The United States is finished, by the way. It can never unify. It's unity, what there was of it, was totally destroyed by non-white immigration, both legal and illegal. Basically, Americans are fucked. Things will probably improve over the short term, but in the long term the US will inevitably be broken up into regional nation-states. Which, it is to be hoped, will cooperate with each other.

That's what the States were always supposed to be. A powerful central federal government is the aberration not based on reality. Since the civil war we have been trapped in a system doomed to failure. SLowly growing larger and sealing it's fate even more. These other centralized states on the rise now because of the vacuum of power left by the abject failure of the US to do the impossible will also eventually break back up into pieces. People talk about evolution mainly in a spatial sense of isolated populations developing independently but forget the other part. Populations don't need to be isolated geographically to grow apart and evolve into a different "organism" from the whole. In fact geographic isolation is the least interesting of all the inputs to how populations evolve with more interesting impetuses being ones that manifest in large homogenous bodies randomly and for some reason start spreading until a group within a group forms and it takes on it's own identity. Entropy is a slow determined process where as centralization is a rapid fickle burst optimizing for a fleeting flavor of the month efficiency and while it can win over entropy for a time eventually entropy always wins.