A Failing State

In June of 2020, as the pandemic took the first 100,000 American lives, George Packer wrote, “Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state…in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future”. Just days after the November election, with Biden clearly having won millions more votes than Trump but still not declared the winner and control of the Senate still hanging in the balance despite Democrats representing 40 million more Americans in that body, Paul Krugman wrote, “If we were looking at a foreign country with America’s level of political dysfunction, we would probably consider it on the edge of becoming a failed state — that is, a state whose government is no longer able to exert effective control.”

Since then, the argument that America is a failing state has become even stronger. One of our country’s two major…