4. Well, if you're living locally, you don't see the other community, and any sense of being a "global citizen" goes out the window. Other communities without enough food will start migrating to where there is enough food. Over time, it settles out, but would you welcome migrants or defend your "territory"? That's going to depend on how fast it happens, I think.

If there are plenty of resources, you'll welcome the new settlers. If there's a shortage of resources, you'll be afraid of them pillaging and make them keep on moving at gunpoint. Unless they also have some pointy guns.

Adam, I dont have a crystal ball so I cannot give a perfect snapshot of what a post peak US will look like. However, I can give a glimpse of the past in one US location during, prior and after the great depression, which might look a lot like a post peak US - for the survivors.
In Northern Louisiana my grandmother had a farm of about 180 acres of red clay soil with some sandy loam. She had five children, three girls and two boys, the oldest was my father. In 1932 near the peak of the depression her husband and middle son passed away from Pnemonia during the same week. The family had a mortgage on the farm and no money for medicine or a doctor. My father dropped out of school in the 9th grade to take over the heavy work on the farm that consisted of plowing with a team of mules, harvest, maintaining the implements, making feed for the stock, any building of outbuildings, cutting wood for the kitchen stove and fireplace in winter (about 40 acres were left in timber for wood for the stove and for any lumber that was needed for building projects),etc. The daughters were busy with a large garden, canning, gathering eggs, churning butter, and helped with the harvest, milking, etc. There was no electricity, no air conditioning, a well with bucket and pulley located on the back porch was their water supply, refrigiration was provided by one 25 lb. block of ice delivered by the ice man from the nearest large town once per week, other 'cooling' - for butter and other perishables - was done by placing objects in a bucket and lowering them partially into the well. Once per month the one gallon kerosene can would be filled for ten cents at a nearby blacksmith/gas station and this was to refill the lanterns - the only night lighting that they had. Pork was kept by use of a smokehouse. When the farm harvested vegetables they were taken by the mules and wagon to the nearest large town on Saturdays for sale to stores and the public, along with butter and eggs. Many streams that had to be crossed to reach the town had no bridges so if the streams were swollen by rain the trip to town was off. On Sundays the family walked to church, a distance of about four miles each way. Very little other travel was done. The 'cash crop' that the family produced was rotated from feed corn to cotton each year. Little was known about crop rotation but it didnt matter because during the depression there was no money in circulation to pay for a cash crop and no bank had any money to front farmers for seed and fertilizer. Basically, the farmers in the area were self sufficient during the time of the depression which did not end in the area until WW2 was well over. They purchased flour, salt, kerosene and a few other essientials with the money from eggs, butter and vegetable sales. They made their own syrup from a patch of sugar cane, grinder, and boiling pot. The same pot was used on Saturdays for boiling the wash and was used for rendering lard from hogs. The boiling pot was kept busy. So was my dad, the woodcutter.
The amount of hard manual labor that was put in by all farm families in the area is incomprehensible to most people that post on this board. The families worked from daylight till dark - the work was endless. True, there were a few breaks in the actual farm work during the year but these times were spent mending harness, repairing fences, outbuildings, digging out the well, or hunting quail, squrill, gigging frogs, gathering mushrooms (for cooking or sale), butchering and smoking hogs - including making sausage, taking corn to be ground into corn meal at the gristmill, catching fish to eat with gill nets and a bunch of other chores that kept coming at you every day. Even with all their hard work these families did not always eat three meals a day. A draught, too much rain, insects, hot weather that caused the hens to stop laying, cows that would eat bitterweed and give milk that no one could drink, and many other unforseen things could befall them...such as pnemonia. Many people died young from illness or were just plain worked to death. The only meal that they ever ate away from home was during 'vacation bible school' at the church in springtime. Vacations as we know them were totally unknown. If they had some kerosene they would read the bible for a short time prior to going to bed. Doing this sort of work will make one so tired that after dinner its bed time.
I hear many on this board comment on how important it is to work together in a community. I found that little 'working together' was actually done. Large families were the norm and they were necessary to keep up with the grinding farm work. I found that many extended families were not close and the gossip in these small communities was devastating to some. Grudges were held in spite of religion. I often heard the term 'he/she married above or below him/herself'. It was a sort of caste system but unlike anything I have encountered elsewhere. If anyone was perceived as the least bit 'unusual', they were ostracized. Outsiders would be tolerated if they were 'normal' but they were never really accepted as part of the community. If you were of another faith or another color it was not the place to settle. I found these people narrow minded, petty and mean. Since that time I have lived in proximity to Amish communities and have seen much more cooperation among families. Perhaps this is because of the difference of religion?
Farms were located near to a larger town that had a market for cash and garden crops, generally a thirty mile round trip by mule team and wagon was about the limit. If you look on the map today you will see that larger towns are situated about 30 miles apart. Of course many of the older farms are now suburbs. Almost nothing was known about the families living a mere forty miles distant. Since essentials and the mortgage consumed almost all of the little money coming in there was very little for frivolous items. If any money was left over it went for material to make make your own clothing or a new pair of store bought overalls or work boots. Cloth sacks that flour was sold in were made into clothing. Nothing was discarded until it was totally worn out.
I lived on my grandmothers farm for parts of my hs years and I did some of the chores. The work was much less than in my fathers time for the depression was over, we only had a garden, hens, raised beeves on halfs for other people, bought and put up hay and hayed the cows, milked the one cow that we still had, collected eggs, Picked up and sold the pecan crop, etc. It was nothing compared to the depression because of the natural gas found in N Louisiana. The house was heated by gas, we had electricty, had an electric pump for the well, had electric appliances, but still I found myself busy before and after school. I also spent a summer working on my uncles dairy farm and a summer working on a hybrid seed corn plantation and they are not experiences that I look back on fondly. As soon as I graduated hs I was out of there and have never longed to return to such a life. I still have a garden but that is it.
Anyone that finds themselves living this sort of life after peak oil will soon find out just how many man hours are in a barrel of crude oil.