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We Are Living in a Failing State

67 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

mark_l_watson 6y ago
A very good write up. The initial premise is something I agree with: that the virus has shown up existing weaknesses in the US political, economic (income inequality, taken to extremes), and cultural matters. The pandemic has been a magnifying glass.
zepto 6y ago
This kind of reporting is weird. Yes, the virus is showing up problems. No, the US is not a failing state. Europe as a whole is faring almost identically to the US.
- throwaway7877 6y ago
  No, they are not. How many citizens have lost their health insurance in the US and the EU? How many citizens, in the IS and the EU, will claim bankruptcy from medical bills in the next 12 months?
  - zepto 6y ago
    We’ll see if that’s significantly different from prior years. My guess is that it will be worse, but not in some catastrophic way. Yes, I agree that medical bankruptcy is a serious problem. But it’s not new, and doesn’t mean we have a failing state. I also don’t actually know what the state is across all of Europe. Do all states cover all of their citizen’s Covid treatments?
  - refurb 6y ago
    So having medical insurance or not determines whether or not a country is a failed state? By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic. But all you need to do is think about it a bit to realize that's ridiculous.
    - jonny_eh 6y ago
      > By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic I believe that was the premise of the article.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      The US was a failing state before the pandemic, unless you’re upper class. It’s just even more so now.
      - nostrademons 6y ago
        I remember reading an interesting premise about 5 years ago, that the U.S. was rotting from the bottom up and it just took longer for higher social classes to recognize it. If you were poor and black the U.S. was always a failed state. If you were a factory worker you started noticing it in the 1970s, and then it accelerated with Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound " in the 90s. The former middle class started realizing it with the financial crisis in '09, which knocked many of them out of the middle class. In the last couple years many of my friends (who went to an elite college and all have professional jobs) have started realizing it. Coronavirus probably finally exposed the wealthy to it. I think it's actually going to get worse before it gets better. Right now we're just a failing state, give it a year or two and we're likely to be a failed state. Then we get to see what emerges from the ashes, but the process of getting there probably won't be pretty.
      - refurb 6y ago
        Interesting how so many people are so desperate to come here and live in this failed state they'll enter the country illegally! Really remarkable.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Not so remarkable. “The illegal immigrant population of the United States peaked by 2007, when it was at 12.2 million and 4% of the total U.S. population. Estimates in 2016 put the number of unauthorized immigrants at 10.7 million, representing 3.3% of the total U.S. population. Since the Great Recession, more illegal immigrants have left the United States than entered it, and illegal border crossings are at the lowest in decades. Since 2007, visa overstays have accounted for a larger share of the growth in the illegal immigrant population than illegal border crossings, which have declined considerably from 2000 to 2018. In 2012, 52% of unauthorized immigrants were from Mexico, 15% from Central America, 12% from Asia, 6% from South America, 5% from the Caribbean, and another 5% from Europe and Canada. As of 2016, approximately two-thirds of unauthorized adult immigrants had lived in the U.S. for at least a decade.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...
- axguscbklp 6y ago
  Yeah, from what I can tell the U.S. currently has fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, or Ireland. Of course, part of the reason for this might be the timing of when COVID-19 hit the U.S. as opposed to when it hit those countries. But it certainly doesn't seem to me that the U.S. has been doing wildly worse, at least when it comes to the death toll, than most wealthy Western European countries. Germany is a big outlier, with about half the deaths per capita so far when compared both to the U.S. and to most of its wealthy Western European neighbors. It could also be argued that, even if the U.S. ends up having a COVID-19 deaths per capita rate that is similar to that of Western Europe, people in the U.S. will have a harder time dealing with the economic aftermath of the crisis due to weaker social safety nets. Probably a lot will depend on how efficient the U.S. emergency stimulus measures end up being. The author of the article tries to connect the COVID-19 crisis to the U.S.'s political divisions and to the failures of the Trump administration, but I am not sure that he succeeds. There are many nations that have less political bickering than the U.S. does and have more technically competent and less divisive people in charge of their governments than the U.S. does, but have nonetheless been suffering from the crisis as much as the U.S. has been suffering. There are plenty of good reasons to criticize U.S. political partisanship and to criticize the Trump administration, but this article strikes me more as intellectually shallow anti-Trump complaining or propaganda, not as a serious and unbiased analysis of the political state of the U.S. and how that state relates to the COVID-19 crisis.
  - rumanator 6y ago
    > The author of the article tries to connect the COVID-19 crisis to the U.S.'s political divisions and to the failures of the Trump administration, but I am not sure that he succeeds. Did he or anyone has to try for that connection to be extremely clear? I mean, right now the Trump administration is desperately trying to manipulate the public to force the Overtime Window over the "let's stop the quarantine" spot. How is that not a glaring failure? And let's not forget how the Trump administration persecuted a carrier captain for protecting the crew after finding out the epidemic was spreading within the ship.
    - 6y ago
Jeema101 6y ago
I didn't vote for Trump, but I always hoped from the day after the election in 2016 that he'd put the partisan showboating aside and turn to governing. But it doesn't seem like that ever happened. And we need that now more than ever. I think in some way, too, people want to feel united. I know I do. But it just can't ever work when the President calls for unity one day and then reverts to us vs. them namecalling on Twitter the next. I really wish there was some way to overcome all of it but I don't know how we do it.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  > I always hoped from the day after the election in 2016 that he'd put the partisan showboating aside and turn to governing. What made you think he was even capable of that, let alone was interested?
seibelj 6y ago
This is “narrative reporting” where you start with a premise (US is a “failed state”) and then cherry-pick events to fit the narrative. It can be entertaining, but it’s so full of holes it’s Swiss cheese.
djohnston 6y ago
rolls eyes. No you aren't. You're living in a state with systemic issues that perpetuate a growing inequality. My family left Germany in the 20s. My grandma told me stories of people going to the bakery with wheelbarrows of cash because the inflation was so dramatic. Stop it.
hnburnsy 6y ago
From the article... "Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together." Headlines from DDG News search... Fort Myers Nurses Travel to New York City to Help Real-life heroes: 25 Cleveland Clinic workers travel to New York to help with coronavirus battle Tusculum University nursing graduates travel to New York to join fight against virus Minnesota nurse on battling coronavirus crisis in NYC: 'I stepped up to the plate and here I am'
bawana 6y ago
The more I read the Atlantic, the more I realize it's a nihilistic rag. Ok, there are shortcomings, but it seems they only like to trumpet inflammatory remarks-perhaps they think they are counterbalancing our govt.

67 points by headalgorithm 6y ago

A very good write up. The initial premise is something I agree with: that the virus has shown up existing weaknesses in the US political, economic (income inequality, taken to extremes), and cultural matters. The pandemic has been a magnifying glass.

zepto 6y ago

This kind of reporting is weird. Yes, the virus is showing up problems. No, the US is not a failing state. Europe as a whole is faring almost identically to the US.

throwaway7877 6y ago
No, they are not. How many citizens have lost their health insurance in the US and the EU? How many citizens, in the IS and the EU, will claim bankruptcy from medical bills in the next 12 months?
- zepto 6y ago
  We’ll see if that’s significantly different from prior years. My guess is that it will be worse, but not in some catastrophic way. Yes, I agree that medical bankruptcy is a serious problem. But it’s not new, and doesn’t mean we have a failing state. I also don’t actually know what the state is across all of Europe. Do all states cover all of their citizen’s Covid treatments?
- refurb 6y ago
  So having medical insurance or not determines whether or not a country is a failed state? By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic. But all you need to do is think about it a bit to realize that's ridiculous.
  - jonny_eh 6y ago
    > By that logic the US was a failed state before the epidemic I believe that was the premise of the article.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    The US was a failing state before the pandemic, unless you’re upper class. It’s just even more so now.
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      I remember reading an interesting premise about 5 years ago, that the U.S. was rotting from the bottom up and it just took longer for higher social classes to recognize it. If you were poor and black the U.S. was always a failed state. If you were a factory worker you started noticing it in the 1970s, and then it accelerated with Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound " in the 90s. The former middle class started realizing it with the financial crisis in '09, which knocked many of them out of the middle class. In the last couple years many of my friends (who went to an elite college and all have professional jobs) have started realizing it. Coronavirus probably finally exposed the wealthy to it. I think it's actually going to get worse before it gets better. Right now we're just a failing state, give it a year or two and we're likely to be a failed state. Then we get to see what emerges from the ashes, but the process of getting there probably won't be pretty.
    - refurb 6y ago
      Interesting how so many people are so desperate to come here and live in this failed state they'll enter the country illegally! Really remarkable.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Not so remarkable. “The illegal immigrant population of the United States peaked by 2007, when it was at 12.2 million and 4% of the total U.S. population. Estimates in 2016 put the number of unauthorized immigrants at 10.7 million, representing 3.3% of the total U.S. population. Since the Great Recession, more illegal immigrants have left the United States than entered it, and illegal border crossings are at the lowest in decades. Since 2007, visa overstays have accounted for a larger share of the growth in the illegal immigrant population than illegal border crossings, which have declined considerably from 2000 to 2018. In 2012, 52% of unauthorized immigrants were from Mexico, 15% from Central America, 12% from Asia, 6% from South America, 5% from the Caribbean, and another 5% from Europe and Canada. As of 2016, approximately two-thirds of unauthorized adult immigrants had lived in the U.S. for at least a decade.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...
axguscbklp 6y ago
Yeah, from what I can tell the U.S. currently has fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, or Ireland. Of course, part of the reason for this might be the timing of when COVID-19 hit the U.S. as opposed to when it hit those countries. But it certainly doesn't seem to me that the U.S. has been doing wildly worse, at least when it comes to the death toll, than most wealthy Western European countries. Germany is a big outlier, with about half the deaths per capita so far when compared both to the U.S. and to most of its wealthy Western European neighbors. It could also be argued that, even if the U.S. ends up having a COVID-19 deaths per capita rate that is similar to that of Western Europe, people in the U.S. will have a harder time dealing with the economic aftermath of the crisis due to weaker social safety nets. Probably a lot will depend on how efficient the U.S. emergency stimulus measures end up being. The author of the article tries to connect the COVID-19 crisis to the U.S.'s political divisions and to the failures of the Trump administration, but I am not sure that he succeeds. There are many nations that have less political bickering than the U.S. does and have more technically competent and less divisive people in charge of their governments than the U.S. does, but have nonetheless been suffering from the crisis as much as the U.S. has been suffering. There are plenty of good reasons to criticize U.S. political partisanship and to criticize the Trump administration, but this article strikes me more as intellectually shallow anti-Trump complaining or propaganda, not as a serious and unbiased analysis of the political state of the U.S. and how that state relates to the COVID-19 crisis.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > The author of the article tries to connect the COVID-19 crisis to the U.S.'s political divisions and to the failures of the Trump administration, but I am not sure that he succeeds. Did he or anyone has to try for that connection to be extremely clear? I mean, right now the Trump administration is desperately trying to manipulate the public to force the Overtime Window over the "let's stop the quarantine" spot. How is that not a glaring failure? And let's not forget how the Trump administration persecuted a carrier captain for protecting the crew after finding out the epidemic was spreading within the ship.
  - 6y ago

Jeema101 6y ago

I didn't vote for Trump, but I always hoped from the day after the election in 2016 that he'd put the partisan showboating aside and turn to governing. But it doesn't seem like that ever happened. And we need that now more than ever. I think in some way, too, people want to feel united. I know I do. But it just can't ever work when the President calls for unity one day and then reverts to us vs. them namecalling on Twitter the next. I really wish there was some way to overcome all of it but I don't know how we do it.

jonny_eh 6y ago
> I always hoped from the day after the election in 2016 that he'd put the partisan showboating aside and turn to governing. What made you think he was even capable of that, let alone was interested?

seibelj 6y ago

This is “narrative reporting” where you start with a premise (US is a “failed state”) and then cherry-pick events to fit the narrative. It can be entertaining, but it’s so full of holes it’s Swiss cheese.

djohnston 6y ago

rolls eyes. No you aren't. You're living in a state with systemic issues that perpetuate a growing inequality. My family left Germany in the 20s. My grandma told me stories of people going to the bakery with wheelbarrows of cash because the inflation was so dramatic. Stop it.

hnburnsy 6y ago

From the article... "Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together." Headlines from DDG News search... Fort Myers Nurses Travel to New York City to Help Real-life heroes: 25 Cleveland Clinic workers travel to New York to help with coronavirus battle Tusculum University nursing graduates travel to New York to join fight against virus Minnesota nurse on battling coronavirus crisis in NYC: 'I stepped up to the plate and here I am'

bawana 6y ago

The more I read the Atlantic, the more I realize it's a nihilistic rag. Ok, there are shortcomings, but it seems they only like to trumpet inflammatory remarks-perhaps they think they are counterbalancing our govt.