Pressed by Supreme Court decisions diminishing rights that liberals hold dear and expanding those cherished by conservatives, the United States appears to be drifting apart into separate nations, with diametrically opposed social, environmental and health policies.
Call these the Disunited States.
It comes after a month's worth of rain hit the city in less than a day on Saturday - smashing a 120-year record - with NSW residents warned the bout of wet weather hitting the east coast is only going to get even worse.
Torrential rain, flash flooding, landslides, damaging winds and power outages are all threatening to devastate Sydney.
In the 24 hours to 9am Saturday, the Illawarra district of NSW was hit by its heaviest bout of July rainfall since 1904. Foxground recorded 215mm of rain, Albion Park 171mm and Kiama 163mm.
Residents in the Sydney and Illawarra regions were previously warned flash flooding is 'essentially guaranteed' with three months' worth of rain to fall in the next five days.
The Bureau of Meteorology issued a severe weather alert for metropolitan Sydney, Illawarra and parts of the South Coast, Central Tablelands and Southern Tablelands on Saturday morning.
Three flood rescues have already been performed in NSW since Friday, with people along parts of the Hawkesbury River being warned they face a major flood risk.
The most immediate breaking point is on abortion, as about half the country will soon limit or ban the procedure while the other half expands or reinforces access to reproductive rights. But the ideological fault lines extend far beyond that one topic, to climate change, gun control and L.G.B.T.Q. and voting rights.
On each of those issues, the country’s Northeast and West Coast are moving in the opposite direction from its midsection and Southeast — with a few exceptions, like the islands of liberalism in Illinois and Colorado, and New Hampshire’s streak of conservatism.
Even where public opinion is more mixed, like in Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, the Republican grip on state legislatures has ensured that policies in those states conform with those of the reddest states in the union, rather than strike a middle ground.
The tearing at the seams has been accelerated by the six-vote conservative majority in the Supreme Court, which has embraced a muscular states-rights federalism. In the past 10 days the court has
“They’ve produced this Balkanized house divided, and we’re only beginning to see how bad that will be,” said David Blight, a Yale historian who specializes in the era of American history that led to the Civil War.
Historians have struggled to find a parallel moment, raising the 19th-century fracturing over slavery; the clashes between the executive branch and the Supreme Court in the New Deal era of the 1930s; the fierce battles over civil rights during Reconstruction and in the 1950s and early 1960s; and the rise of armed, violent groups like the Weather Underground in the late ’60s.
For some people, the divides have grown so deep and so personal that they have felt compelled to pick up and move from one America to the other.
Many conservatives have taken to social media to express thanks over leaving high-tax, highly regulated blue states for red states with smaller government and, now, laws prohibiting abortion.
Others have transited the American rift in the opposite direction.
“I did everything I could to put my mouth where my money was, to bridge the divide with my own actions,” said Howard Garrett, a Black, gay 29-year-old from Franklin, Tenn., who ran for alderman in recent years, organized the town’s first Juneteenth celebration and worked on L.G.B.T.Q. outreach to local schools, only to be greeted with harassment and death threats.
Mr. Garrett moved to Washington, D.C., last year. “People were just sick in their heart,” he said, “and that was something you can’t change.”
On abortion, history seems to be riffing on itself.
Both supporters and opponents of abortion rights see a parallel to the abolition of slavery.
As states like Illinois and Colorado vow to become “safe harbors” for women in surrounding states seeking to end their pregnancies, abortion rights advocates see an echo of past efforts by antislavery states in the North. But abortion opponents see themselves as emancipating the unborn, and often compare the Roe decision’s treatment of the fetus to the Dred Scott ruling in 1857 that denied Black people the rights of American citizenship.
Conservatives are not resting on their victories: The anti-abortion movement, long predicated on returning the issue of reproductive rights to elected representatives in the states, talks now about putting a national abortion ban before Congress.
Roger Severino, a leading social conservative and senior official in the Trump administration, invoked the struggle of Black Americans for equality, saying the 10 years that passed between the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision ending “separate but equal” segregation and Congress’s passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 mirrored the struggle ahead on abortion.
“I cannot see us living in two Americas where we have two classes of human beings in this country: some protected fully in law, some who are not protected at all,” said Mr. Severino, now the vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
On climate change, the court’s decision to limit federal regulatory powers has underscored the impasse in Congress over legislation expressly limiting emissions of climate-warming pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane.
“I’m strongly supportive of the E.P.A. having the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from fossil fuel,” said Katie Dykes, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the chairwoman of the East Coast initiative’s board of directors. “But R.G.G.I. has been in place since 2009 and has provided clear, predictable signals to the power sector and to the states in the alliance. It becomes only more relevant if we see federal authority curtailed.”
On guns, the District of Columbia and 11 states, including Delaware and Rhode Island just this week, have banned some weapons and accessories like high-capacity magazines in response to mass shootings across the country. Republican states, in contrast, have passed and continue to pass laws that allow for the carrying of concealed or unconcealed firearms with no permits necessary.
As conservative states move to bar gender transition therapies for people under 18, California’s Legislature is considering a bill that would void any subpoena seeking information about people traveling to the state for such care. But Alabama’s attorney general, invoking the Supreme Court’s reasoning in its abortion decision, said this week that federal courts must allow the state’s ban on gender-transition care to take effect.
Anne Caprara, the chief of staff to the Democratic governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, said abortion providers in the state used to serve a few hundred out-of-state women per week. Since the overturning of Roe a week ago, she said, it’s been “several thousand.”
“The governor is committed to Illinois being an oasis,” she said. “He isn’t shifting on that, but there’s no question that’s a burden.”
Gun rights laws like the protections for silencers in Texas “are edging back toward the idea of nullification, that states should be able to ignore federal law, an idea that grew directly out of slavery,” said Bethany Lacina, a University of Rochester political scientist who studies federalism in different countries. “But you can imagine a day where there’s a federal ban on abortion, and the governor of California says, ‘Eh, we’re just not going to do that.’ It’s all very double-edged weapons.”
Conservatives might see the coming years as the moment to pivot toward amassing more national power, if they can seize Congress in November and the White House in 2024. Anti-abortion activists have always had two arguments in favor of ending Roe v. Wade: a legal case that the Constitution does not include a right to end a pregnancy, and a moral case that abortion is murder.
Mr. Severino, again invoking segregation, said that until the legislative and executive branches of government stepped in with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s, recalcitrant states failed to integrate their schools after the Supreme Court ordered them to in 1954.