The US federal government is in an unprecedented state of turmoil. The group around Elon Musk, officially the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency,” has engaged in the name of reducing waste in the state through a ruthless cut in credits and jobs in the services that belong to the boundaries of the federal government, including those related to critical areas such as veterans’ welfare, public health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A symbolic condensation of all of the above, the fact that it is proceeding with layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration, a few weeks after the worst aviation tragedy on American soil in years, which was largely attributed to the understaffing of the control tower at one of the busiest airports in the US.
All this is combined with a conspiratorial attack on a supposed “deep state,” which not only reflects the traditional reservation of the American right against the federal state, but also directly targets institutions and mechanisms that have to do with the supposed basic obligations of the state towards citizens, such as those concerning public health or transport safety. The fact, moreover, that this attack is coordinated by one of the richest people in the world, who when he bought Twitter fired 80% of the employees, comes to underline the way in which a modern arrogant oligarchy of wealth treats the state as an unnecessary luxury, in a horizon of generalized privatization.
This demonstrates how dangerous the dystopia of a world where the only regulatory mechanism is markets and investment decisions is, and underlines that the more complex societies become and the more difficult the challenges they face (let’s just think of climate change), the more they need a strong, effective and socially-oriented state.
And of course, all this is not just about the US. Neoliberal oligarchic anti-stateism has already undermined the public infrastructure of most developed countries. This was evident in the chaotic conditions at the beginning of the pandemic, in the increasing difficulty of responding to major natural disasters, in the constant warnings of experts about dangers in transportation. And of course, it does not help at all that the only state institutions that were actually strengthened were the militarized mechanisms of repression that, however, are objectively proving to be inadequate to respond to real social needs.
From the pandemic to tragedies (which have at their core the fact that the state failed to guarantee security even when “human error” occurs) it is obvious that the next failed states are now more likely to be found among the OECD countries.
