If you have conservative reps you could try calling and writing their office and demand they compromise on health care. With enough pressure they will cave.

If you have progressive reps call and congratulate them and tell them not to stop until the conservatives start participating in governance

Many of your later questions would rely on too much conjecture to answer. The simple truth is this unprecedented and we don't know what is going to happen.

I share many of your concerns as many people here do.

Well California is just making their own equivalent of federal programs. So if you are on the west coast you are doing better than most.

The U.S. balkanizing is what I expect to occur sometime in the next few decades. Divisions have just grown so strongly that there already are functionally a few different Americas, even if we're still bound together for now.

In terms of the current shutdown though, I suspect it will last through Thanksgiving, and we will see the mother of all air traffic catastrophes. Multiple high profile crashes, tons of airports fully shutdown, lots of airspace shutdown, all amidst one of the busiest travel times of the year. Afterwards, there will be enough pressure to get the Reps to agree to a clean continuing resolution, which will fund the govt through January, and then we'll do the whole song and dance again.

The long term is typically what happens to empires like Rome or Britain: a slow, whiny, unstable decline into obscurity until everyone eventually leaves.

Rome had so many civil wars, imperial overextension, political instability, famines, and an inability to cope with disasters, that by the time it fell, it hollowed out to like < 1% of its peak population.

/end doomposting

Personally I have no inclination for a government that, has paramilitary grabbing folks on the streets and renditioning to literally devil knows where as they will refuse to say where people have been sent, to be running. It can be shutdown forever as it stands now.

Long term you should probably come up with a system that doesn't fail like this by something like a government shutdown...

We don't really know. I expect things to degrade until we hit a constitutional crisis of some form.

Could try !AskUSA@discuss.online too

At this point just scrap the current government and start fresh. The current administration is a joke.

There won't be a long term. The mid term would see enough people out of work or without resources for food/shelter etc that they will resort to alternative means of acquiring resources which will then give the administration the excuse it needs to enact martial law

...and that will be that

Could we finally have a revolution by that point? Because I'm about tired of just talking and thinking of a revolution. We should've had about three big ones by this point.

You could ask your state/cities (those with income taxes like NYC) to undertake a federal tax strike where all taxes are owed to local jurisdiction, and all payroll exemptions are directed to the local jurisdiction.

Thank you, everyone who responded.