Member-only story
America Was Built to Fail
And it has, repeatedly, only to be revolutionized and rebuilt. What kind of country will we create now?
Institutions, like individuals, never change because they realize they ought to; they only ever change because they’re forced to, by crisis, catastrophe. No one goes to their first AA meeting because they recognize that they have a drinking problem and it’s going to get out of hand unless they do something about it; they get fired, or their wife leaves them, or a judge orders them into rehab. Societies have even more inertia than people; individuals always recognize the need for reform long before their ostensible leaders do, which enables them to watch in well-informed horror as their nation slides inexorably toward disaster, like surgery patients paralyzed, but not rendered unconscious, by anesthetic.
Our country has been in denial for decades now, like a guy I once saw after a motorcycle accident, dragging one nearly severed leg behind him, punching an EMT who was trying to help, insisting he was fine. The only national problems I can…
