Is the US a failed state? No, BUT

2018-07-12 10:05 pm
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)

Yesterday I posted a link to this disturbing article[1], which describes the US as Modernity's first failed state. It provoked responses from both left and right, and led me to research just what constitutes a failed state[2].

It turns out that there's a way of measuring degree of failure[3], called theFragile States Index[4]. At first glance, the US looks pretty good: with a score of 36.7, it currently ranks 154th out of 178. Currently. Here's what the Fund for Peace, which maintains the index, has to say about that:

The United States has experienced significant political upheaval recently, and as a result has ranked as the fourth most-worsened country for 2018. Despite a remarkably strong economy, this economic success has been largely outweighed by social and political instability. However, we must be careful not to misunderstand the longer-term nature of this trend. Though some critics will likely be tempted to associate the worsening situation in the United States with the ascendance of President Trump, and what can generously be described as his Administration’s divisive leadership and rhetoric, the reality is that the pressures facing the United States run far deeper. Many “inside the Beltway” in Washington have long complained of a growing extremism in American society and politics, with an increasingly disenfranchised (if not vanishing) political center. The FSI demonstrates that this is no illusion – it is definitely happening. Indeed, on the ten-year trend of the three Cohesion Indicators (including Security Apparatus, Factionalized Elites, and Group Grievance), the United States is the most-worsened country in the world bar none, ahead of the likes of Libya, Bahrain, Mali, Syria, South Africa, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen. To be sure, the United States has nearly unparalleled capacity and resiliency, meaning that there is little risk that the country is about to fall into the abyss. Nevertheless, these findings should serve as a wake-up call to America’s political leaders (not to mention media influencers) that divisive policy-making and rhetoric that seeks to divide Americans for political gain can have very real consequences and can threaten the country’s long-term stability and prosperity. [5]

I have three things to add:

  1. The United States may not be a "failed state" by this definition -- yet. But it has certainly failed a large number of its people.
  2. The United States has also failed -- miserably -- to become a modern country. By many measures, it is far behind the rest of the developed world, and falling farther behind as its ruling elite continues to gain power.

The US is not a failed state, but it's failing. If the current trend keeps up, it will reach the "warning" level of 70 in less than 16 years.

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The modern world's first failed state

2018-07-11 04:32 pm
mdlbear: (distress)

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?

...

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.

...

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.

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