I was emailing yesterday with a friend in Tel Aviv, who was marveling from afar at the dysfunction and insanity here in the US – the lack of testing, the absence of presidential leadership on any meaningful forward-going plan, the reckless crowds of protesters, the handful of states deciding to open back up even as their COVID numbers continue to climb.

As I pointed out to him, this has been a fascinating experiment in federalism, with states taking wildly different approaches to handling it all. But though I’m grateful for the institutional competency here in New York (and in California, where my parents live), it’s also becoming increasingly clear that, without some kind of more centralized response, even the best-managed states face serious problems of leverage and coordination.

So I’ve been particularly fascinated by consortiums of states – one of the three states on the west coast, two more of seven each in the Northeast and Midwest – banding together as sort of nations of their own. At this point, though it already feels like we’ve been living in this new COVID reality forever, we’re still in early days. And, I suspect, the varying responses across states (or groups of them) will play out with increasingly disparate results over the months and years ahead.

Previously, whenever I’d read a book like The Handmaid’s Tale, built around a vision of a fractured US, broken apart into a handful of new nations – some scientifically modern and democratic, others backwards–looking theocratic autocracies – it always seemed rather far-fetched. How, exactly, would we get from our current world to that sort of dystopia? But, as of now, it seems like a distressingly much shorter leap.