> Confederating doesn't work. The US tried that back in the 1700s and it was a disaster

I'm not sure what you mean that confederacy doesn't work. The U.S. has always been a confederation of states, as per the current constitution. We got started in the conversation debating on how many states there should be.

> The reason the US is so successful economically is because of unity.

I've always thought that geography, natural resources, free markets, and immigration played a big role in our economic growth. The Soviet Union was unified, and they were not successful, so there are obviously other factors. Perhaps unified dictatorship vs unified democracy makes a difference, also, at least over the long term.

> it's why the EU was formed, to try to emulate the US's success with a single currency and single market

The EU was flawed. Money and labor could cross boarders, but not national debt. The poor countries were allowed to borrow more than they could afford, and lost their manufacturing to the richer countries. It was half assed. Perhaps the countries in the EU were too dissimilar to be unified the way they were. In contrast NATO still works. Confederacies come and go as the decades go by, things change.

> I'm not convinced that China is disintegrating at all.

China has fallen apart numerous times in their history. it's not just what is happening now with covid, it's going to be economic bubbles bursting, increasingly ineffective centralized power, their rapidly aging population, culturally and economically disparate regions, etc. The aging population is a time bomb for them, they're headed towards a seriously scary demographic cliff. They are not going to be the same country in 2030. They are not an existential threat to the U.S., just like the former Soviet Union and the current Russian regime are not an existential threat. Three years before the Soviet Union fell apart we were terrified of them, too. We over-judged that threat for a couple decades.

> You might be right that the US in particular has gotten to a point where internal divisions will force some kind of large change, but this doesn't support the idea that free nations would be better off splintering into hundreds of tiny republics and hoping that confederating will protect them from enemies that don't share this view.

We kind of got mixed up talking about many small states, versus many small countries, with asides about the details of the EU and China. Perhaps that's my fault, I can't help myself, I find all of this interesting. I never said that we need to turn the U.S. into Europe, or into a confederacy of many small countries. We already have a confederacy of many small states.

I meant to defend the idea of smaller and more local government, and that more small states could be a good thing. I brought up Switzerland not because they were a small country in Europe, but because they have small states (cantons) of 20k to 1.5m people handling things that our federal government ruling over 330m people struggles with, like health care. The Swiss are my favorite example of a well designed democracy that can scale. They vote on getting involved in wars. They voted on their pandemic response. The voters can referendum to veto politicians. They use double majorities to try to avoid suppressing minorities. It's not perfect, but it is definitely better.

The founding fathers of the U.S. were against democracy [0]. They were the rich landowners and thought of it as a threat, that people would vote to take their land. And in the modern era we still have money in control of politicians, the Supreme Court ruling that money is free speech [1], legalizing what most other civilized countries consider bribery and corruption. That's why the health care industry players got to write the Obamacare bill, and we're all stuck with it. Goodbye Romneycare in Massachusetts, goodbye to Vermont's pending single payer plan, goodbye to New York's and California's future plans, etc.

I think it's a real long term problem that our federal government continues to grow in power. That Leopold Khor fellow I referenced earlier said that the U.S. works well because a plurality of states are more powerful than the federal government, to keep it in check. When the federal government becomes more powerful than a majority of states it can act with impunity, and that's where things get ugly.

You wanted to get rid of small states for some reason, and you haven't explained how come. We've talked enough, I'd really like to know if you still think this is a good idea, and why.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=founding+fathers+against+democracy...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC