Before the pandemic, Packer asserts, the U.S. was already plagued by “a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public.” Those problems, according to Packer, “had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity — to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.”
The Trump Administration, Packer laments, responded to the coronavirus pandemic like a developing country “with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” And he believes that Americans are living in a failed state. Continue reading.