A very large part of the problem is that the United States has only been around for a couple hundred years and it really doesn't have a core culture, beyond growth, to hold it together in the hard times.

We have kept it going with a few decades of compounding debt, but as anyone with a credit card finds out, debt doesn't matter, until it does.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Russia could coalesce back into a core culture. One with varying degrees of relations with the surrounding states.

When the dollar eventually inflates to a fraction of its current value, the United States will be no more, because the common currency is its most foundational bond. The local banking systems have largely been absorbed into the big banks and they have become casinos, with far more debt than real assets, aka, seriously stable loans. So the only institutional structures with the strength to issue new local currencies and develop the banking system to support them, will be state governments. Then they will start to adopt divergent policies and start overriding federalism, such as agreeing to each other's elections.

It may be politics all the way down, but it's economics all the way up.