• Welcome to the Internet Infidels Discussion Board.

Is The US A Failed State?

 
 
 
rousseau said:
A failed state has an unambiguous definition, which is this:

a state whose political or economic system has become so weak that the government is no longer in control.
Click to expand...

IOW, a failed state is a country with no effective government, a territory that has descended into what amounts to anarchy. So the U.S. isn't a failed state by any normal definition of the term. I think what the Atlantic is trying to say is that the U.S. has serious problems, and they'd like to use a provocative title that it's readers don't have the awareness to understand, to get clicks.

If we're going to have a serious discussion about the composition of the U.S. as a functional state, we need a concrete definition of the term. And by the normal definition of the term the U.S. isn't a failed state.
Click to expand...

Exactly right. People seem to be conflating failures of the US government (or any government) with a failed state. The two are not equivalent.
 
Blame me. I taught 5th & 6th grade for 31 years. In the last ten years of it, I did try to subvert the pablum in the state-mandated curriculum strands, but still, the young 'uns left with some dumbass boring learnin' about the 4 factors of production (entrepreneur, capital, land, labor) and some stuff about Squanto and adobe and how to divide a fraction by another goddamned fraction. Oh yeah -- they were told that there's a system of checks and balances in our government that protects us from kinglike rulers. (That was to leaven all the adobe-type lessons with a little humor.)
 
Patooka said:
It could be argued that there is a clear evolutionary gap between rednecks and people.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that's definitely sounding like racism. I'm with Trausti here, if you're going to complain about racism in other aspects of social life, you can't expect not to be rightly called out for hypocrisy if you then turn around and act bigoted toward poverty-stricken Whites.
 
What's the PC term for "redneck?" Let me give it a try.

Most ... usually white individuals with rural American cultural affiliation... I meet are proud to tell you that they are "rednecks."

You think the folks watching Jeff Foxworthy specials from the 90s are all racists looking down on the despicable people who don't live in cities? No. That is not and was not his audience. Is "redneck" really a slur? or is it a badge of identity?
 
The Trump Administration Is Corrupting the U.S. Government - The Atlantic - Trump vs. his employees. He inherited them from his predecessors, and he's now trying to turn them into something resembling his businesses -- run by lackeys and cronies and loyalists at the expense of any bit of competence.

Trump has made an alliance of expediency with the Republican establishment, especially Mitch McConnell. MMC says unflattering things in private about Trump, like how Trump is nuts and not very smart. Trump must also seem hopelessly undisciplined to MMC.

That was not in the article, but another alliance of expediency was in the article: with his Attorney General Willam Barr. He has three main principles:

1. The unitary executive - the President has absolute authority over the executive branch, and that branch has a broad latitude in making war and interpreting laws. One can see how Trump likes this.

2. Partisanship - Republicans good, Democrats bad. Special prosecutors are bad, but when they investigate Democratic Presidents, they are good. Presidential authority is good, when the President is a Republican.

3. Being a right-wing Catholic, and very authoritarian. "Dunne and his wife once had dinner at Barr’s house and came away with the impression of a traditional patriarch whom only the family dog disobeyed."
In 1992, as attorney general, Barr gave a speech at a right-wing Catholic conference in which he blamed “the long binge that began in the mid-1960s” for soaring rates of abortion, drug use, divorce, juvenile crime, venereal disease, and general immorality. “The secularists of today are clearly fanatics,” Barr said. He called for a return to “God’s law” as the basis for moral renewal. “There is a battle going on that will decide who we are as a people and what name this age will ultimately bear.”

... Barr and Cipollone also sat together on the board of the Catholic Information Center, an office in Washington closely affiliated with Opus Dei, a far-right Catholic organization with influential connections in politics and business around the world. During those years, the Republican Party sank into its own swamp of moral relativism, hitting bottom with Trump’s presidency.
Click to expand...
Like evangelicals, that right-wing Catholic is more than willing to look the other way at Trump's "family values".
Barr uses his official platform to gaslight the public. In a speech to the conservative Federalist Society in Washington in November, he devoted six paragraphs to perhaps the most contemptuously partisan remarks an attorney general has ever made. Progressives are on a “holy mission” in which ends justify means, while conservatives “tend to have more scruple over their political tactics,” Barr claimed. “One of the ironies of today is that those who oppose this president constantly accuse this administration of ‘shredding’ constitutional norms and waging a war on the rule of law. When I ask my friends on the other side, ‘What exactly are you referring to?,’ I get vacuous stares, followed by sputtering about the travel ban or some such thing.”
Click to expand...
He describes his own side so very well.
The core of the speech was a denunciation of legislative and judicial encroachments on the authority of the executive—as if presidential power hasn’t grown enormously since 9/11, if not the New Deal, and as if Trump’s conduct in office falls well within the boundaries of Article II.
Click to expand...
Seems like he'd like absolute monarchy.
In October, at Notre Dame, the attorney general recycled his old jeremiad on religious war. For Barr the year is always 1975, Congress is holding hearings to enfeeble the presidency, and the secular left is destroying the American family.
Click to expand...
 
Axulus said:
Exactly right. People seem to be conflating failures of the US government (or any government) with a failed state. The two are not equivalent.
Click to expand...
Right now, the federal government is barely functional. The states had to act entirely on their own and the Majority GOP leader in the Senate is telling the states to 'fuck off' for funding to support the closure of the state economies which prevented (for now) 100,000,000 or so infections at this point in the US. The US has spent $2 trillion recently and unemployment is what, 20 to 30 million?
 
rousseau said:
Fragile States Index

The U.S. sits at 153 and is listed as 'very stable', but interestingly not 'sustainable'. It's also 12th on the list of the most worsened countries in 2019, and between 2009 - 2019.
Click to expand...
I think that a better comparison would be with the bottom of the list, the most stable of all. Finland, at 178.

 List of countries by Fragile States Index

Another interesting list is at  Democracy Index It lists the US as 25th in order, making it a "flawed democracy". One of the better ones of those, but still one of those.

It's interesting to compare to  List of countries by system of government and  List of electoral systems by country - one can look for what the top scorers have in common.
 
Let's look at countries by region. I'll use the highest scorers for the larger regions.

Nordic: Iceland 173 2 MC PL, Denmark 175 7.5 MC PL, Norway 177 1 MC PL, Sweden 170 3 MC PL, Finland 178 5 PC PL

German: Netherlands 166 11 MC PL, Luxenbourg 169 12 MC PL, Germany 167 13 PC MM, Austria 165 16.5 PC PL, Switzerland 176 10 PE PL

Commonwealth: the UK 155 14 MC SM, Ireland 168 6 PC ST, Canada 172 7.5 MC SM, Australia 174 9 MC ST, New Zealand 171 4 MC MM

Belgium: 161 33 MC PL

Ex-Roman: France 160 20 PE SM, Spain 147 16.5 MC PL, Portugal 164 22 PE PL, Italy 143 35 PC PM

Eastern Europe: Czechia 154 32 PC PL, Slovenia 163 36.5 PC PL, Lithuania 152 36.5 PE MM

Latin America: Uruguay 158 15 PE PL, Costa Rica 145 19 PE PL

East Asia: Japan 157 24 MC PM, South Korea 160 23 PE PM, Taiwan NL 31 PE PM

United States: 153 25 PE SM

NL = not listed

Executive: M = usually-hereditary monarch, P = elected president, C = ceremonial, E = executive

Legislature: SM = single-member, ST = single transferable vote, PL = party-list PR, MM = mixed-member PR, PM = parallel-member partial PR
 
Let's see what one can plausibly conclude from this list of high scorers.

First, the head of the executive branch of government. The most common kind of head is a ceremonial one, one who is basically a nonpartisan master or mistress of ceremonies. The head can be either a monarch or a president, a hereditary or an elected leader -- both are represented among the high scorers. The legislature is responsible for the rest of the government, including picking the heads of major government agencies, and an overall acting head: a Prime Minster or First Minister or Chancellor or Premier. This is sometimes called the Westminster or parliamentary system.

There are a few activist ones among the high scorers, and they deserve further discussion. Switzerland is unusual in having an an activist president who is elected by the legislature. France has a semi-presidential system, sort of like a parliamentary system with an activist president.

The US is one of the top countries with a pure presidential system - most others are much lower in the Fragile States and Democracy Indices.

Monarchies are now rare, and the top-rated ones are all ceremonial. Let's see how activist ones work out.

Monarchy + legislature, monarchical version of a presidential or semi-presidential system:
Bahrain 113 149 SM, Bhutan 81 91 SM, Jordan 69 114.5 PM, Kuwait 130 114.5 ??, Liechtenstein NL NL PL, Monaco NL NL PM, Morocco 79 96 PM, Thailand 77 68 MM, Tonga NL NL SM

Monarchy alone: absolute monarchy.
Brunei 124 NL, Eswatini 42 132.5, Oman 133 137.5, Qatar 141 128, Saudi Arabia 93 159.5, United Arab Emirates 149 145, Vatican City NL NL

Eswatini was formerly Swaziland

So they are not nearly as good as the top-rated ones, and the absolute monarchies that have low fragility are the ones with a lot of oil wealth.
 
lpetrich said:
Let's see what one can plausibly conclude from this list of high scorers.

First, the head of the executive branch of government. The most common kind of head is a ceremonial one, one who is basically a nonpartisan master or mistress of ceremonies. The head can be either a monarch or a president, a hereditary or an elected leader -- both are represented among the high scorers. The legislature is responsible for the rest of the government, including picking the heads of major government agencies, and an overall acting head: a Prime Minster or First Minister or Chancellor or Premier. This is sometimes called the Westminster or parliamentary system.

There are a few activist ones among the high scorers, and they deserve further discussion. Switzerland is unusual in having an an activist president who is elected by the legislature. France has a semi-presidential system, sort of like a parliamentary system with an activist president.

The US is one of the top countries with a pure presidential system - most others are much lower in the Fragile States and Democracy Indices.

Monarchies are now rare, and the top-rated ones are all ceremonial. Let's see how activist ones work out.

Monarchy + legislature, monarchical version of a presidential or semi-presidential system:
Bahrain 113 149 SM, Bhutan 81 91 SM, Jordan 69 114.5 PM, Kuwait 130 114.5 ??, Liechtenstein NL NL PL, Monaco NL NL PM, Morocco 79 96 PM, Thailand 77 68 MM, Tonga NL NL SM

Monarchy alone: absolute monarchy.
Brunei 124 NL, Eswatini 42 132.5, Oman 133 137.5, Qatar 141 128, Saudi Arabia 93 159.5, United Arab Emirates 149 145, Vatican City NL NL

Eswatini was formerly Swaziland

So they are not nearly as good as the top-rated ones, and the absolute monarchies that have low fragility are the ones with a lot of oil wealth.
Click to expand...

I'd think the chain of causation moves in the other direction -> stable economies manifest themselves into stable government, and not vice versa. What you're looking for in a stable government isn't really type so to speak, but their commitment to democracy and the freedom of their citizens. IOW, there should be a tight correlation between regions with a deep, natural history and political evolution, material resources, and stability. Read: Western Europe and it's descendants. Those materially wealthy regions will also have a high degree of freedom and adherence to human rights.

In the middle-east there are some outliers who became wealthy before they evolved into a politically free state.
 
Turning to legislatures, I have decided to analyze lower houses, the more populist ones, at least by original intention. Upper houses, the more elitist ones, usually don't do as much. The US Senate is relatively active by upper-house standards. It started out with its members being elected by state legislatures, but in 1913, the 17th Amendment made it elected by ordinary people, like House members. So it was made more populist.

The most common kind of election for them is party-list proportional representation. Everybody votes for a party, and seats are allocated in proportion to how many votes each party got. Parties usually publish lists of candidates that they want seated, thus the name.

The US uses single-member districts, and of the high scorers, only Canada and the UK continue to use that system.

Some nations use hybrid systems, like mixed member and parallel member, with both district seats and list seats. For parallel member, the list seats are proportional only among themselves, while for mixed member, the list seats are parallel for the entire legislature.

Another system that some nations use is ranked-choice or preference voting combined with multimember districts -- single transferable vote. It is like its single-seat counterpart, except that not only losers, but also winners drop out of the count as it proceeds.
 
So let's create a profile of good government. I'll use US terms.

The President is a ceremonial sort of leader and not an activist or executive one. The Senate has been downgraded to something like Britain's House of Lords, and it not even exist anymore. The House is elected by proportional representation, and the Speaker is the US's Prime Minister, doing the work of leadership.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom