Failed Nation State?
Question: Is the U.S. a failed nation state? I have been thinking about it and think one could reasonably say yes. For instance, our rules about representation in government have not changed significantly since everyone used horses and buggies! I heard/read on NPR that we always had elections on Tuesdays so that people could ride to town to vote after the Sabbath ended and ride back. Is that really where we should be now? According to
Pew research, the number of constituents for each Representative has gone from 209,447 people in 1910 to one for every 747,184 as of last year. And yet we are still trying to run the country the same way. Well, except for the Republicans, who are sturdily trying to disenfranchise everyone who is Black, lives in a city, or otherwise looks like they might be a Democrat.
Heck, our healthcare is about the same as it was in 1910 too although the rest of the world has moved on quite a few steps. And don't let me forget to mention our police who kill many more people each year than the police in all of Europe.
So I argue that the U.S. cannot be a successful nation state. What kind of successful nation state would have that much power to fix the ills its people suffer but do so little to fix them?
Pew research, the number of constituents for each Representative has gone from 209,447 people in 1910 to one for every 747,184 as of last year. And yet we are still trying to run the country the same way. Well, except for the Republicans, who are sturdily trying to disenfranchise everyone who is Black, lives in a city, or otherwise looks like they might be a Democrat.
Heck, our healthcare is about the same as it was in 1910 too although the rest of the world has moved on quite a few steps. And don't let me forget to mention our police who kill many more people each year than the police in all of Europe.
So I argue that the U.S. cannot be a successful nation state. What kind of successful nation state would have that much power to fix the ills its people suffer but do so little to fix them?

Comments
Neither has Canada's, really. Our legislatures are still a pretty hardcore version of Westminster, pure first-past-the-post with no input from PR whatsoever, where it's still possible to win a majority government without getting a majority, or even a plurality, of the votes; IOW another party can actually get more votes than yours, but you can still form a majority government.
And in fact, when somone tried to change this by seeking a court decision forcing my home province to abolish its "rotten borroughs", the SCOC ruled that it was okay for rural ridings to have significantly fewer voters than urban ridings, and that one-man-one-vote was a weirdo American import we didn't need in Canada.
(The hilarious thing about all this was that the party which benefitted from that ruling was the right-wing Conservatives, generally regarded by their detractors as puppets of the US oil industry.)
However, I believe things are beginning to turn around. Biden is coming on board. He is selecting an in-depth cabinet (assuming most of them will be approved). Biden has also had a good working relationship with Republican Senior Senators. If the Dem's get the two Georgian seats, he can develop a coalition to get things done.
To the point of each representative representing 750,000+ constituents, the size of the House is set by law, and the constraints of the actual building. However, you forget with modern communication each representative is much more accessible to their constituents. Moreover, each representative has a large office staff both in DC and at offices in their district. It was not too long ago I was trying to get copies of my military record. Going through the normal channels, I was getting nowhere fast, so I went to my representative's local office, and within two weeks I had my records with a follow-up call from a staff member of the Secretary of the Air Force.
--Haven't heard of Dixie seriously leaning that way since the Civil War, though I speculate many Southerners have wanted it.
--I think the only secession talk I've heard about New England is about folks in the "sovereign citizens" movement. (IIRC, they basically say that (Federal?) laws don't apply to them, due to interpretations of various things; and some of them were trying to settle together somewhere in New England.
--"Deseret"? Is that heavily Mormon country? Utah, etc.? I think I've seen that word in conjunction with them. I wouldn't think mainstream Mormons would seriously plan to do that. But maybe the splinter groups that are pretty much separatist anyway.
--West Coast has a pull towards being the Cascadia region. I think there's *some* talk of secession; but more emphasis on Washington, Oregon, and California working together, maybe on some kind of official basis.
--I think Hawai'i has a good case for secession. They were basically overthrown in a coup. (See the docu-drama "Betrayal". Though it's established history that it happened.) Alternatively, they might go for a "sovereign nation" status like many mainland Native American tribes have.
--There've been lots of other plans and attempts. the proposed state of Jefferson, for example (Wikipedia). There was progress towards it, until Pearl Harbor. If you look at the "See also" section, many other proposed splittings are listed.
Also see the article "Secession in the United States", which discusses numerous secession and partition plans and attempts.
I think that's pretty unlikely. It has to be remembered that pretty much every state has deep red and deep blue areas, usually split by population density. City dwellers in Chicago and Houston likely have more in common than either does with farmers in rural Texas or Illinois.
That would be swell. Then let's have western Oregon, California, and Washington secede and form a single nation (NOT called COW). Where do I sign?
To those who say that our laws could be worse, absolutely. But we could also have sensible voting. We could try to slow down how fast we destroy the Earth. We could stop gerrymandering people out of their votes. But nope. Instead we have lots of guns. For a first world nation, we are doing a terrible job of quality of life for our citizens.
Which to my mind shows the strength, not the weakness, of the US.
I think historians will view Trump not as a proto-fascist but as a total nonentity who achieved almost nothing of his stated aims. Partly because he is all mouth and no trousers, but partly because he is constrained by too many checks and balances.
This is akin to the argument that every bad guy with a gun was a good guy with a gun right up to the microsecond before he pulled the trigger.
Another scenario:
"Trump is reportedly planning a made-for-TV exit on Air Force One from the White House to a rally on Inauguration Day, hoping to pull viewers from Biden" (Yahoo).
Which is to ignore the deaths and abuses his rule has led to.
I don't think your comment really goes to my limited support of Gwai's comment: Is the U.S. a failed nation state? I have been thinking about it and think one could reasonably say yes., while setting out the circumstances where the proposition would be strengthened.
In terms of his underlying ideology, I think you could call Trump an authoritarian ethnonationalist with pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, which comes pretty close to the textbook definition of fascism. (Trump might not be aware of this resemblance, but I'm pretty sure Bannon would be.)
I agree that in practice, he hasn't really been able to penetrate civil-society to the extent that would be required to attain a fascist state.
Democracy in the US is in serious trouble. I used to think the Australian law that requires everyone to vote was a little silly - if you don't want to vote, fine - but I think now a system that recognizes the importance of everyone participating in at least that basic level is an excellent idea. We now have minority rule in the US, because the Electoral College and the Senate give disproportionately more representation to some people and because of outright voter suppression and other less racist but still important barriers to voting.
Majorities of Americans support sensible basic gun control laws and access to abortion, to take just two of the supposedly controversial issues where a minority in the right is imposing a reality most of us don't want. If you ask people about access to healthcare without putting it in the loaded terms the right uses, we're generally in favor of it too.
I don't know if the US is too large and diverse to be governed successfully - maybe that's the case. But I think we won't know if a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural democratic state can be successful until and unless we have a real democracy. We were making steps in that direction for a while in the second half of the 20th century, not getting close but going in the right direction, and now we've regressed. I don't know how we turn that around. The Constitution needs to be changed, and it's really hard to see that happening.
Which I see mostly as caused by pre-existing situations that he's mismanaged or ignored, rather than a conscious decision to launch a reign of terror.
Elsewhere (and this is in reply to @stetson too) I've commented that Trump could be a tackier version of Mussolini if he actually put his mind to what he claims to believe, but in reality he never bothers to follow through. So I'm not denying any fascistic tendencies in Trump, but he hasn't created a fascist society.
(There was a period when a whole bunch of Obama-era appointees were still in office, and Trump had the right to replace them, but hadn't got round to it. Which led to the observation that far from trying to seize absolute power, Trump couldn't even be arsed to use the powers he had.)
The strength of the intellectual life of these places, when joined to centres of professional dedication in the federal bureaucracy and the military, were grave impediments to Trump's nonsense. However, he had so many camp followers who were prepared to wreak havoc to achieve very specific policy ends, that the damage to national structures would have taken many years to repair. I would also argue that the damage to the moral underpinnings of the US would be difficult to measure and restore.... I'll leave that to others to explore.
I am staying positive.
I'd put 1920 (the year women's suffrage became legal nationwide in the U.S.) as after the time when "everyone used horses and buggies". If you were a black American your right to vote was often purely theoretical until 1965, well after the horse-and-buggy era. You can argue that these are changes to American "rules about representation in government" that should have been in place or enforced earlier, but they were significant recent changes.
"Deseret" was a state proposed by Mormon settlers. It contained most of the non-California land (and a bit of California as well) that the U.S. had just stolen from Mexico in the Mexican War. The state was never recognized by the U.S. The term still pops up in Mormon-related or Utah-related contexts. As far as I know the idea of setting up an independent Greater Mormon Homeland is one that only exists at the fringes.
I'd argue that what saved the U.S. from a second Trump term is that Biden's win was widespread enough that it was out of stealing range. Overturning it would have required throwing out the vote in at least three states. The aforementioned silence of Congressional Republicans on the election outcome and Trump's ongoing attempts to subvert democracy tells me that their chief objection is that it's not working. If Biden's victory could be reversed by subverting the election in one (or possibly two) state(s) I'd guess Republicans would be dusting off their Florida 2000 playbooks. An electoral system that 'handicaps' one party by ~4 percentage points is not a healthy democratic system.
It's also notable that a lot of the "antiquated systems" of American elections are, not coincidentally, the means used to suppress the votes of various groups.
A pre-election Vox article asking various historians and political scientists whether or not Trump is a fascist had this part by Jason Stanley of Yale:
Italics from original, bolding added by me.
Asking whether or not Trump has implemented a fascist state is asking the wrong question. That's like claiming Hitler or Mussolini weren't really fascists until they achieved government power. By the time you have a fascist regime it's too late. You need to recognize the signs earlier.
I'll try again with the my message to Gee D, which I apparently failed to get across.
When fascism actually arrives, it will be too late to do anything about it. If we're going to prevent fascism, we need to look at fascistic tendencies and do all we can to squelch them.
Absolutely, and I don't think anything in my post implies otherwise.
My original claim was that Trump failed, in part, due to the checks and balances in the US system. From which the conclusion was supposed to be: 'Therefore the US system of government is actually pretty robust'. Not: 'Therefore everyone is absolved from the need to do anything at all', or whatever you thought I was saying.
Important parts of the compulsory voting system here is the education in voting which starts at an early stage of schooling, together with the events on voting day itself at the polling stations - the bbqs, cake stalls and the like. Voting is built into our lives.
I think the US system of government is hanging on by its nails. Trump failed in large part because many of the judges of the land are still non-Trump-picks. Had he been more successful filling the judiciary with sycophants, he may well have succeeded in doing far more harm than he already did, and perhaps in effecting a coup.
My position has always been that both the US and China should be broken up into four or five different regions for competition in the Olympic Games.
Ruth wrote:
I reckon that's right, and the right word is "failing", but I don't think it has failed yet, and the recent election is proof of that. I really do think that if Trump won a second term, the prospect of a successful "lawful" coup would have increased significantly, as his people would have had more time to purge the public service in key states of ethical individuals.
This post needs to be copied and pasted and screamed from the rooftops. The strength of the US is its people, not the fools who follow pseudo-saviors, but the artists, the academics, the administrators and the great weight of ordinary people going about their lives.
I raise a glass to all of you. I am sure that every American shipmate is one of those people. You had the capacity to save us from the nightmare of American fascism and you did it. Thankyou.
But we haven't yet fully woken up from the nightmare until the Supreme Court shakes us by the shoulder.
--Militias are still around--and there was an African-American one in the news recently, though I think their leader was arrested.
--All sorts of people who analyze other people and human behavior (e.g. psychiatrists and psychologists, a former CIA employee who analyzed world leaders, even a Shakespeare prof) are warning about T.
--Plus the pandemic and the resulting economic disaster have driven hordes of people right out of their minds.
--Millions of Americans are "food insecure" at best, and many are hungry or actually starving. People can't pay their rent. The extra unemployment insurance (UI) payments are ending soon (just after Christmas, IIRC). So...hungry people on the edge of homelessness...probably unable to celebrate their holidays. Scared, confused by, or doubtful of the pandemic.
--Unrest about different kinds of diversity, especially racial/ethnic.
--People who feel they have nothing to lose.
--Many of them with guns.
I deeply, fervently hope that we get a whole bunch of miracles very soon; turn this all around; get America's governmental, cultural, societal, and common life acts together; and use the situation to become a better place in all ways.
But IMVHO, we're not there yet.
:votive:
Oh Lord. Please tell me that you don't truly think the most important thing about the large size of the US and China is that this unfairly gives them more people to choose from in the Olympic Games.
I know Australia has a tendency towards sports obsession, and I quite like watching sports, but I truly couldn't give a shit about this aspect of the unequal size of nations.
Arguing over whether electoral systems distort the result by a few % points is the wrong question. The question should be how subcultures with different value systems can live together as one nation (God optional).
And these things can't be managed at state level, because they're seen as issues of constitutional rights ?
I think you have the tools. It's a question of subsidiarity. What's a local issue where rural areas can choose to be different from their neighbouring cities ? What's a state issue ? What's a federal issue ? What's an international issue ? The huge resistance in the US to being in any way subject to international bodies is part of the same problem.
The trouble is that your notion of progress is tied up with (please pardon my ignorance if I name the wrong states here) imposing Massachusetts values on Wyoming. And Trumpism is a backlash to that.
Ask instead how the system can be changed to let Wyoming be Wyoming and let Massachusetts be Massachusetts.
Agreed.
(Oops I though this was a trupm or election thread!)
Agreed. 17 GOP States have joined Texas in an appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn the certified votes in four swing States which voted for Joe Biden. Trump is also applying to join the case. If successful, Joe Biden would lose his majority in the Electoral College.
Legal experts say the case has virtually no merit. It is being brought before a court with a 6-3 conservative majority.
Whether or not the Supreme Court rejects this case (and the evidence is strong that they should) it now looks inevitable that there will be a fight on the floor of Congress in January.
This is taking polarisation to the extreme. Whatever the outcome, the result will be an even more divided nation. A legacy of bitterness seems inevitable.
Just be grateful that neither nation plays Test Cricket
I'm wanting to look very deeply at the Republican Party of that time. I have an idea (and this is partly what I want to find out) that there was a bit of a battle between conservative and progressive forces in the GOP of the time and that Ike was on the progressive side. So I'm wondering whether Justice Warren actually became the sort of Judge Ike wanted. I stress that this is a thesis I want to test.
The last justice to become far more liberal than expected was David Souter, appointed 30 years ago. Since that turned out to be a bit of a debacle for conservatives, they have since made sure that the SCOTUS nominees they expect to be conservative already have some kind of track record of conservatism, usually a history of conservative court decisions. The folks who look at potential SCOTUS nominees for Democratic presidents look for substantial evidence going the other direction.
Earl Warren's appointment was specifically a payback for Warren's efforts in making sure California's electoral votes ended up in Eisenhower's column in 1952.
In other words it was not so much that Eisenhower thought Earl Warren was a great judicial mind but rather that he had a debt to pay off, as well as demonstrating to supporters in swing states (and California was a swing state at the time) that their support was not in vain and would be rewarded.
Yeah, that's absolute, painfully misleading bullshit. By no coincidence whatsoever Trump supporters in eighteen states (though interestingly not Wyoming) have demanded that the Supreme Court overturn the presidential election results in four other states, ostensibly because they don't like the way those four states conducted their elections but really because Trump lost those four states. Even more specifically, they hate the fact that black and brown people voted in sufficient numbers to swing Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in favor of Joe Biden. This is in clear violation of the early 20th century values against letting non-white people vote that @Russ seems to be so nostalgic for. (Let Alabama be Alabama!)
In short, Trumpism isn't a backlash against stricter federal standards in voting rights per se, it's about white fragility and the will to power. Trump and his supporters are perfectly happy to run roughshod over states that don't support Dear Leader.
IIRC, most of the 17 states involved are in the middle of the country, top on the map to the bottom. I wonder if there's anything important about that?
Possibly nothing more novel than that mid-country states tend to be more conservative than coastal states, the explanation for which I will leave to the political scientists.