Why wouldn’t it lead to more cohesion? The discourse becomes more entrenched and settler nightmares become easier to wield making action easier to mobilize or imagine. The future becomes more and more certain. This is how American history has always worked and it’s how American politics has developed. I wish more people understood this place before speaking on it.

for all the “blue state, red state” divisions- both sides’ spread across the country know no borders; the comparison of the “slave state, free state” does not exist.

In other words, things aren’t really that dire for the empire, like I said. (Although if you look at oil backed attempts to dictate how shadow banks invest you will find some striking geographic, class divisions brewing even if they are not like the mid 19th century) Furthermore, the slave-free question was not about the merrits of slavery, it was about unified expansion. Your fixation on industry in the Civil War misses the point that the Civil War marks the most rapid expansionary period in US history all despite the turmoil of speculation driven depression and political polarity.

I don’t care about your country, actually

You flatter me

that same industry has been gutted into a shadow

This is an exhausting narrative that is rarely wielded correctly. I’ll just say one thing to blow it up. Oil.

As for the apparent victims of “globalization,” none of this is new to US history. We blow up our economic systems pretty routinely. There are dead mines and ghost towns dating back nearly 200 years yet it hasn’t truly harmed the empire yet and it’s not clear that the overplayed narrative about the rust belt, or rural communities, will be anything more than more of the same. It’s not like those regions are not being actively gentrified as we speak anyway.

Further, the tensions of the civil war are not the only tense moment in US history that led to massive expansion. So was the great depression. Gee now how did that turn out? Roll the war footage, Jerry.

one side happens to be overwhelmingly representing US industry and production- agriculture, domestic industry, etc… and the other side is the financier/managerial class which has been starving out the former, or exporting it overseas for its own profit

Its not that simple. We literally mined all the best iron already. The steel industry died of natural causes and that shit isn’t coming back regardless of how nefarious finance is or isn’t. Golden ages don’t last forever, especially when they are inherently extractive and imperial, this is something the US “working class” doesn’t seem to understand and it’s partially because this false bourgeoisie narrative that coddles industrialists can only breed reaction. US prosperity cannot and never will be legitimate and looking to the past is meant to breed nostalgia for a reset, which is exactly the cohesion the US seeks and it’s exactly where we are headed.

Unless by “cohesion” you mean jackboots on the ground, not beyond the official borders of the empire, but within the continental USA…

This has already been the case for literally centuries.

I’d go so far as to describe it as the likely “great filter” humanity must overcome, lest we face extinction.

Yet, unsurprisingly, it’s structure and history has evaded you.