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Your problem will be when 10 million people come trampling over your town.
It won’t be pretty.

Civil wars never are. The first civil war took four years of active fighting. Its completely destroyed the south, devastated its population and culture, and left its economy in ruins. It took the US almost 40 years (1898) for the political wounds to recover from the first one. And the southern economy didn't catch back up to the north until after WWII, and then only because of the wholesale industrialization required to fight the war.

That is what we are looking at if this comes apart, except it won't be just the southeastern part of the country, but every state in the union, except perhaps Alaska and Hawaii that could just sit it out. Winning this at the ballot box is far preferable to any sort of uprising. My point was just that if it happens the cities will have the numbers, but the countryside has the resources.

The problem hasn't come up until now because the cities had surplus wealth, created by their control of manufacturing and trade, and could buy the resources the needed. For years taxes have flowed from the high density stats to the low population density states. That was not accidental, it was a payment to keep the raw materials necessary for the big urban centers flowing freely. Pork lubricates the wheels of commerce most effectively.

But now the big urban centers, and high population density states are broke. Manufacturing has either moved out of the cities, or out of the country entirely. The taxes on the stock exchanges and traders are based on their ability to turn a profit, and recently they haven't been. New York, California, Illinois and Michigan can't afford to send anything to anyone, in fact they are all looking for bailouts. This is even more pronounced when you break it down to the county level. Also the country side is broke too, and will want to extract more money for their resources at the exact time the urban areas are less able to pay. The cities will be forced to either grant concessions to the countryside, essentially allowing the countryside to determine what services and benefits the cities can provide, or try to take those resources them by force. Note that this is exactly what is happening now, but politically. Conservatives, suburban and rural, want to dictate to the cities how much they can spend. Liberals, urban areas, want to confiscate resources and give them to their people in order to stay in power.

Iraq, USSR, Yugoslavia and the US Civil war were geographic. Two distinct and separate parts of the country, one, or more, fighting to break away. But any uprising her will be more like Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cuba, China or any of the Central American uprisings. The cities are easy to control. The central government establishes control of the cities and tries to move into the countryside. The rebels go to ground and attack the infrastructure. Eventually the economy completely collapses, destroying the central governments power base. Finally, the are starved into submission and overrun one by one.

It was pure numbers that won the civil war. The Irish were conscripted as soon as they got off their boats.

There is still manufacturing being done in the cities today. Not as much as years ago though.

It was the invention of air conditioning and cheap southern labor that brought manufacturing to the south. There was never really any manufacturing being done before WWII or before the Civil War in the south.

The governments in most cities are broke which really means that they can't fund their public pensions. If they converted to 401k’s the revenue problem would end tomorrow.

Manufacturing as a whole in this country is smaller percentage of the total economy and cities have about the same amount of manufacturing as the rest of the country.

This is a crazy post by the way, I saw similar ones on D.U.

The south's economy in the Civil War was devastated because it no longer had cheap slave labor to work it's fields.