Of course these things take time ... but the US has never gone through a 75 year period without a major change in the order of things, so sometime in the next twenty years we are probably due. Whether we ride it out successfully or not is in the right people seeing which is the right side of the fight and then winning it.

A hollow shell center, as in the ancien regime of the DRC when it was the rotting nation-state of Zaire, is one possible outcome of failing to pick the right fight or to win it, but then the DRC is more akin to the US between the mountains (I guess that would make New Orleans equal to Kinshasa) than to the whole US. In the case of a hollow shell center, I'd expect the center would fail to hold.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.