Failure Is Not an Option

Is a State failed when it bans books in its schools and yet, despite the slaughter of its children in those schools, makes no effort to control guns, or even share responsibility for the carnage? This seems a worthy question Americans might need to consider at this stage of our history.

A failed state is a government that has become incapable of providing the basic functions and responsibilities of a sovereign nation, such as military defense, law enforcement, justice, education, or economic stability. Common characteristics of failed states include ongoing civil violence, corruption, crime, poverty, illiteracy, and crumbling infrastructure. Even if a state is functioning properly, it can fail if it loses credibility and the trust of the people.

Max Weber was a German sociologist and political economist whose theories are considered some of the most important in the development of modern Western society. Those ideas continue to influence, often in profound ways, our civilized world.  His concepts denied monocausal explanations for both the development and failure of modern governments, which determined the success or dissipation of individual countries. Many causes are brought to bear in either situation. From his theories, researchers have developed a practical heuristic for determining when a nation becomes a Failed State. What is a Failed State? “Typically, the term means that the state has been rendered ineffective and is not able to enforce its laws uniformly or provide basic goods and services to its citizens because of (variously) high crime rates, insurgency, extreme political corruption, an impenetrable and ineffective bureaucracy, judicial ineffectiveness, military interference in politics, and cultural situations in which traditional leaders wield more power than the state over a certain area. Other factors of perception may be involved. A derived concept of “failed cities” has also been launched, based on the notion that while a state may function in general, polities at the substate level may collapse in terms of infrastructure, economy, and social policy. Certain areas or cities may even fall outside state control, becoming a de facto ungoverned part of the state.” (Versteten, Max Weber)

A heuristic based on quantitative and qualitative analyses has been developed over the years to make the determination of when a state, or nation, becomes ungovernable. There are currently several third-world nations that fit into the category of a failed state—Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chad, and several others teetering close to the abyss. Don’t forget Yugoslavia and the USSR. I wondered what would happen if I took this heuristic and applied it to the current conditions of our society. The United States is not a failed state. I’m not trying to make that argument. We are among the most successful countries in the world at the present time. On the other hand, the reality exists that our way of life has dissipated considerably for most of our citizens and their families in the last fifty years, and we have come close to losing the very vestiges of our democracy in the last decade due to greed, arrogance, fear, and race hatred. Consider these facts below, all of which are easily researched and public knowledge. The numbers have moved slightly up or down, but the data is mostly consistent since 2016. The issue here, for me, is how far must we go without corrective behavior to reach the tipping point of the abyss we seemed poised above? It’s worth both some thought and action on our part, unless we are determined to fail ourselves.

Quantitative and Qualitative:

Social indicators:

• Demographic pressures – constant political gerrymandering and population shifts
• Refugees or internally displaced persons – 340, 881 foreign refugees and 567,715 homeless citizens, more than 10% of which are veterans
• Group grievance – Of the 917 hate groups categorized by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 450 (roughly 50 percent) are white supremacist organizations. That number includes 100 white nationalist groups, 78 racist skinhead, 99 neo-Nazi, 43 neo-confederate and 130 Ku Klux Klan chapters. This doe not include pro-life, pro-choice, Black Lives Matter, Evangelical political action groups, etc. that are not defined as “hate” groups.
• Human flight and brain drain – America has over a century’s worth of brain drain and human flight in a regional sense resulting in the best and brightest relocating from rural to urban settings. The result has been catastrophic for many rural areas of the country educationally and economically.

Economic indicators:

• Uneven economic development – The average CEO earns $21.45 million dollars a year. That’s 400 times more than what an average employee earns ($51,394).
• Poverty and economic decline – About 12% of the United States population, or 36,460,000 people, live below the poverty level. Poverty not only indicates a lack of monetary funds, but also a lack of basic needs, which may include such things as clean water, shelter and food.

Political and military indicators:

• State legitimacy – Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, two-thirds of GOP voters and just over one-third of all voters, now believe the 2020 election was stolen. 
• Public services – infrastructure problems with roads, bridges, schools; cost of health services and medication, overcrowded and filthy prisons, police incompetence and brutality based on racial profiles, education deterioration, costs of utilities and aging electrical grids, etc. and refusal of politicians to correct these issues.
• Human rights and rule of law – read the news every day and, if nothing else, consider gun violence. Do you feel anxious to go to a fast-food restaurant these days or do anything in a crowd? Is it safe for your child to go to school without fear?
• Security apparatus – ???? What is acceptable to us regarding personal security and do we feel more or less secure than twenty years or fifty years ago?
• Factionalized elites – political corruption, rising number of billionaires or one percenters, wealthy white nationalists supporting various domestic terror groups
• External intervention – Russian interference in elections, Chinese corporate espionage.