I'm talking about cultural values, like self-reliance versus a collective mentality.....stuff like that. I also think that, eventually, there will be significant population shifts between those autonomous regions, as people begin to sort out what kind of regional culture they want to live in. Perhaps those autonomous regions will become loosely allied for purposes of mutual defense and commerce—EXACTLY WHAT THE FOUNDERS ENVISIONED—but they will likely never give big centralized government a chance for to form again.
But the collective mentality region wouldn't be able to exist without a large centralized government because that's the mechanism whereby resources are "fairly" redistributed. Eventually, that redistribution would spread from solely within the collectives to moving wealth from the self-reliance areas into the collectives. Which is close to what we currently have - where the working class are being forced to support those that don't on a larger scale.