George Packer speaks on stage at the School of Visual Arts Theater in New York City. File/AFP

He argues that the US reacted to the coronavirus challenge “like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose readers were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” He blames the

Trump administration for squandering “two irretrievable months to prepare” for the pandemic. He writes that during March US citizens “woke up to find themselves (in) a failed state” with “no national plan” and “no coherent instructions” on how to deal with the coronavirus. Packer systematically goes through the long list of Trump’s misdeeds, lies, and refusals to take action, transforming the country into the globe’s largest coronavirus calamity.

Packer is not alone. Writing in The Irish Times respected columnist Fintan O’Toole asserted, “The country (Donald) Trump promised to make great again has never seemed so pitiful.” Commenting in The New York Times, Timothy Eagan points out that the US, with “five per cent of the world’s population, has 33 per cent of the sick” and its death rate is far ahead of all other countries. The planet’s most famous intellectual truth teller, Naom Chomsky, who argued in a book published in 2006 that the US was becoming a “failed state,” has put forward his observations on the US before and during the coronavirus crisis.

In the view of this writer, the US has been a failed state for decades. It is a failed state because its federal government has not developed overarching “national” policies for the 50 states. Consequently, the US does not meet the basic criteria of a successful state by protecting and educating its citizens.

On the former, the federal government has failed to legislate on guns. Weapons of war have proliferated across the country. As a result US citizens have no protection against mentally unstable shooters, criminal gangs rampaging

through poor areas, racists, and people with grudges. Mass shootings take place in schools, churches, malls and other places where people gather. The gun lobby and gun owners rebuff all attempts to curb the “right” to possess all manner of weapons, carry them openly and covertly, and shoot anyone they deem to be threatening. The White House and Congress dare not try to regulate guns although there were more than 15,000 gun deaths, including suicides, in the US during 2019.   

Washington has not adopted a national health care programme, leaving the poor without coverage and the middle class prey to private insurance companies which charge high rates and demand that subscribers pay thousands of dollars before receiving benefits. The wealthy and cash-rich employers can afford this broken system. The coronavirus epidemic is certain to bankrupt US citizens who

cannot afford to become infected. Many forgo treatment and go to work, infecting others; some struggle to survive or die at home. 

On the latter, education in the US is left to the states, their cities and towns, where local school boards dictate budgets and standards. There is no federal system with a national curriculum and national standards. Consequently, educational levels vary widely from place to place, state to state. Children in wealthier communities generally have better public schools because their families pay higher local taxes or send them to fee-paying private schools.

New York State is an exception. It has tried to force schools to reach standards by requiring pupils to take examinations on core subjects in order to graduate. As a result, New York has managed to maintain a higher standard than most other states. New York students have the advantage in gaining university admission.

Secondary school students everywhere applying for US universities generally have to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the American College Test. These tests disadvantage students who have attended schools with low levels of achievement, preventing them from attending quality universities or depriving them of higher education altogether.

Educational deprivation has created a class of resentful men and women who envy the educated “elite” and, along with privileged business interests, reject the adoption of national policies on gun control, health care and education.

 The US failure to impose national protection and education policies is largely due to the nation’s dysfunctional federal structure established by the country’s founding fathers in the 18th century. This allows states to demand their “rights,” often at the expense of the country as a whole.

The Civil War (1861-65) was fought on this issue: southern states insisted on their right to hold slaves while northern states were determined to end slavery in line with the abolition of slavery in Britain and elsewhere. The north won, creating an unbridgeable rift with the south, and enduring discrimination against black citizens. Although institutional discrimination on the basis of colour, sex or faith was banned by federal civil rights legislation adopted in the mid-1960s, discrimination remains prevalent.

Discrimination is not reserved for blacks. Throughout the history of the country, indigenous communities have fought repression and ethnic cleansing while waves of immigrants have faced discrimination. This has faded when migrants were whites but brown Hispanics and Asians continue to encounter persecution. 

The US is also divided by geography. The urbanised  east and west coasts, which are heavily Democratic, are resented by less thickly populated, more rural states in the centre and west as well as in the south, where conservative Republicans hold sway.

US corporations and the super-wealthy have used the failure of the US as a national state to reign over it, creating the globe’s most unequal society. While politicians of every hue have benefitted from this situation, Donald Trump, a half-educated, sometimes billionaire reality television showman, secured election to the country’s highest office in 2016 by playing on white resentments and discrimination against blacks and Hispanics and playing off the coasts against the hinterland. Since taking office he has continued with this playbook, undermined the rule-of-law by freeing law breakers, packing the judiciary with conservatives, and compelling unprincipled Republicans to protect him while he does as he pleases.

While portray himself as commander in the war against Covid-19, his refusal to intervene early and decisively in the campaign against the coronavirus has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of US citizens. Many would be alive today if they had been living in a state that had not failed and had chosen an honest, effective leader.