Finally, I hope you’ll forgive me for some remarks on Right Attitude in your new home, especially if that home is a small conservative town and you are a Blue urbanite. For some this will be very obvious and you may think I’m being condescending, but please believe me that some other people need advice. Lifelong city residents can be just as parochial as rural villagers in their own way. Everyone they know is from the city; they have never met a farmer. (Many urban children actually do not know where tomatoes or potatoes come from.) Better-educated urbanites often have friends and colleagues who are ethnically diverse, but all similarly well-educated; they may never socialize with anyone who isn’t, or have more than a brief conversation with them at the checkout counter or the tire shop. How can they know what behavior is appropriate in a small blue-collar town? Just like a rube going to the big city and unwittingly shaming himself by bristling or sneering at its diversity, city folk in small towns can look like arrogant fools without realizing it. If you get that reputation in your first months, it could take many years to shake it. At worst, if the rural vs. urban cold war turns hot, that could put you in real danger.

In a moment I will talk about how to embed yourself among the residents of your new community, but first let’s think of the community you are leaving behind. If you move away from a place that is likely to face major hardship in the short term, perhaps you will leave behind family or friends who will remain at risk. You may have known these people since childhood; in the best case, your ties with them may be stronger than any new friendships you will ever form. Once you have established yourself somewhere, one of the best things you could do, for yourself and others, is to offer to help selected loved ones to move and get established in the same area.

(This is a continuation of my discussion of employment in times of decline, which was too long to be treated as a single post.)

According to a survey conducted by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System [2019, before the pandemic], 39% of Americans do not have enough savings to pay for an unexpected $400 expense without hardship, such as having to borrow money or failing to pay regular bills. The implication is that most Americans do not have the savings needed to move safely from one formal, legal housing situation into another, unless a new employer agrees to cover the costs. It costs far more than $400 to do that, especially long-distance, especially with a family.

The following text backtracks to present almost all of the last bit of my chapter on selecting a new region to live. It offers answers to a few questions that could be asked in response to my suggestion that migrants should select their destinations with an eye to the possible geographic outlines and politics of successor nations following the collapse of the United States. If you are confident that the scenario of breakup within your lifetime is ridiculous, then you may wish to ignore this topic.

However, the country is so severely divided that one of the few alternatives to a civil war leading to breakup or total loss of democracy could be the development of an extreme form of federalism, in which states are free to have secular or theocratic government, democracy or the mere pretense of it. In that scenario, while the disparate regions would continue to enjoy the wealth and power that come with being part of the U.S. imperial homeland, the legal regimes, education, social safety nets, civil rights and liberties, and so forth that their citizens would experience would be so different that they might as well be different countries. The one major difference is that people would be much freer to vote with their feet—unless their state’s laws forbade them to exit.

Therefore, three controversial questions:

Indiana could support its urban areas easily if, as usual, people ate less meat. It has a historic industrial base in the north and good farmland downstate, and the population density is not excessive. This state could easily make room for more migrants; the only uncertainty is political. The GOP holds a supermajority in both branches of the legislature due to both the state’s conservative, rural character and its rather extreme gerrymandering, recently claimed to be worse than 95% of U.S. states. The legislative districts to be used from 2022 onwards not only “crack” parts of Indianapolis into irrelevancy, but similarly break up Fort Wayne, Lafayette, and Evansville. During 2021, the legislature and the Trump-loyalist attorney general devoted time to taking exceptional action to strip the Republican governor of power to respond to the pandemic.

Migrants who hope to live in a secular democracy would be taking a serious risk by moving here, although it might be relatively easy to get across the border in a hurry if needed. They should be prepared to live under very conservative government, with economic life dominated by polluters and union-busters, and to face increasingly aggressive anti-LGBTQ and possibly anti-immigrant policies as soon as the federal courts will let the state get away with it. Younger female residents should be prepared to travel to another state if emergency reproductive health care is needed. At present, I doubt that Indiana is a good choice for most such people, although if this pre-breakup period lasts long enough that climate change forces many millions of migrants out of the Western or coastal regions, increasing population pressures in the bluer states may make Indiana appear more attractive as a more affordable destination with more available jobs.

Migrants who hope to end up in a Red theocracy would also be taking some risk. Despite its right-wing politics and “home of the KKK” status, Indiana never was culturally or economically a Southern state, and a state government that was really confident that “urban” residents remain a small minority wouldn’t have to work so hard to gerrymander them out of political participation. Betting on Indiana to join the Confederacy might not pay off.

All that said, many Indiana communities have much to offer in terms of day-to-day quality of life. If you are one of the 43 remaining Americans who genuinely don’t care about politics and don’t expect any of the culture-war issues to affect you personally, this state could be a fine destination.

Virginia is now a bluish-purple state in terms of its people’s preferences. Virginia has in the recent past had problems with racist gerrymandering so severe as to be limited by the U.S. Supreme Court, yet elects a good number of Democrats; as of this writing, it appears that the 2022 pro-GOP bias will be somewhat moderated. It was one of the original 13 U.S. states and is geographically adjacent to presumed Northeastern states, so if any of the former Confederate states were to look north following a breakup of the U.S., Virginia would be the most likely. That is the prediction of Stephen Marche. However, culturally it is primarily Southern and I would not bet on its future affiliations.

Before I comment on three “weird states,” I want to double back and put up the second half of my chapter on the possible future breakup of the United States, whose first half is here. This will inform why I would be leery of advising anyone to move to those states. I also wish to post a digression into my views of the recent election. Suffice it to say for now that I think, for the most part, that its results were compatible with the possibility of the future regional divisions I have envisioned as possible. I am also inclined to think that we may have more than two years before a full-scale civil war breaks out ... but, contrarily, that a breakup may well be the best outcome many of us can hope for.

I’m out of potentially promising Northeastern states to cover so today am wrapping up the last couple of Southeastern states, namely Texas and West Virginia. In retrospect, I was probably too hard on Texas in suggesting that out-of-state migration should be avoided. There were a fairly good number of cities and towns that passed my search criteria, some large enough to absorb thousands of migrants every year without blinking. True, the governor is a nut and the regime far from democratic, but perhaps you approve of these things. True, the power grid is a disaster, but ... but maybe you can buy a generator? If you move there you had better prepare your life on the assumption that no public services, including basic utilities, can be relied upon. Still, it’s certainly possible to look at eastern Texas and see it as a better-than-the alternative destination for Christian conservatives from the soon-to-burn Southwest.

The large cities in South Carolina include Charleston on the coast, Columbia in the center, and Greenville in the northwest. All three have metro areas in the 800,000 to 900,000 range. Charleston is a truly lovely city, but given its location in the high-risk flood and hurricane zone, best not added to. The foodshed mapping of Kurtz et al. (2020) suggested that Greenville might require quite a large foodshed even with a low-meat diet. Columbia is more easily provisioned but its metro area, which sprawls over six counties, is likely to be larger than you want.

South Carolina does not seem to be the most promising state for conservative migrants to consider, unless you want to move to one of the big cities, which I don’t recommend. Smaller cities frequently appear to have chronic economic issues or shockingly high crime rates that are suggestive of such issues. A few of the most promising that are located away from the coast or the metros are the following: