Rebecca Gordon: The U.S. is in free fall - and at risk of becoming a failed state
...that feeling of falling
and knowing it’s too late ... reflects
a sensation many people in the United States might be having right now, a sense
that time is moving slowly while we watch a flailing country in a slow-motion
free fall.
It has taken decades of government dereliction to get us to this
point and a few years of Trumpian sabotage to show us just where we really are.
To have any hope of pulling back from the brink, however, will take the
determination of organizations like the Movement for Black Lives. That national descent,
when it came, proved remarkably swift. In less than six months, we’ve seen more
than 2.5 million confirmed
Covid-19 infections and more than 125,000 deaths. And it’s not slowing
down. June 24th, in fact, saw the biggest single-day total in new U.S.
infections (more than 38,000) since April and that number may well have been
superseded by the time this piece comes out.
During this pandemic, we’ve gone
from an economy of almost full employment - even if at
starvation levels for those earning a minimum wage to one with the worst unemployment
since the Great Depression (even as
billionaires have once again made a rather literal killing). The government’s response to these
twin catastrophes has been feckless at best and criminal at worst. While this country may not yet be a
failed state, it’s certainly in a free fall all its own.
What Is a Failed
State? People use this
expression to indicate a political entity whose government has ceased to
perform most or all of its basic functions. Such a condition can result from
civil war, untrammeled corruption, natural disaster, or some combination of
those and more. The Fund for Peace, which has been working on such issues for
more than 70 years, lists four criteria to identify such a country:
- “Loss of control of its territory, or of
the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force therein
- Erosion of legitimate authority to make
collective decisions
- Inability to provide public services
- Inability to interact with other states as
a full member of the international community”
I’ve always thought of
such fallen lands (sometimes given a fatal shove by my own government) as
far-away places. Countries like Libya. The Fund for Peace identifies that
beleaguered and now fractured nation, where rival armed forces compete for primacy, as the one in
which government fragility has increased most over the last decade.
The present
chaos began when the US and its NATO allies stepped in
militarily,
precipitating the overthrow of autocrat Muammar
Qaddafi, with no particular plan for the day after. Then there’s Yemen,
where Washington’s support for the intervention of Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates only exacerbated an ongoing civil war, whose civilian
victims have been left to confront famine, cholera, and most recently, with a
shattered healthcare system, the coronavirus. And before Libya and Yemen, don’t
forget the Bush administration’s disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, which
damaged that country’s physical and political infrastructure in ways it is now,
17 years later, starting to dig out of.
So, yes, I’d known
about failed states, but it wasn’t until I read “We Are Living in a Failed State” by George Packer in the
June 2020 Atlantic magazine that I began to seriously
entertain the idea that my country was bouncing down the same flight of stairs.. read more:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/the-u-s-is-in-free-fall-and-at-risk-of-becoming-a-failed-state/
see also
