The United States: A Patient in Stable but Critical Condition

Sunday, April 11, 2021, Daunte Wright was killed by Brooklyn Park police.

Monday, April 12, 2021, another terrorist attack occurred, this time in Knoxville Tennessee. Among the casualties is a member of the Knoxville Police Department.

Despite the remarkable success of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, large numbers of Americans, in particular white evangelicals, are refusing to get vaccinated.

All of this is to say that the United States is in worse condition than I thought.

A Useful Historical Analogy

If you are a history buff like I am, then you can find helpful examples all over time and place.

In the case of the present-day United States, the Crisis of the Third Century may be helpful.

The Crisis of the Third Century was a series of overlapping crises that nearly caused the fall of the Roman Empire. These crises included runaway inflation, economic crisis, military disasters suffered at the hands of barbarian tribes to the north and the Sassanid Empire to the east, and pandemics. Magnifying all of these crises was the fact that Roman emperors were assassinated on a regular basis, often at the hands of their own bodyguards, the Praetorian Guard, looking for a payday because new emperors were expected to pay their soldiers and officers a gift of a year’s wages.

These crises fed off and magnified each other. For example, the fact that there was frequently no stable leadership at the top meant that there was no clear direction or consistent economic or military policy. For example, pandemics did serious damage to an already overstretched military by killing soldiers and officers who could not be replaced. This meant that the Roman Empire had to rely more and more on mercenaries and barbarian allies, which in turn ate away at their ability to maintain the integrity of their borders.

The only reason the Roman Empire did not fall before the year 300 was because two leaders, Emperors Aurelian and Diocletian, managed to institute enough reforms to keep the Roman Empire from immediately falling.

Despite their impressive accomplishments, their reforms were not enough to save the empire in the long run. The empire was formally split in 285/286 by Emperor Diocletian, and less than two centuries later, the Western Roman Empire fell in 476.

Relevance?

President Joe Biden is no doubt doing an excellent job of repairing the damage from the Trump administration.

But the problems the United States is currently dealing with are systemic and long running.

More importantly, as much as I despise Trump, his rise to power and the four years of his administration are symptoms that have made many longstanding problems worse.

It will take much more than just President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris fixing everything. Not even the best and brightest Democrats in office today, people like Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Lauren Underwood, will be able to solve these problems on their own.

If this country is going to improve, if the Republic is to endure, the American people themselves will need to become better citizens.

To be more specific, my fellow White Americans as a whole are going to have to grow up. What I mean by this is to start thinking about the bigger picture, think realistically, learn to respect people who cannot hit back, respect expertise even when it’s inconvenient, and much more.

With freedom comes responsibility—something so many of my fellow Americans seem to have forgotten or never learned.

If they don’t learn this lesson soon, the United States will not last much longer.

Some Alternative Systems

It is clear to me that the United States will have to transform itself.

As a country, the United States ranks behind its peers in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Canada in education and health outcomes. The law enforcement apparatus is either incompetent or compromised.

I have looked at Singapore, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and Germany as useful models.

What do you all think?