The fundamental problem with this popular essay is the way it relies on First World panic—being haunted by the specter of becoming "like Pakistan or Belarus." The competent progressive state it assumes as an American birthright is barely a century old. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

I fully understand the reasons for that rhetorical choice. But it is a choice.

Beyond its tendency to stoke prejudice, the reason I see that choice as a problem is that it works against the essay's point that the U.S. faces a long-term structural problem deeper than Trump's personality disorders.

The competent American state of the 20th century was created in direct, calculated defiance of deep American political traditions—or more plainly, by reinterpreting those traditions in ways that many Americans saw as completely illegitimate.

Crucial aspects of Packer's "failed state" diagnosis are the result of extremely American intellectual movements that were active throughout the competent state's golden age, and which, in a kind of corpsified form, are critical to Trump's political coalition now.

Understanding that the competent U.S. state was *created* through intellectual/political combat under specific economic conditions, and the combat never ended, is fundamental to understanding any current state failure. "Pakistan and Belarus" is worse than a distraction from that.

Also: The key difference between failed and competent states is that the former tend to be produced by poverty plus war, the latter by wealth plus war (or war-like conditions). This is another reason it would be better to look to in-group historical comparison targets right now.

For the United States to remain apparently rich, and to be mobilized constantly for war and warlike activities at the same time, yet be sliding into state failure, invites analysis that First World panic tends to foreclose.

("War," in my claims above, doesn't have to mean literally war. It really means mass mobilization.)

If the United States remains apparently very rich and obviously in a permanent state of war, this invites questions about imperial collapse, internal inequality, undemocratic conditions combined with poor citizen engagement, etc., that "Pakistan or Belarus" mostly suppresses.