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We Are Living in a Failed State
The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.
When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly.
- George Packer
- The Atlantic
Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—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…