America Has Failed

10 MINUTE READ

America is fast becoming a failed state. The great experiment is over and the results are in, writes Henri Colens.

How does one define a country? A collection of people sharing a common legal system? A defined physical space on Earth, surrounded by geographical or artificial boundaries? A shared history of people, flora and fauna? Or... an idea?

If America was an idea, now it’s a warning. America is the boy who grew up with nothing, and through his wits and ruthless pursuit of profit, became rich beyond imagination. But at what cost? Did he lose his soul along the way? Now, in his dotage, he seems to have lost his mind. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is: it’s the story told in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film: ‘There Will Be Blood’.

Whilst it was once the most developed country in the world, America is now a backward country. It is in reverse. Many indicators show this, but why? Perhaps the origin is in its people’s quasi-religious acceptance of its outdated Constitution and their steadfast adherence to Christian dogma. Its institutions, culture and society are immune to reform. When it’s in a tough spot this a country that invokes precedent, prays to God and buries its head in the sand.

America’s Constitution is a fine historical document. At the time it stood as a beacon of human progress. Today it utterly fails to serve the nation. It hinders reform, it stifles political progress, hampers social mobility, and causes needless death. What is more, the process of reforming it is itself in need of reform. 

This is not an attack on institutions. This is an attack on the greed and cruelty of people who work within them, and corrupt them to their own ends. The Constitution was a product of the pure hearts of founders who dreamt of a better world (hence their innate power) but who knew the value of compromise (hence their imperfection). They built their house to withstand the wind and rain of the changing seasons. But it is often from the inside that a house falls down.

Systems of belief are also systems of ignorance

Religion has also inoculated vast swathes of the country to progress. In fact, evangelical Christians have added the word “progress” to their list of deadly sins. Christian values have insinuated themselves into questions around healthcare and women’s rights, promoted gun use, accelerated environmental destruction and polluted politics with money. Although church and state are supposed to be separated, Christian doctrine prevents science from being taught properly in schools, with creationism elevated as an alternative theory. Systems of belief are also systems of ignorance: when America loves Jesus, faith is all you need.

Religion is fundamentalist and blinding. Christianity itself is full of redeeming features, but the human need to codify and control has created strange hypocrisies which have seeped into political life. An example of this is the pro-life movement. The demonization of mothers seeking abortion, even in cases of rape or life-threatening conditions, is based on the belief that God sees the practice as murder. Every life is sacred – nothing must be done to interfere with God’s plan. But where are the pro-lifers after mass shootings? Where are the pro-lifers when guns are brought into schools? Where are the pro-lifers when immigrant children with life-threatening illnesses are asked to leave the country? In all these cases the pro-lifers are either silent or cheering.

America is a divided country: the dis-united States. A resurgent class system separates Americans, many of whom are indoctrinated to be socially conservative and in thrall to a culture of unspoken but increasingly overt segregation. Race, education and religion are the most important drivers of this apartheid. Religion, especially when dragged into the public and political sphere, is used as a weapon of exclusion.

Jealousy and rage

America runs on fear. The emotional fuel of middle America, the Southern States and wealthy elites, is fear - fear that the control they exert on every facet of the country’s social and political process will be torn away from them. It’s the fear that the dream they were sold will be dissolved, and crucially that the lie they sold others to control them will be uncovered. And fear is the great economic driver of the United States. A whole industry of weaponry is made freely available so that the militia can quell any potential revolt quickly and efficiently, or strike preemptively to annihilate those thought to dilute the purity of the United States. Police brutality is another example of this fear in action: white cops trained to see all young black men as violent criminals. 

Furthermore, fear of being left behind, of not fitting in, of not conforming, of missing out… is at the heart of many marketing campaigns. While many will say this has been copied everywhere, a common trait most Americans lack is cynicism, a positive quality in many respects, but one which renders them susceptible to commercial exploitation. America sells through fear as much as aspiration.  

And as communities break down, as town and cities crumble and jobs stagnate, what can an American do? If fear is the fuel, then the result is jealousy and rage, the most powerful influence on American politics right now. Jealousy asks why immigrants are here, and rage orders them to go home. Jealousy blames the elite, while rage screams “Drain the swamp!”. Jealousy sneers at Hillary Clinton, while rage elects Donald Trump. 

A moral society

American is undoubtedly a racist country. You get the sense, as you wander the streets and move through the vast landscapes of this beautiful land, that a great denial is occurring. The native extermination, the relegation of the history of slavery - both are acknowledged, but the lessons refuse to be learned. The purity of White America is a quilted system of nepotism that resembles the informant hierarchy of communist Russia. It’s so stiflingly ubiquitous that most Americans don’t even realise it’s there. 

America has always considered itself a model of a moral society. These days, that appears to be laughably naive. Discrimination based on race, religion and gender has been driven by high profile political and religious forces, and transmitted intravenously into the blood stream of the nation by commercial television and the now ubiquitous use of social media. Morality has become a method of exclusion: if you diverge from our cultural, religious, sexual or racial ideal you are not welcome here.  American racism lies unseen, latent, filtered through chatrooms and message boards which lurk in the dark corners of the web. Like a vast inter-connected sewer, the foundations of America’s hatred fester underground, periodically belching up acts of terror. 

The very people traditionally held responsible for rooting out this hatred are now actively promoting it. The President (Trump), the Government and his law enforcement community are installing more sewer! They pronounce hate speech of their own and turn a blind eye to the growing evidence that white supremacy is virulent again. It’s as if the ruling GOP is now running the country in the interests of the wealthy few and the extremists who clamour to Trump’s banner. While many reasonable people voted for Trump in 2016, how can they do so again in all good conscience in 2020? While many Americans may rightly claim that most of their fellow countrymen are hard-working and tolerant citizens, it does beg the question: why have they allowed themselves to be ruled by a racist misogynist President who heads a gun-loving, environment-destroying Party? Is it simply because of the tax cuts? Is it because the economy is supposedly “booming”? Or is it because the odds are stacked against them?

America’s politics are dysfunctional. Cavernous legal loopholes allow cheating to discriminate in favour of the interests of the few and the white. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, electoral dirty tricks are rife, designed to disadvantage the poor and spread fear within the undocumented. Corporate money distorts politics by funding public representatives, who act like pawns, furthering the distortion. 

America is bad for your health. Political and legal corruption has prevented the country from entering the 21st century. Societal and economic indicators show a country which is stalling. This endangers the lives of not only its own citizens but the world’s. The US will account for almost two-thirds of the world’s new oil and gas output in the coming 10 years. America is bad for people and planet. Unlike Russia, which deliberately enjoys its role as the global mischief-maker, America is sleep-walking us towards global apocalypse.

America is now no longer the ideal of the world. Americans haven’t accepted the ideals of equality and justice for all. American society, founded on the twin pillars of Christian doctrine and competitive consumerism, has evolved as the celebration of the individual. This faith in Christ and the free market would sit uneasily side-by-side in most countries, but in America their apparent contradiction is completely ignored. America has evolved deep psychological and institutional contortions to cope with the inherent hypocrisy at its very heart. But the cracks are beginning to show. 

America is the land of the skin-deep. Lazily, “Globalisation” is blamed for destroying communities, but is it not America’s anti-progress agenda which has stunted the chance of economic renewal within many towns and districts? Americans are anchored to an ideal that is long-gone. The irony is that this is the country that capitalised progress. Now its current leader is marketing nostalgia. 

The hall of mirrors

America gets the President it deserves. The American President is often an accurate reflection of the character of the nation. Its present incumbent is a racist, a serial liar, a misogynist and former TV “personality”. Granted, the current occupant of the White House did not win the popular vote, but still American women voted in their droves for a proud sexual predator. America’s politics is a hall of mirrors reflecting the personality cult of a deeply egotistical (and yet highly unimpressive) human being. America is now forced to worship daily to the symbol of itself in all his cruel and feckless ignominy. As usual, deep down the cult leader abhors his subjects. 

The liberalisation of healthcare and prison services has meant that low income and disadvantaged people are treated as a commercial objects. Wherever there are resources there are white people. Black people are more likely to live in deprivation. Black mothers are roughly four times more likely to die from childbirth than their white counterparts. 

Against the backdrop of this deep-rooted racial inequality (when he stops Muslims entering the country, when he puts Central Americans and Mexicans in cages, when he praises the “very fine people” who rallied for white supremacy in Charlottesville) the Republican President is in effect harking back to the Jim Crow era. 

The Presidency is enabling a modern-day fascism, whose end is the return to racial and religious purity. Even if he may not truly believe in the concept of white supremacy, Trump has surrounded himself with people who do. He does this because he believes it will maintain him in power. Muslims, Blacks, Latinos and Jews are being blamed for the ills of the country by him and his administration. It is a return to Hitler’s 1930s playbook: remember a glorious past, blame the country’s moral decline on the “other”, oversee a dismantling of democratic institutions, purge the state from what it considers racially undesirable (exterminate them if necessary). The depressing reality is that the real symbol of moral decline is sitting in the Oval Office.

America crashes on the rocks of the white working class. The country, which has for so long divided its politics on racial grounds, skews its electoral math to the whims of the rural poor. The great population centres are under-represented in the Senate, which has become a bastion of illiberal intolerance and sings to the tune of Republican white supremacy apologists. A Republican senator is just as likely to call a Democrat a despicable socialist as he is to go to church on Sundays. 

America’s press is as morally contemptible as any of the country’s corrupt politicians or CEOs. Because the media accepts the framing of issues in such a binary way, because it filters based on optics, because it chases the dollar more than truth, because it often utterly fails to challenge and therefore operates as a mouthpiece for those who are financially wealthy but morally bankrupt, it does not measure up to the ideals of the founders for robust, transparent and inclusive reporting and debate.  

Weaker, and more appallingly abject still, are the people, who spoon-feed themselves vile bigotry out of a warped sense of patriotism. Are we surprised that white supremacy has become endemic to the very fibre of this country? It turns out we were wrong: American idiocy had not yet reached its zenith with the daytime television evangelicals of yore, the robber barons masking as TV preachers who grew rich by preying on the poor, the sick and the old. (Isn’t it deliciously apt that “pray” and “prey” are homonyms?)

But now, American social media actively and unrepentantly pushes fiction as fact, ripping up the way the World accesses truth, to the detriment of free and informed debate. Social media salivates at the prospect of taking a crowbar to the country, revelling in the division and destruction it causes, and empowering modern information terrorism. Information technology, and the way it has revolutionised how humans communicate, was perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back when it came to unleashing the latent and endemic prejudices in America. Apologists for it are numerous. It is not a crime to lie, they say. Opinion is a gift, they say. Well, liberal democracy is based on trust - who can be trusted now?

America is in an utterly abject state: devoid of compassion, common-sense, moral judgement, authenticity, good-character, manners. Courage and tolerance are glaringly absent from its political discourse. America was supposed to be founded on ideals of liberty, opportunity and equality for all - a great vision that was the envy of the world. Where are those dreams now? They lie in tatters at the feet of a President and a Party that have cloaked themselves in the white flowing robes of gun-toting radical nationalist hate groups. If current trends continue, America’s government will soon be as authoritarian and corrupt as any of the juntas it sought to destroy in its foreign policy heyday. 

America is the art of the con, the land of the caged, home of the coward. Some might indeed say that America needs to bleed and burn, but this is not the remedy, for innocence is worth preserving. Reason is the cure, but stocks of the required serum are running low. The fight for America’s soul continues. And we watch with dread and with hope. We watch because it teaches us about our world. We watch and wait for the sun to rise again.

Things to fix in America:

- The outdated Constitution

- The Electoral College

- The Senate

- Two party politics

- Corporate funding in politics

- Wholesale access to guns

- Political appointment of judges

- The privatisation of prisons

- The broken justice system

- Police (un)accountability

- The sue-first culture

- Gerrymandered districts

- Religious influence within education

- The ability of the IRS to collect taxes