Insights Photo: publicdomainpictures.net
Sam Pizigatti
Failed state status? Here comes the US!
A
mericans have at various times in our past battled horrific bouts with infectious disease. And Americans have lived through times of sheer economic desperation. But we’ve never – until this corona spring – experienced both at once. The stats out this week have made this grim landmark “official.” Over 100,000 Americans now dead from Covid-19. Over 40 million claims for unemployment insurance. No nation on Earth has lost as many people to the coronavirus. No rich nation on Earth has a population less economically secure. The United States is becom-
ing, commentators have begun to contend, a “failed state.” We don’t, to be sure, have warlord gangs speeding through our neighbourhoods, brandishing automatic weapons out of opentop jeeps. But we do have fanboys of our nation’s top elected leader carrying long guns into legislative chambers and screaming red-faced at lawmakers they despise. “We are one trigger-pull away,” laments veteran Mideast journalist Lucian Truscott IV, “from what happens every day in places like Kabul and Mogadishu and Tripoli.” Our core institutions, adds Jacobin editor Seth
Ackerman, betray “a deep lack of administrative capacity,” be those institutions the bureaucracies that deal with safety-net benefits or the mail or even elections. State unemployment offices run on obsolete 1960s-era software that only “old retired former programmers” know how to fix. The corona pandemic has put a spotlight on that obsolete software – and so much more. “The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective,” notes George Packer in the Atlantic. “The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” So who to blame? Donald Trump makes an obvious and deserving target. But the failures of our ruling order predate his troubled and reckless administration. Our “chronic ills” – everything from “a corrupt political class” to a “heartless economy” – have gone, Packer points out, “untreated for years.”
H
ow can we halt our national descent into full-bore “failed state” status? Taking a moment to contemplate how a “successful state” operates might be a good place to start. In a successful state, people thoughtfully identify the problems they share in common and democratically debate a variety of possible solutions. But this
ColdType | Mid-June 2020 | www.coldtype.net
7
