mdlbear | The modern world's first failed state (Reply)

Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
The Great Lesson of the 20th Century — and How America Never Learned It
--Umair Haque

... is a very disturbing article. Hat-tip to thnidu.

When I say “the modern world”, what do you think of? Probably a great city somewhere, with broad avenues, spacious parks, art and culture, old museums, people buzzing about, public transport thrumming.
Now think of America. People dying for a lack of insulin. Young people who can’t afford to start families of their own. The average person living perched right at the edge of ruin, one missed paycheck, one illness, one emergency away from disaster. Kids massacring one another at schools. Infants on trial. Politicians who proclaim “God is a white supremacist!” An endless and gruesome list of stuff that’s beginning to put the dark ages to shame.
Here’s what I think. American never joined the modern world. It’s the modern world’s first failed state. It became something like a weird, bizarre dystopia, replete with falling life expectancy, hand-to-mouth living, relentless and legendary cruelty, instead of a truly modern society. But why?
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Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.
But the question we still haven’t answered is why. Why did America never join the modern world? The answer goes something like this. Americans never learned the greatest lesson history taught. That poverty causes ruin.
You see, in America, poverty was seen — and still is — as a kind of just dessert. A form of deserved punishment, for being lazy, for being foolish, for being slow. For being, above all, weak — because only the strong should survive.
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So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.

What was that about those who fail to learn from history? Welcome to the 19th Century.