The United States is the richest, most powerful nation in the world. But these days, failure, not success, is the word most associated with it.

Writing in the Atlantic, George Packer said, “Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.” Our national response to the coronavirus pandemic, Packer contended, has forced us to ask questions we’ve never before had to ask, such as, “Are we still capable of self-government?”

In an interview with Salon, economist Richard D. Wolff compared America to “a patient who has had a really bad cancer or a heart attack, and is now kept alive with tubes and chemicals and all the rest of it. He is not dead, but is in deep trouble.”