How Fragile is America?

The prior post was about a report put together by The Wise in 2019. This was their definition of "fragility" as regards states.

Fragility

According to the Fragility Study Group, fragility can be defined as “the absence or breakdown of a social contract between people and their government.” Fragile states suffer from deficits of institutional capacity and political legitimacy that increase the risk of instability and violent conflict and sap the state of its resilience to disruptive shocks.

Now 2019 was before COVID, the 2020 "irregular" election, and a lot of other things. The US social contract has broken down a great deal. 

Our local pharmacy is in the front of a grocery store, so you end up sitting out in public while getting you flu shot. One of our older firefighters walked in while I was getting mine, and came over to talk to me for a moment. He said that this would be his first year in fifty years of not getting a flu shot, but, "I don't trust 'em anymore." That's a shame, because he's now of an age where the flu shot might actually save his life. You can put that to the whole cycle of saying things that weren't true about the COVID vaccine: it'll stop you from getting it, it'll stop the spread, it's "safe" and "effective" though it causes heart problems especially in young men and it doesn't actually work as promised. The second-order effects of all that lying by the highest levels of the government may never be overcome.

So too the effects of the sudden setting-aside of the social contract and constitutional order from that period. The most lasting effect of those set-asides is the result of the election, which was decided based on unconstitutional alterations of the method of voting by the executive without (as the constitution requires) consultation with the legislatures of the swing states involved. That changed everything, and nobody has forgotten it. Trust may, again, be impossible to restore. 

As for 'deficits of institutional capacity,' witness the Afghanistan withdrawal. That was the most trusted institution in the United States, the military, which has for decades stood right at the top of Gallup's Confidence in Institutions Poll. But also witness the loss of trust in the police, not only among those who sided with the George Floyd protests, but also among those who saw the police stand aside while rioters burned their cities because the police suddenly feared prosecution if they did their jobs.

Now look at just that middle bar from the graph below, on fragile states' relationship with extremisim:

Every part of that is true, right? You can each provide your own examples with only barely adjusted wording in a few cases: it's not that they've "failed to provide schools," but that they've provided schools in which sometimes no students can pass math proficiency exams. It's not only traditional religious authority that they've opposed and weakened -- it's intolerance and hate to oppose gay marriage or gay adoptions even in traditional churches in which there is a Biblical or Koranic definition of marriage, or to oppose provision of abortion even for an order of Nuns or in a Catholic hospital -- but it is certainly also those.

Pay attention to the log in one's eye, we are warned; but they walked right into it. Again, look at that list of Task Force members. They're the elites who had solid gold educations and careers, members of the Council of the Wise every one.