“With all due respect for the FR preppers here, in a “Mad Max” future your survival will be contingent on membership in a powerful tribe.”
I think history shows this to be true. Without govt people band into groups headed by a warlord. These groups fight amongst themselves and get larger by assimilation of weaker groups until their are only one or a few. Loners have no chance. I hate to say this but the preppers with dozens of ARs, many thousands of rounds of ammo, and all the food and tac gear they can muster will probably be dead before they can empty their first magazine.
“With all due respect for the FR preppers here, in a “Mad Max” future your survival will be contingent on membership in a powerful tribe.”
At lower levels, there are the State governments.
Lower than that are the County Sheriffs and self forming militias organizing around them.
Alternatively, city or neighborhood self organizing militias.
The U.S.A. has a long history of self organizing and a easily followed blueprint to rebuild that organization.
It would take a powerful destructive force to overcome this self-organization.
Maybe an all-out nuclear war could do it; Maybe a successful EMP strike that took down the power grid for a year; Maybe a successful conventional conquest.
All of them are pretty unlikely. Even the total nuclear war and EMP scenarios are very likely to result in the local/state/national government rising from the ashes, because it is what people know, they know it works, and it would be a wonderful rallying point.
A conventional conquest has to overcome that organization to start with in order to succeed.
Organization is a force multiplier.
Negan agrees.