bickering over power and control. Occasionally, systems like Shadowrun have a "mild" apocalypse that mostly serves as a catalyst for balkanization. Whatever vestiges of a state remained fall apart under the stress.

Complete apocalypse tends to be something like large scale devastation from a known threat that final gets used (nuclear, biological, dangerous machine sentience) and everybody's too busy dealing with their own issues to care about larger ideas like a continental federal state of "America."

Either way, tends to result in 3+ most of the time. From looking at the Roman Empire and the multiple collapses of China though, it really does not take anything especially dramatic to result in pretty severe balkanization. Often its the old "Blue and the Grey" divide and then most of the West just does their own thing. Occasionally it's more like East Coast, Heartland, and often the West still is not really included.

The result for the West has actually been one of the weirder parts of reading a lot of those settings. Often this undercurrent that the West has never really been a part of "America." The heavily populated East is still mostly fighting over the same issues with each other, the lightly populated West is just some far away land they occasionally pay attention to (mostly California and Texas).

For this to happen, the US population is probably too old on average, and too overweight.

Civil wars and the like are usually based on youth bulges, as they need a lot of breathing bodies to fight it out. Preferrably slightly hungry bodies, as hungry people are easier to provoke into fighting.