8 ms·

The Unraveling of America

52 points by nouveaux 6y ago

zepto 6y ago
Oh for god’s sake. “Failed state”? Seriously? Rolling stone has done great reporting on serious problems, but this is just insane. If the US is a ‘failed state’ then so is every other state.
- IntelMiner 6y ago
  What points in the article do you specifically disagree with?
  - avs733 6y ago
    that the facts lead to a conclusion he doesn't like.
  - pzone 6y ago
    The UNESCO "wealth of the 1%" sloganeering is one pet peeve of mine. This is the data where the article derives the claim "the top 3 richest people owning more wealth than the bottom 160 million." The way they get this eye popping number is by summing up all financial debts and subtracting them from total financial assets. What this ends up doing is overwhelming the sum with the roughly $1.5 trillion in student debt. Unlike a mortgage or car loan, which trade financial debt for financial assets, student debt is an investment in human capital. According to this UNESCO data, the very poorest people in the world are American lawyers and doctors fresh out of medical school. These people have a great deal of non-financial wealth. But according to this methodology, such a person with $300k in debt plus 300 people with $1k in reported assets equals a total of zero. Running the numbers this way is great for shock value but it doesn't make any sense if you think about it.
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    I agree things are fairly bad in a lot of ways, and very bad in some ways, but "failed state" does have a specific meaning and applying it to the US is pretty hyperbolic. It's fuzzy like anything that describes human stuff, but the US is definitely on the not-failed side of that fuzzy line. Heading toward it? I dunno. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. There now? Certainly not. Our Federal government might be doing a piss-poor job but it has not stopped being able to assert sovereignty in meaningful ways, domestically and internationally, or to continue to deliver government services to a significant extent. If those things had happened we'd know it. "Governing very poorly"—even somewhat maliciously—is not what it means for a state to have failed. Maybe it's being used... I dunno, poetically? But that doesn't seem to be the case, in context. Some of the stuff in the article's interesting but a lot of the rest is similarly overblown. Declaring China's ascendance (it sometimes explicitly says China but then other times seems to use Asia to mean "Asia, but mostly China") is fashionable and might end up being true but is far from settled history, to pick on another part, and I'm guessing the "D-Day versus gun deaths in 2019" stat is mostly suicides, which seems disingenuous to me, in this context—while of course it is interesting and meaningful in others, I think they're trying to mislead with it here. I'm left-wing as hell and probably agree with most policy positions and general opinions the writer holds, so this should be right up my alley, but the piece isn't great. A better-written version of this with exactly the thesis and overall journey might even be something I'd really like! It's a mix of a pretty good cataloguing of disparate bad-sounding stats and figures about the US, many bad/misleading instances of same (any time there's a bad-sounding—or good-sounding, for that matter—stat missing any frame of reference, I get twitchy, and this has plenty), some dull and overstated predictions about the future, and some lazy narrative-building. I hate these kinds of articles when the right does them, but I almost hate them more when "my" side does them. I know that's bad politics because people respond to this sort of thing, but I just can't stand writing this transparently manipulative, at great cost to honesty and accuracy. The best parts are when the writer's focusing directly on the COVID response. Those are alright. A few other bits are OK for a few sentences in a row and could form the seed of good, if thoroughly unoriginal, articles on their own.
    - JKCalhoun 6y ago
      It sounds like you would give the article a B- Not exactly a train wreck then.
      - spanhandler 6y ago
        Mmmmm.... call it a C-. Some paragraphs are train-wrecks. There's about 1/3 of an only-semi-interesting but not-actually-bad article in here if you cut it down, maybe.
    - nouveaux 6y ago
      "It's a mix of a pretty good cataloguing of disparate bad-sounding stats and figures about the US, many bad/misleading instances of same (any time there's a bad-sounding—or good-sounding, for that matter—stat missing any frame of reference, I get twitchy, and this has plenty), some dull and overstated predictions about the future, and some lazy narrative-building." I see what you're saying. To me, this article is not about building a case for America's failed state. It's an argument for the perceived loss of American leadership around the world. Given that conclusion, the stats he chooses are exactly the ones on people's minds around the world. Talking to my friends in China and Singapore, the George Floyd protests often come up as the US descending into chaos. There are comparisons to Hong Kong. Regardless of the faulty perception outside of the US, that perception shapes our leadership abilities. This article perfectly reflects what I've been hearing from overseas.
      - zepto 6y ago
        That’s fair, but I personally lived for more than 30 years overseas before moving to the US, and am in contact with plenty of people outside the US. My experience has been that people’s perceptions are mostly reflective of what they read in the press. They were grossly inaccurate and misleading when the US was perceived as a magnificent success - most of the problems we have now were already apparent then. But they are also grossly misleading when representing the US relative to other states now. There are ‘failed states’ inside the European Union for example, and pretty much every one of the problems the US has are reflected elsewhere too. It is obvious that things are a lot worse, and that serious problems have gone unresolved, etc. I live in the East Bay and stores were looted only a few blocks from here. Similar things happened during the riots over Oscar grant at when I lived in another part of the East Bay. There is no descent into chaos. It’s not surprising that it seems like that if you live in China or Singapore, where the penalties for rioting are draconian. You can make argument either way as to whether the riots represent something healthy or unhealthy. But it is simply not true that US is descending into chaos. It’s not even true that this is some new thing. But of course if the media present it that way, then people will think that.
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    Both sides may be able to agree that the COVID crisis is being used to usher in new norms. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-the-great-reset/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-the-great-re...
- Craighead 6y ago
  Have you seen: Hong Kong, Belarus, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Russia, China, Mexico, UK, Zimbabwe, or Egypt within the last 10 years?
- booi 6y ago
  Successfully trying to rig an election by killing a constitutionally guaranteed service that the government itself is responsible for? What would you call that
  - ojbyrne 6y ago
    Assuming you’re talking about USPS, “successfully” seems premature.
  - donatj 6y ago
    Trying to do an election by mail, last minute, when we haven’t really any infrastructure in place to prevent mass mail-in fraud seems just as much a vector for rigging to me.
    - JKCalhoun 6y ago
      > mass mail-in fraud Source?
      - xaqfox 6y ago
        How many sources would you expect if there is no possible way to detect the fraud, unless the perpetrator confesses to committing it? Previously mail-in ballots were generally limited to specific conditions in order to limit the effectiveness and opportunity of this type of fraud (e.g. coercion and voting for others). That said and in my opinion it should be left up to the states to decide, but I also think there are better alternatives to limit the spread of covid (e.g. early voting by letter of last name; increased number in general and availability of outdoor polling locations; drive-thru polling locations; ticketing system where they message you when you are next or near next in line). I would also agree with federal grants to states to help fund such initiatives that actually provide a way to limit these types voting fraud that mail-in ballots do not.
    - nouveaux 6y ago
      "Trying to do an election by mail, last minute" It seems like you're implying that there is some negligence or conspiracy. No one could have predicted that United State's Covid response would be so poor. That realization only came about in May when we tried to reopen too early. Mail was delivering fine 6 months ago. Can you cite any sources that study the infrastructure problems of the USPS?
- nine_zeros 6y ago
  The denial sometimes is just unreal. What do you think other failed states are like? America is as much a failed state as corrupt democratic governments in Turkey, Thailand and Russia.
  - nick_kline 6y ago
    Yes, how can it not be obvious? Look at our continual failure to make even simple plans for cv19 and execute them nationally? It's partly the president's fault but we have multiple failures, and the situation makes clear our underfunded public health system's weakness. It can be done, look at how well other countries are organizing and dealing with it.
    - chii 6y ago
      under ultra-liberal capitalism, the cost of funding public is not profitable - and by that i mean the value created cannot be captured by an individual/entity, but is instead spread across society (aka, a common goods). This idea is deeply seated in the minds of those who would bear the highest cost burden (the medium to high tax bracket payers). For them, it is "cheaper" to pay their own way, than to "subsidize" the healthcare of the "poorer" people (even tho it's not that much, and they don't see the value lost to private healthcare companies).
    - aww_dang 6y ago
      Has this issue been unduely politicized in the context of an election year and a bitterly contested presidency? Which national plans would be possible within the context of the constitution? The US is literally a collection of states. When central dictates were issued by the president in the form of travel bans, partisans predictably cried "racism". It seems inconsistent or even hypocritical. Perhaps the "unraveling" is more a function of bitter partisanship?
      - nick_kline 6y ago
        Perhaps you aren't familiar with the US separation of powers between the states and the federal government. In the US, just like we have federal food inspectors (and some statewide ones too), a federal dept. of health, federal standards for roads, a federal center for disease control, it's silly to suggest we couldn't benefit from federal standards for covid-19 safety (we have something called OSHA). We could also make use of the existing federal laws to force companies to make ppe. There's rarely any PPE in the local stores in my area. I'm left to buy random questionably sourced masks on amazon. All it would take is an order from the president to vastly improve this situation on PPE. It will apparently be left to the next one to actually make a plan and deal with it.
- throwaw4y-plate 6y ago
  Living in TN right now, it's looking pur-ty rough.
- elefanten 6y ago
  You are correct and it's disheartening to see multiple replies asserting non-arguments against your observation. In political science, "failed state" has some commonly accepted definitions (eg- unable to project power and defend borders), none of which apply to the US even when accounting for the terrible mismanagement of COVID-19. But like with some other terms, there's a group of theorists (usually not political scientists) who are diluting the word and throwing it around politically. In terms of the underlying reality, the US very much a functioning state.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Yes, those two words appear in the article. Just once. I feel like you are cherry picking when you call out those two words and dispense with the other 4000+ The author makes numerous excellent points.
  - zepto 6y ago
    I agree with this. Most of the criticisms of the US have merit, and are serious. The part I think is problematic is this piece of hyperbole. I honestly believe that when people say things like this, they are contributing the problems we have as a world, even if they make a bunch of other good points. The value of an argument is not judged by then number of good points that are made. It is judged on the conclusions.
emerged 6y ago
I can't honestly make it through an article where every sentence is so optimized for maximum pessimism, fear mongering and politicality. I actually love the United States and would like to see articles like this stop trying to "unravel" it.
- yls 6y ago
  For me, it looks rather realistic. If you love the US, shouldn’t you embrace such articles in order to have some intellectual food to reflect on? If you don’t think so, the current admin provides more than enough good news anyway.
  - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
    If you love the US, you should embrace thoughtful articles that bring up neglected but valid points in insightful ways. This article is not that. This article is yet another "orange man bad" lamenting that America now isn't as great as it was from WWII through 1970. The problem with articles like this is that the people who already agree with the author will think the article is insightful and focus on the parts that are obviously correct (social cohesion genuinely has decreased), and the people who disagree will focus on the parts that are obviously wrong (oh look it's that misleading statistic again about the top X Americans having more wealth than the combined wealth of the bottom 50% because the bottom 50% have a combined wealth of about $0 because debt exists). The article gets shared by people who agree, who think everyone should read it for the author's "deep insight", and shared by people who disagree who say "look what the brainwashed people believe", and the article gets lots of clicks and ad impressions and everyone hates each other a little bit more.
    - michaelchisari 6y ago
      > because the bottom 50% have a combined wealth of about $0 because debt exists). I find that to be a relevant metric.
      - JoshuaDavid 6y ago
agustamir 6y ago
> The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. This crisis has really made me ponder the extent to which individualism has taken its toll on the American society. Really, large parts of the country don't seem to care about the collective good and are just turning a blind eye toward their fellow citizens in this moment of crisis.
- tetrometal 6y ago
  Piggybacking on your comment to respond to the quote, not your interpretation... First, there's no cult. Western civilization protects the rights of the individual, as they should - it's immoral to use aggressive force against anyone, no matter how many people that aggression might benefit (or appeal to). Second, protecting the rights of the individual denies neither community nor society, it only provides their operating principles. Communities and societies should absolutely work together and cooperate for the benefit of everyone - they should simply do it without using aggressive force against anyone.
  - whytaka 6y ago
    > First, there's no cult. Western civilization protects the rights of the individual, as they should - it's immoral to use aggressive force against anyone, no matter how many people that aggression might benefit (or appeal to). In an ironically cult like absolutism, you dismiss the moral discussion that transpired within Western philosophical traditions that debate this very topic - of Judeo-Christianity, of consequentialism. > Second, protecting the rights of the individual denies neither community nor society, it only provides their operating principles. Communities and societies should absolutely work together and cooperate for the benefit of everyone - they should simply do it without using aggressive force against anyone. This of course necessitates an elaboration on the word “should” in the context of a group of individualist agents where one chooses to not cooperate.
    - spanhandler 6y ago
      > In an ironically cult like absolutism, you dismiss the moral discussion that transpired within Western philosophical traditions that debate this very topic - of Judeo-Christianity, of consequentialism. There's a lot of this in online political discussion. Strident but, ah, let's say poorly sourced claims about ethics or morality, with whole castles of charmingly clear and straightforward political philosophy built atop them. I usually "nope" out when it looks like we might end up accidentally re-creating the "what is Justice?" dialogue from the beginning of Plato's Republic, but with only one of us realizing it, which is a situation that comes up pretty often, actually.
Helloworldboy 6y ago
Drivel sensationalism
youareostriches 6y ago
Relevant: American Passports Are Worthless Now https://medium.com/indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e https://medium.com/indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20... The USA has become a plague state.
joe_the_user 6y ago
America has entered into a strange category of it's own. It's looking similar to Brazil in some measures (inequality) and similar to Europe in other measures (average wealth, some levels of development) and it's somewhat to Turkey or India in yet other ways (dominated by ruthless religious parties that haven't, yet, eliminated Democratic processes entirely). I suspect that in every third world nation, and now here, people ask themselves "how does a nation so filled with competent, intelligent people allow itself to be dominated by corrupt, delusional people." Especially here in the nation that once and maybe still does have more competent people than anywhere else in the world. The answer is that the corruptly delusional ideologues and the competent technocrats are mixed together with no way of unraveling them. Look at Dr. Ben Carson, brilliant surgeon.
eric4smith 6y ago
While there is some significant loss of "value" of holdings, the main thing is to understand where the jobs and money are going, not where they were. Take a water balloon, and squeeze one end of it. It does not lose water, instead, the water goes to the other end of the balloon. That illustrates where the "money" is going. I've said elsewhere there is a sea-change in education happening right under our noses. I believe that a lot of the education money may very well flow to more vocational training, distance learning, tech and lessons for home school and smaller classes. Old-school group classes were inefficient anyway -- and people are just beginning to realize that. Doctors will do more old-timey house calls. Even to just survive! The restaurants and businesses that you frequent during your commute, like diners, etc, will also adapt. More deliveries instead. It will be easier to schedule a haircut from your barber for your home or office. I don't really want to go to a salon and sit in a chair there. Store owners will have to start doing more list building and email marketing, you can no longer just watch a customer walk-in and walk-out without trying to build your email or contact list. Yes, America is unravelling, but we are humans and we always adapt. It's just the stubborn ones or the hard to change industries that will suffer the longest and the slowest. I do not believe that things are just going to go back to "normal" as they were. There will be some significant change in the way how we conduct business, education, entertainment and living. The people who adapt to that change will be the winners.
dmje 6y ago
Nodding Brit nods
8bitsrule 6y ago
Never have I seen a post go from page 2 to page 7 so quickly. Particularly one so insightful. Edit: But maybe it'll get back to where it belongs, so I'll add this. Davis' insights only go skin deep. I've been around long enough to see a slow but steady movement in the US toward more positive values and appreciation and respect for individual differences. While our leadership has become more addled and directionless, real and affirming values have been on the rise, displacing those created by institutions. I could spend an hour disputing much of what Davis says, but I just hope this page isn't buried even further. We really need to have this discussion.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  This kind of column's a venerable cliché in left-leaning political writing in the US. Very good instances of it are still valuable, but this isn't really one of those and doesn't add much that anyone who pays attention to political writing hasn't already seen many times over. Better-argued and better-framed versions of the more historical and contextual bits of this are essentially the air that much of the left breathes. I've (repeatedly) seen forum posts cover the recent-events portions of this better, over the last few months, let alone professional writing. (for the record, I'm writing this from a pretty damn "left" perspective, having read just... so many of these sorts of columns, or whole books, over the years. This ain't a notable or particularly good one.)
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
I'm a brit, so speaking from the outside. I'm getting sick of this downtalking of everything. People have various fuels, and optimism is one (cautious, realistic, measured optimism, together with appropriate self-belief). This is not reflection, it's putting a hole in that tank to drain it out. It was incompetence that got the US into the mess it is, but if the US is sick, I have full confidence it will get well again. USA'ians putting down the US unrealistically will hurt your country as much as any other factor, draining your confidence - and to be clear, there are sate actors out there who are happy to chip in. This is bad and it's going to get worse. Consider yourself in a war and now try to see how to survive it and contribute to it instead of wallowing in apathy and fear. Of course the faults in the US are there and they are deep and must be acknowledged before they can be fixed, but they will be fixed and the US will be stronger (and just maybe smarter) for it afterwards. Destroy a person's hope is the most effective way of destroying them, and you're doing it to yourselves (with, I'm sure, a little help from others who want the US shrunken). (I'm normally on the negative side of things but watching people sink themselves into blackness over it all isn't realistic, as much as believing that 'hope is enough' or 'god will fix it' isn't realistic).

52 points by nouveaux 6y ago

Oh for god’s sake. “Failed state”? Seriously? Rolling stone has done great reporting on serious problems, but this is just insane. If the US is a ‘failed state’ then so is every other state.

IntelMiner 6y ago
What points in the article do you specifically disagree with?
- avs733 6y ago
  that the facts lead to a conclusion he doesn't like.
- pzone 6y ago
  The UNESCO "wealth of the 1%" sloganeering is one pet peeve of mine. This is the data where the article derives the claim "the top 3 richest people owning more wealth than the bottom 160 million." The way they get this eye popping number is by summing up all financial debts and subtracting them from total financial assets. What this ends up doing is overwhelming the sum with the roughly $1.5 trillion in student debt. Unlike a mortgage or car loan, which trade financial debt for financial assets, student debt is an investment in human capital. According to this UNESCO data, the very poorest people in the world are American lawyers and doctors fresh out of medical school. These people have a great deal of non-financial wealth. But according to this methodology, such a person with $300k in debt plus 300 people with $1k in reported assets equals a total of zero. Running the numbers this way is great for shock value but it doesn't make any sense if you think about it.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  I agree things are fairly bad in a lot of ways, and very bad in some ways, but "failed state" does have a specific meaning and applying it to the US is pretty hyperbolic. It's fuzzy like anything that describes human stuff, but the US is definitely on the not-failed side of that fuzzy line. Heading toward it? I dunno. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. There now? Certainly not. Our Federal government might be doing a piss-poor job but it has not stopped being able to assert sovereignty in meaningful ways, domestically and internationally, or to continue to deliver government services to a significant extent. If those things had happened we'd know it. "Governing very poorly"—even somewhat maliciously—is not what it means for a state to have failed. Maybe it's being used... I dunno, poetically? But that doesn't seem to be the case, in context. Some of the stuff in the article's interesting but a lot of the rest is similarly overblown. Declaring China's ascendance (it sometimes explicitly says China but then other times seems to use Asia to mean "Asia, but mostly China") is fashionable and might end up being true but is far from settled history, to pick on another part, and I'm guessing the "D-Day versus gun deaths in 2019" stat is mostly suicides, which seems disingenuous to me, in this context—while of course it is interesting and meaningful in others, I think they're trying to mislead with it here. I'm left-wing as hell and probably agree with most policy positions and general opinions the writer holds, so this should be right up my alley, but the piece isn't great. A better-written version of this with exactly the thesis and overall journey might even be something I'd really like! It's a mix of a pretty good cataloguing of disparate bad-sounding stats and figures about the US, many bad/misleading instances of same (any time there's a bad-sounding—or good-sounding, for that matter—stat missing any frame of reference, I get twitchy, and this has plenty), some dull and overstated predictions about the future, and some lazy narrative-building. I hate these kinds of articles when the right does them, but I almost hate them more when "my" side does them. I know that's bad politics because people respond to this sort of thing, but I just can't stand writing this transparently manipulative, at great cost to honesty and accuracy. The best parts are when the writer's focusing directly on the COVID response. Those are alright. A few other bits are OK for a few sentences in a row and could form the seed of good, if thoroughly unoriginal, articles on their own.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    It sounds like you would give the article a B- Not exactly a train wreck then.
    - spanhandler 6y ago
      Mmmmm.... call it a C-. Some paragraphs are train-wrecks. There's about 1/3 of an only-semi-interesting but not-actually-bad article in here if you cut it down, maybe.
  - nouveaux 6y ago
    "It's a mix of a pretty good cataloguing of disparate bad-sounding stats and figures about the US, many bad/misleading instances of same (any time there's a bad-sounding—or good-sounding, for that matter—stat missing any frame of reference, I get twitchy, and this has plenty), some dull and overstated predictions about the future, and some lazy narrative-building." I see what you're saying. To me, this article is not about building a case for America's failed state. It's an argument for the perceived loss of American leadership around the world. Given that conclusion, the stats he chooses are exactly the ones on people's minds around the world. Talking to my friends in China and Singapore, the George Floyd protests often come up as the US descending into chaos. There are comparisons to Hong Kong. Regardless of the faulty perception outside of the US, that perception shapes our leadership abilities. This article perfectly reflects what I've been hearing from overseas.
    - zepto 6y ago
      That’s fair, but I personally lived for more than 30 years overseas before moving to the US, and am in contact with plenty of people outside the US. My experience has been that people’s perceptions are mostly reflective of what they read in the press. They were grossly inaccurate and misleading when the US was perceived as a magnificent success - most of the problems we have now were already apparent then. But they are also grossly misleading when representing the US relative to other states now. There are ‘failed states’ inside the European Union for example, and pretty much every one of the problems the US has are reflected elsewhere too. It is obvious that things are a lot worse, and that serious problems have gone unresolved, etc. I live in the East Bay and stores were looted only a few blocks from here. Similar things happened during the riots over Oscar grant at when I lived in another part of the East Bay. There is no descent into chaos. It’s not surprising that it seems like that if you live in China or Singapore, where the penalties for rioting are draconian. You can make argument either way as to whether the riots represent something healthy or unhealthy. But it is simply not true that US is descending into chaos. It’s not even true that this is some new thing. But of course if the media present it that way, then people will think that.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  Both sides may be able to agree that the COVID crisis is being used to usher in new norms. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-the-great-reset/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-the-great-re...
Craighead 6y ago
Have you seen: Hong Kong, Belarus, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Russia, China, Mexico, UK, Zimbabwe, or Egypt within the last 10 years?
booi 6y ago
Successfully trying to rig an election by killing a constitutionally guaranteed service that the government itself is responsible for? What would you call that
- ojbyrne 6y ago
  Assuming you’re talking about USPS, “successfully” seems premature.
- donatj 6y ago
  Trying to do an election by mail, last minute, when we haven’t really any infrastructure in place to prevent mass mail-in fraud seems just as much a vector for rigging to me.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    > mass mail-in fraud Source?
    - xaqfox 6y ago
      How many sources would you expect if there is no possible way to detect the fraud, unless the perpetrator confesses to committing it? Previously mail-in ballots were generally limited to specific conditions in order to limit the effectiveness and opportunity of this type of fraud (e.g. coercion and voting for others). That said and in my opinion it should be left up to the states to decide, but I also think there are better alternatives to limit the spread of covid (e.g. early voting by letter of last name; increased number in general and availability of outdoor polling locations; drive-thru polling locations; ticketing system where they message you when you are next or near next in line). I would also agree with federal grants to states to help fund such initiatives that actually provide a way to limit these types voting fraud that mail-in ballots do not.
  - nouveaux 6y ago
    "Trying to do an election by mail, last minute" It seems like you're implying that there is some negligence or conspiracy. No one could have predicted that United State's Covid response would be so poor. That realization only came about in May when we tried to reopen too early. Mail was delivering fine 6 months ago. Can you cite any sources that study the infrastructure problems of the USPS?
nine_zeros 6y ago
The denial sometimes is just unreal. What do you think other failed states are like? America is as much a failed state as corrupt democratic governments in Turkey, Thailand and Russia.
- nick_kline 6y ago
  Yes, how can it not be obvious? Look at our continual failure to make even simple plans for cv19 and execute them nationally? It's partly the president's fault but we have multiple failures, and the situation makes clear our underfunded public health system's weakness. It can be done, look at how well other countries are organizing and dealing with it.
  - chii 6y ago
    under ultra-liberal capitalism, the cost of funding public is not profitable - and by that i mean the value created cannot be captured by an individual/entity, but is instead spread across society (aka, a common goods). This idea is deeply seated in the minds of those who would bear the highest cost burden (the medium to high tax bracket payers). For them, it is "cheaper" to pay their own way, than to "subsidize" the healthcare of the "poorer" people (even tho it's not that much, and they don't see the value lost to private healthcare companies).
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    Has this issue been unduely politicized in the context of an election year and a bitterly contested presidency? Which national plans would be possible within the context of the constitution? The US is literally a collection of states. When central dictates were issued by the president in the form of travel bans, partisans predictably cried "racism". It seems inconsistent or even hypocritical. Perhaps the "unraveling" is more a function of bitter partisanship?
    - nick_kline 6y ago
      Perhaps you aren't familiar with the US separation of powers between the states and the federal government. In the US, just like we have federal food inspectors (and some statewide ones too), a federal dept. of health, federal standards for roads, a federal center for disease control, it's silly to suggest we couldn't benefit from federal standards for covid-19 safety (we have something called OSHA). We could also make use of the existing federal laws to force companies to make ppe. There's rarely any PPE in the local stores in my area. I'm left to buy random questionably sourced masks on amazon. All it would take is an order from the president to vastly improve this situation on PPE. It will apparently be left to the next one to actually make a plan and deal with it.
throwaw4y-plate 6y ago
Living in TN right now, it's looking pur-ty rough.
elefanten 6y ago
You are correct and it's disheartening to see multiple replies asserting non-arguments against your observation. In political science, "failed state" has some commonly accepted definitions (eg- unable to project power and defend borders), none of which apply to the US even when accounting for the terrible mismanagement of COVID-19. But like with some other terms, there's a group of theorists (usually not political scientists) who are diluting the word and throwing it around politically. In terms of the underlying reality, the US very much a functioning state.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
Yes, those two words appear in the article. Just once. I feel like you are cherry picking when you call out those two words and dispense with the other 4000+ The author makes numerous excellent points.
- zepto 6y ago
  I agree with this. Most of the criticisms of the US have merit, and are serious. The part I think is problematic is this piece of hyperbole. I honestly believe that when people say things like this, they are contributing the problems we have as a world, even if they make a bunch of other good points. The value of an argument is not judged by then number of good points that are made. It is judged on the conclusions.

emerged 6y ago

I can't honestly make it through an article where every sentence is so optimized for maximum pessimism, fear mongering and politicality. I actually love the United States and would like to see articles like this stop trying to "unravel" it.

yls 6y ago
For me, it looks rather realistic. If you love the US, shouldn’t you embrace such articles in order to have some intellectual food to reflect on? If you don’t think so, the current admin provides more than enough good news anyway.
- JoshuaDavid 6y ago
  If you love the US, you should embrace thoughtful articles that bring up neglected but valid points in insightful ways. This article is not that. This article is yet another "orange man bad" lamenting that America now isn't as great as it was from WWII through 1970. The problem with articles like this is that the people who already agree with the author will think the article is insightful and focus on the parts that are obviously correct (social cohesion genuinely has decreased), and the people who disagree will focus on the parts that are obviously wrong (oh look it's that misleading statistic again about the top X Americans having more wealth than the combined wealth of the bottom 50% because the bottom 50% have a combined wealth of about $0 because debt exists). The article gets shared by people who agree, who think everyone should read it for the author's "deep insight", and shared by people who disagree who say "look what the brainwashed people believe", and the article gets lots of clicks and ad impressions and everyone hates each other a little bit more.
  - michaelchisari 6y ago
    > because the bottom 50% have a combined wealth of about $0 because debt exists). I find that to be a relevant metric.
    - JoshuaDavid 6y ago

agustamir 6y ago

> The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. This crisis has really made me ponder the extent to which individualism has taken its toll on the American society. Really, large parts of the country don't seem to care about the collective good and are just turning a blind eye toward their fellow citizens in this moment of crisis.

tetrometal 6y ago
Piggybacking on your comment to respond to the quote, not your interpretation... First, there's no cult. Western civilization protects the rights of the individual, as they should - it's immoral to use aggressive force against anyone, no matter how many people that aggression might benefit (or appeal to). Second, protecting the rights of the individual denies neither community nor society, it only provides their operating principles. Communities and societies should absolutely work together and cooperate for the benefit of everyone - they should simply do it without using aggressive force against anyone.
- whytaka 6y ago
  > First, there's no cult. Western civilization protects the rights of the individual, as they should - it's immoral to use aggressive force against anyone, no matter how many people that aggression might benefit (or appeal to). In an ironically cult like absolutism, you dismiss the moral discussion that transpired within Western philosophical traditions that debate this very topic - of Judeo-Christianity, of consequentialism. > Second, protecting the rights of the individual denies neither community nor society, it only provides their operating principles. Communities and societies should absolutely work together and cooperate for the benefit of everyone - they should simply do it without using aggressive force against anyone. This of course necessitates an elaboration on the word “should” in the context of a group of individualist agents where one chooses to not cooperate.
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    > In an ironically cult like absolutism, you dismiss the moral discussion that transpired within Western philosophical traditions that debate this very topic - of Judeo-Christianity, of consequentialism. There's a lot of this in online political discussion. Strident but, ah, let's say poorly sourced claims about ethics or morality, with whole castles of charmingly clear and straightforward political philosophy built atop them. I usually "nope" out when it looks like we might end up accidentally re-creating the "what is Justice?" dialogue from the beginning of Plato's Republic, but with only one of us realizing it, which is a situation that comes up pretty often, actually.

Helloworldboy 6y ago

Drivel sensationalism

youareostriches 6y ago

Relevant: American Passports Are Worthless Now https://medium.com/indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20678a80e https://medium.com/indica/the-plague-states-of-america-53b20... The USA has become a plague state.

joe_the_user 6y ago

America has entered into a strange category of it's own. It's looking similar to Brazil in some measures (inequality) and similar to Europe in other measures (average wealth, some levels of development) and it's somewhat to Turkey or India in yet other ways (dominated by ruthless religious parties that haven't, yet, eliminated Democratic processes entirely). I suspect that in every third world nation, and now here, people ask themselves "how does a nation so filled with competent, intelligent people allow itself to be dominated by corrupt, delusional people." Especially here in the nation that once and maybe still does have more competent people than anywhere else in the world. The answer is that the corruptly delusional ideologues and the competent technocrats are mixed together with no way of unraveling them. Look at Dr. Ben Carson, brilliant surgeon.

eric4smith 6y ago

While there is some significant loss of "value" of holdings, the main thing is to understand where the jobs and money are going, not where they were. Take a water balloon, and squeeze one end of it. It does not lose water, instead, the water goes to the other end of the balloon. That illustrates where the "money" is going. I've said elsewhere there is a sea-change in education happening right under our noses. I believe that a lot of the education money may very well flow to more vocational training, distance learning, tech and lessons for home school and smaller classes. Old-school group classes were inefficient anyway -- and people are just beginning to realize that. Doctors will do more old-timey house calls. Even to just survive! The restaurants and businesses that you frequent during your commute, like diners, etc, will also adapt. More deliveries instead. It will be easier to schedule a haircut from your barber for your home or office. I don't really want to go to a salon and sit in a chair there. Store owners will have to start doing more list building and email marketing, you can no longer just watch a customer walk-in and walk-out without trying to build your email or contact list. Yes, America is unravelling, but we are humans and we always adapt. It's just the stubborn ones or the hard to change industries that will suffer the longest and the slowest. I do not believe that things are just going to go back to "normal" as they were. There will be some significant change in the way how we conduct business, education, entertainment and living. The people who adapt to that change will be the winners.

dmje 6y ago

Nodding Brit nods

8bitsrule 6y ago

Never have I seen a post go from page 2 to page 7 so quickly. Particularly one so insightful. Edit: But maybe it'll get back to where it belongs, so I'll add this. Davis' insights only go skin deep. I've been around long enough to see a slow but steady movement in the US toward more positive values and appreciation and respect for individual differences. While our leadership has become more addled and directionless, real and affirming values have been on the rise, displacing those created by institutions. I could spend an hour disputing much of what Davis says, but I just hope this page isn't buried even further. We really need to have this discussion.

spanhandler 6y ago
This kind of column's a venerable cliché in left-leaning political writing in the US. Very good instances of it are still valuable, but this isn't really one of those and doesn't add much that anyone who pays attention to political writing hasn't already seen many times over. Better-argued and better-framed versions of the more historical and contextual bits of this are essentially the air that much of the left breathes. I've (repeatedly) seen forum posts cover the recent-events portions of this better, over the last few months, let alone professional writing. (for the record, I'm writing this from a pretty damn "left" perspective, having read just... so many of these sorts of columns, or whole books, over the years. This ain't a notable or particularly good one.)

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

I'm a brit, so speaking from the outside. I'm getting sick of this downtalking of everything. People have various fuels, and optimism is one (cautious, realistic, measured optimism, together with appropriate self-belief). This is not reflection, it's putting a hole in that tank to drain it out. It was incompetence that got the US into the mess it is, but if the US is sick, I have full confidence it will get well again. USA'ians putting down the US unrealistically will hurt your country as much as any other factor, draining your confidence - and to be clear, there are sate actors out there who are happy to chip in. This is bad and it's going to get worse. Consider yourself in a war and now try to see how to survive it and contribute to it instead of wallowing in apathy and fear. Of course the faults in the US are there and they are deep and must be acknowledged before they can be fixed, but they will be fixed and the US will be stronger (and just maybe smarter) for it afterwards. Destroy a person's hope is the most effective way of destroying them, and you're doing it to yourselves (with, I'm sure, a little help from others who want the US shrunken). (I'm normally on the negative side of things but watching people sink themselves into blackness over it all isn't realistic, as much as believing that 'hope is enough' or 'god will fix it' isn't realistic).