I am a 1MB block supporter who feels 1MB is enough for many years to come. We have a network run on Raspberry Pi's and old laptops from the 90s, We need a stronger network and a stronger world wide web and a stronger Tor network; we need better mempool protocols to allow for rebroadcasting transactions with higher transaction fees and many other features like client side minimum fee requirement prediction but what we do not need is a larger block size. Bitcoin was never meant to be a free system, higher transaction fees are the only way to secure the network from government manipulation and control.

Hardforking now is impossible, consensus is everything and it will not be won by force, A hard fork now would mean fracturing the network into two distinct camps the 1MB faction and the others, it would be war.  A war the 1MB camp will win.
There can only be one Bitcoin and one Bitcoin network and the new fork would be seen as nothing more then an alt coin bootstrapping itself with the Bitcoin Blockchain. When in doubt people will side with the 1MB faction and people know it, this is the only thing preventing a hardfork now.

Higher transaction fees mean more incentive for mining pools to process transactions and reinvest profits in the cutting edge hardware needed to stay ahead of the mining difficulty wave.  The total cost of all transaction fees is more or less = to the amount of money spent on mining hardware, as that price falls so dose the price needed to manipulate the network. If miners are not constantly reinvesting profits to buy new hardware then governments will gain control simply by waiting for our mining hardware to become antiquated.  We should only raise the block size after transaction fees grow to a point where they become prohibitive to the growth of the network that inflection point will be around 1 to 5 USD per transaction. Again Bitcoin was never meant to be free. Freedom is not free and nether is Bitcoin.  

When transactions hit the 1MB limit nothing will happen other then through natural selection, the higher transaction fees will start culling out the useless tiny transactions (spam) of the network.