Thanks to the Biden Administration’s unofficial open-borders policy, some two million unauthorised migrants crossed into the United States last year, intent on heading north to ‘sanctuary cities’. No wonder. Apart from providing generous welfare, local officials refuse to hand over illegal immigrants for deportation.

The sanctuary city phenomenon is just the latest manifestation of a totalitarian movement intent on destroying from within, the basis of American society. It doesn’t matter that conferring the rights of citizenship on those who are non-citizens violates the American Constitution. Some states even permit undocumented migrants to obtain driver’s licences, and New York City has just given 800,000 non-citizens a vote in local elections. Who needs citizenship?

Not all Americans approve. Many are abandoning their homes in sanctuary states to move to places like Florida, Texas, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

Over the last decade, the tri-state area of New York lost over a million people, while Californians watched 1.625 million comrades take their skills, capital, taxes and businesses with them as they moved to places where governments respect the federal Constitution and reflect their traditional values and beliefs. The headquarters of tech giants Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, whose roots can be traced back to the founding of Silicon Valley, are among departures.

But, in common with its woke counterparts, California’s problems are of its own making. They include unfulfillable public pension promises and a vast social safety net, beyond the capacity of its remaining workers and businesses to fund. This is unsustainable.

Indeed, what we are seeing is the emergence of two Americas, based upon two conflicting philosophies. One champions authoritarian control, the other economic growth and freedom.

In his book, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail, founder of the world’s biggest hedge fund, Ray Dalio, warns this growing ideological divide raises a ‘dangerously high risk’ of a US civil war within the next decade. He outlines the six stages of the internal order/disorder cycle, which end in civil war. He argues the US is currently at stage five — bad financial conditions and intense emotional conflict.

Dalio observes how voters move to electorates which match their beliefs, crowding out those who don’t, and how they watch different television stations and believe different facts. The number of cross-party friendships is at an all-time low. People today are inclined to excuse bad behaviour when it comes from their side and exaggerate it when it comes from the other.

It is clear the current state of America is the result of decades of self-loathing indoctrination and policies which have deliberately confused welfare dependence with compassion. Poorer communities have become perpetual incubators of poverty and violence. Almost 70 per cent of black children are born to single mothers and, as the Brookings Institution confirms, ‘the policy implications for out-of-wedlock births are staggering’. Single mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor and to instill in the minds of their children a sense of victimhood and learned helplessness. This, in turn restricts social mobility and entrenches inequality. America’s ten ‘most dangerous cities’ bear witness to this trend.

The immediate response is to decriminalise the law and to demonise and defund the police. This has proven to be a disaster and hits poorer communities the hardest.

It is now obvious that America is in the final stages of a social experiment gone horribly wrong. How it is resolved only time will tell. However, the woke states are running out of other people’s money and there is no sense that capitalist states will bail them out.

It’s easy to characterise these deep societal issues as ‘only in America’. Yet Australians are sleepwalking the same path.

Intolerant ideologues are a polarising force in Australia too. Open debate is being driven underground while pride in our history and heritage is constantly traduced. We too observe friendships dividing along partisan lines and watch as politically biased information is accepted as fact, regardless of its provenance and scientific basis. America’s Big Tech companies, along with the local media, specialise in distorting the news to suit their ideological leanings.

Like the Blacks in America’s big cities, Australia’s indigenous communities live a cycle of poverty and misery. By re-writing history and institutionalising Aborigines as victims, paternalistic policies and sanctimonious leadership have ensured that even $50,000 of welfare per man, woman, and Aboriginal child, is not enough to free them from despair.

In today’s Brave New World double standards abound. The uneven treatment of Black Lives Matter and anti-lockdown demonstrators, and selective feminist action around sexual misconduct, make the point.

Forces here are also chipping away at election integrity, the very foundation of democracy. The government favours people showing photo ID before voting, while Labor and the Greens see this as ‘ugly’, ‘divisive’ and ‘racist’. Yet, before the 2015 NSW election, the electoral roll contained 139,898 more names than the federal electoral roll for NSW. And, in 2016, 18,000 people are believed to have voted multiple times.

And, while not yet a trend, some Australians are voting with their feet. Nearly 43,000 Victorians emigrated last year, following the world’s most draconian Covid lockdowns. Research published last May shows Labor’s socialist agenda had already left Victoria poorer than all other states and territories except for South Australia.

So, while smug criticism of the United States may give some a false sense of security, aspirational Australians should face the reality that they are participating in the same disastrous social experiment. However, unlike their American counterparts, there are no states or territories offering meaningful sanctuary from high taxes, oppressive regulations and woke agendas. It’s a case of least bad. Indeed, rather than embrace competitive federalism as the way forward, the 2020 Commonwealth-state funding agreement enshrines a sclerotic ‘coordinated’ (collective) approach.

The time may be coming when disenchanted Australians decide Florida, Texas, South Carolina, and Tennessee, are their states of choice too.