Fred Reed ends a recent column with this:
America is no longer “one nation under God” (who is, I suppose, an undocumented alien). It is an unhappy land of warring tribes, of peoples who have nothing in common and do not like each other. Blacks, whites, browns, Syrians, Somalis, Southerners, Yankees, Christians, mostly detesting each other. The battle lines are drawn. The question is what kind of battle it will be.
I agree with Reed’s “warring tribes” characterization. But mutual detestation will not lead to combat. It will lead to an increasing fragmentation of America into mutually loathing identity groups.
And, as Trumpania makes clear, one result will be more government, not less. Whichever coalition of warring groups is in power, government will expand to fulfill the wishes of that coalition. And the ascension to power of different coalitions will simply lead to the further expansion of government, without any shrinkage of the functions added under previous coalitions.
As I have written elsewhere, the aggrandizement of government in the United States can be characterized by three metaphors: the slippery slope, the ratchet effect, and the death-spiral (of liberty). The Tea Party movement is effectively dead; the true lovers of liberty are a minuscule fraction of the electorate; the thought police are at the door; and with diminished defenses and expanded welfare programs, America is a hair’s-breadth from an economically stagnant, morally bankrupt European-style “social democracy.”
The next administration — or the next one, at most — will finish the job of fundamentally transforming America. Barack Obama certainly did his part, but the transformation has been a long time in the making. And it seems irreversible.
Politics and Prosperity 
George Will once said something like this: If you want to see multiculturalism at work, go to the Balkans. No need to go there, now. The Left has succeeded in “Balkanizing” the good old USA. Soon, it will take a “Marshall Tito” to keep the lid on.
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And it may come to that if enough Americans in the vast, wishy-washy middle get fed up with the wages of “social democracy.”
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I’m glad I am not the only that has felt this way about the good ol’ US of A. I don’t however agree with your assertion that it will lead to more government, at least not in the long term. I think more likely will be an overgrown government and then smaller independent city states with the above factions as head will start popping up. The result would either be war or allowing them to self-govern within the Behemoths borders. self-governance being preferable to the former and will hopefully be the conclusion the government will come to as well.
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I like the idea of self-governing city-states. In fact, I’ve proposed it as an experiment: https://politicsandprosperity.com/2010/06/18/zones-of-liberty/. But as I have said elsewhere, the lovers of big government simply won’t tolerate experiments in liberty. They just want everyone to live by the same rules — their oppressive rules.
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Can you imagine, for example, a Democrat-controlled State allowing wages to be set by markets? I can’t. Consider the minimum wage in California, which is scheduled to rise from a very high $10/hour to a draconian $15/hour. This is all about seeming “compassionate” and “pro-labor,” despite ample evidence that many low-skilled workers will lose their jobs as a result, or never get jobs in the first place.
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