The Deep Causes of The Shallow State

Michael E Herz

A year into the second Trump administration, the 47th president has done a pretty darn impressive job of destroying state capacity. Resources, personnel, expertise, law-following, law-enforcement, ethics, and competence have all been jettisoned. For many observers, the result is a catastrophic inability of the federal government to accomplish basic functions.

In The Secular Decline of the American State, Ganesh Sitaraman has arrived with some good news and some bad news. The good news is that the current administration’s sapping and mining are not that aberrant; Trump’s dismantling project has not, in fact, fundamentally shifted the country from the path it has been on for some time. The crisis is not acute. Whew. Continue reading “The Deep Causes of The Shallow State”

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