RUTHFULLY YOURS

It looks like the Democratic line going into the election is going to be that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed America as a “failed state.” That, at least, is the argument emerging in the left-of-center press. The idea seems to be that the full employment, rising wages, and economic growth Americans had been experiencing were an illusion — popped by Covid-19 to disclose a flat-footed state of incompetence and venality.

It sounds to us like wishful thinking. We’ve no doubt that our crisis is grave and that there have been errors at all levels of government, including federal, and in both parties (the one we worry about most is monetary policy). We’ve read the Times piece headlined “Nervous Republicans See Trump Sinking, and Taking Senate With Him.” What strikes us, though, is that the line on the left goes beyond Mr. Trump to the record of capitalism itself.

President Trump hadn’t been in office half a year when Foreign Policy issued a piece under the headline “Is America a Failing State?” It suggested, in the sub-head, that the “right path forward must not include Donald Trump as president.” Six weeks ago, when the novel coronavirus had only begun claiming American lives, the Atlantic put over one of its pieces a headline declaring: “America Is Acting Like a Failed State.”

At the time, Covid-19 deaths in America numbered fewer than 50. The Atlantic reckoned that businesses, local governments, and individuals were stepping up but getting scant help from the White House. Nine days later, the Black Agenda Report ran out a headline declaring “The U.S. is a Failed State, and COVID-19 Proves it.” The Intercept early this month issued a podcast under the headline “The Failed State of America.”

The site’s Jeremy Scahill contended that “contrary to the rhetoric of American greatness, we are witnessing a failed state that placed all of its faith in the radical ideology of capitalism, the free market, at the expense of protecting the lives of our people.” Al Jazeera last week ran its own piece, issued under a headline saying America isn’t just a “failed state” but also a “failed experiment” and the pandemic is “just another proof.”

Now the Atlantic is out with a new piece, this one under a headline declaring: “We’re living in a failed state.” It, too, goes beyond President Trump. The way the piece — by an Atlantic superstar, George Packer — puts it is that President Trump “acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding.”

It’s not clear to us — we’re notoriously slow — how our government has been defunded. Numbers in a chart of Brookings’ Tax Policy Center show federal tax revenues soared last year to $3.6 trillion, or 16.4% of GDP, from $1.15 trillion, or 17% of GDP, in President Clinton’s first year. Brookings’ also includes a separate column in constant dollars. Tax takings more than — population less than — doubled.

The moment reminds us of the speech Robert Bartley delivered in New York at a banquet at the end of his 35 years as editor of the Wall Street Journal. It was 14 months after 9/11. Ground Zero was still in ruins. The global war on terror was just beginning. Bartley spoke of the crisis in which America found itself at the late 1970s, when we were still digesting Congress’s betrayal of Vietnam, and the Soviets were on the march.

It was a moment, too, when Bretton Woods had unraveled and the dollar had been de-linked from gold. Bartley could have spoken of a failed state. Instead, he spoke of how things were turned around. He kvelled on the joy of the intellectual pursuit of wise policy. He reminded of the need for courage in the wilderness. He stressed above all the importance of optimism, the American elixir he’d no doubt prescribe for our current crisis.