fellow American here, re: "most states consider each other rivals," as a person who's lived all over the US, I strongly believe that feeling is in one direction.

There is all this rhetoric in red-state politics, governors shipping immigrants to NYC, Texans obsessing over Nancy Pelosi, babble about "east coast values." That shit simply doesn't exist in the other direction. It's true that coastal elites harbor a lot of resentment toward "rednecks" for things like the recent abortion ruling, but… they just don't obsess the same way. Mostly they just don't think about them at all.

* * *

I'm not talking about individuals, I'm talking about masses of people. Of course blue state people hated Bush, and Trump, and Reagan… I'm talking about this weird notion that I hear from southerners that people in the city "look down on them." They don't. They don't think about them at all. I'm not sure which is worse.

> It’s true that coastal elites harbor a lot of resentment toward “rednecks” for things like the recent abortion ruling

Nah, the abortion ruling is a product of coastal elites; there aren’t any rednecks on the Supreme Court.

That’s true. But Justice Barrett is a Midwestern church mom, which is a core GOP constituency.

And Clarence Thomas didn't move to DC until age 31, saying of his stint at Yale "I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value."

>But you know what? If some outsider were to pose a serious threat to any of the states, we're all going to band together and tell said outsider to get wrecked and go pound sand. That same Texas would be among the first to come to California's aid and defence. The only one who gets to dunk on Americans are fellow Americans, nobody else.

It would have to be a very, very, unifying outside threat.

Division runs deep these days and it seems highly likely that any such external threat would be leveraged by the two teams to try to gain the upper hand resulting in further division.

You had a political zealot attack the home of a senior lawmaker and send her husband to hospital, and large swaths of the population cheered. I doubt the attacker was applauded only because he has an American passport.