I should go do the things I just said I intend to do but I want to talk about failed states for a moment because I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

I should preface this by saying that the very notion of “failing/failed state” is really problematic in regards to Western colonialism. It’s usually a label that developed Western nations throw at decolonized countries, especially in Africa, that contributes to stigmatization.

I don’t think it’s a *useless* notion in and of itself, but the way it’s used can get really ugly and reinforces a geopolitical system that’s marked by undertones of the idea that there’s something about PoC that renders them unable to effectively govern themselves.

It makes it easier to look at a country ravaged by colonialist destruction and think, on some level, “well what did you expect, of course they can’t establish a functioning state”.

All that being said: failed states and America.

There’s a lot of debate in the scholarly community regarding the characteristics of a failed state, but the key elements are often considered roughly along these lines (taken from the Fund for Peace):

•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

Any of that look uncomfortably familiar?

Now, I should be clear about something: I don’t consider America a “failed state”. The vast majority of it is still pretty safe and peaceful. For most of us the lights turn on and potable water comes out of the taps (not for everyone tho).

The roads are fairly usable, there is no famine, and the land outside the capital is not being fought over by warlords.

That said, we’re in the middle of a pandemic which is killing almost 4k people a day, and the federal government has barely done anything.

We have a vaccine which is being distributed in a horrifically inadequate and incompetent manner.

Much of our infrastructure is in fact in a state of serious disrepair and we seem unable to do much about that at the federal level.

Health care is a necessary service even outside a pandemic and we are wildly terrible at distributing that as well. In part? Because we don’t rely on the federal government to do so. We rely on the private sector, or—even worse—a chaotic mishmash of private and public.

As I said, there are a scary number of people in the country who do not have reliable access to basic services like clean water or electricity.

We are in the middle of terrible widespread hunger. Food shortages are rampant in some areas, or at least shortages of healthy food.

That was all true before the pandemic. The pandemic has merely exacerbated what was already there to a point where it’s much harder to ignore unless you *really* want to.

In terms of our relationship with the global community, that’s historically been pretty okay, but it’s taken a major hit in the last four years. We are increasingly marginalized and cut out of the decision-making processes.

We engage, we don’t engage down on the level of nations like Russia, but we’re way closer to that than we were. I wouldn’t say we engage fully. Other nations don’t trust us anymore. Our position as a member of a community has been severely damaged.

What about erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions?

I mean.

It’s still there? Kind of? But look at what just happened.

There is a significant percentage of the population that will not consider the incoming government a legitimate one, and therefore will not consider their authority to make decisions legitimate.

We just saw a literal armed insurrection in the national capital that disrupted the ability of the legislative body to perform basic, routine, boring work.

For those few hours, the state was not fully functional.

What about the monopoly on legitimate violence?

This is one of the first things I learned about when I was studying state formation in grad school, because many scholars consider it the last fundamental feature of a state.

FIRST. Not last. Sorry.

There’s a line of thinking in scholars of states that holds that states are most essentially about violence and its use.

Social theorist Max Weber popularized the notion of states built on and depending on the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within its borders.

For a while I was reading a *lot* of Charles Tilly, who wrote that “war made the state, and the state made war”.

But this isn’t really about war. It’s about domestic violence—again, in the sense of domestic use of force that the populace considers legitimate.

As in: a cop can shoot you and it’s okay.

See what I did there?

In the past year in particular but way further back in history, the question of what forms of state violence are legitimate has been in *serious* contention, for excellent reasons.

And there’s the whole question of who is subject to such violence, who’s considered a legitimate target and who is often spared as part of the status quo.

I could also get into a whole thing here about how citizenship is constructed, but I’m starting to digress a bit.

My point is that while in a functioning state the government holds a monopoly on legitimate domestic force, that’s almost always a contentious question. It’s stable but not settled, if that makes sense, and that’s probably how it should be.

But more recently, it’s been thrown *hugely* into question. For good reasons... and for bad ones.

Witness the armed insurrection on Wednesday, again. Think about what the cops appear to have done. And not done.

While police force is hugely problematic and I think we need to have a major reckoning about it, and I support the dismantling of the police entirely, the really troubling thing we saw was the police appearing to *recognize self-evidently illegitimate use of force as legitimate*

At least some of them did, in that it looks like they not only didn’t do much but in fact may have enabled the violence.

I’ve seen the videos, video isn’t always reliable but they’re pretty fucking damning.

And some of the police also seem to have tried to make it stop.

But it’s that “some” that’s such a big problem and troubles me so much from this standpoint, because it means there are now some things that are obviously up for grabs.

So, to recap:

We have a federal government that is not effectively distributing basic services.

We have a federal government that isn’t fully engaging with the international community.

We have a federal government which will not be considered legitimate by a frighteningly large percentage of the population.

And we have a federal government which no longer appears to be fully able to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

We aren’t a failed state, no. Or at least I wouldn’t call us that.

But we are a state I would consider no longer fully functional, and heading toward a slide into failure.

Why is this happening?

Lots of reasons, but I would place the largest one at the feet of the Republican Party.

Not because I don’t like Republicans, or enjoy blaming them for things, but because for the better part of a century now, the GOP has been animated by an ideology which holds that the government itself is an undesirable institution and should be eroded.

Except inasmuch as they can use it to prop up a status quo that keeps them in power and enriches them and their friends.

This is what happens when you elect people who don’t like or trust the state. The state starts to fail.

I should say that I’m not a huge fan of states either. They’re super problematic. They do a lot of bad things. They’re intrinsically violent, and marginalized people are especially subject to that violence.

But we need a functioning government.

We need a functioning *federal* government. To distribute basic services, to maintain infrastructure, to give us a voice in the international community, and—yes—to protect our rights and keep us safe, at least in some respects.

What we’re seeing now is what happens when small government conservatives get their way.

I’m pointing this out, because this is one of the most insidious features of the Republican Party and it’s easy to miss the full extent of it and what it means.

This is all happening because of racism, because of capitalism, and because of imperialism, but it’s also happening because the federal government has been long controlled by a party that *fucking hates the federal government and wants to destroy 90% of it and what it does*.

This is what’s at stake: we get these people out of power, everywhere, at all levels, or we are looking at living in a failing state. It’s already happening. It’s been happening for a while. Yesterday should have been a wake-up call for anyone who didn’t perceive it.

I also place a lot of this at the feet of institutionalist Democrats, because they stubbornly refuse to accept what’s going on and act accordingly. Their passivity is part of how we got here.

They’re complicit in the destruction of the institutions they say they protect.

It sounds cliché to say that the task here is “saving America” but to a very real and technical extent that’s what’s facing us.

If you don’t want to live in a failing state, this is what you have to stop. These are the people you have to stop.

And while a functional state isn’t super good in many ways, a failing one is way, way worse.

Fin.