It's a polygot culture lucky enough to ride a couple of centuries of geographic, population, economic, industrial and technological growth, with no real sense of the deeper feedback loops that countries and culture in the Old World have to fall back on. It's probably safe to say the US will really start to break up, as the dollar turns to confetti and the states have to step in and issue local currencies.

When you are talking hundreds of millions of people, it's not politics, it's biology. The old is becoming like a scab, slowly peeling away, as it becomes ever more rigid and disconnected, the new just staring on in wonder and a lot of sorting is going on in the middle.