Failed State

Argentina, un país que se usa como ejemplo.

Del Claremont Review of Books, publicado a la vuelta de la casa de Ramiro.

[...] A growing number of observers argue that California's real problem is that it has become ungovernable. Kevin Starr, for example, who just published the eighth volume in his comprehensive history of the Golden State, recently told an interviewer, "In our public life, we're on the verge of being a failed state, and no state has failed in the history of this country."

Rome wasn't sacked in a day, and California didn't become Argentina overnight. Its acquired incapacity to manage its own affairs has been a long, complicated story, with many contributing factors rather than a single villain or tragic flaw. [...]

The results, a century later, cannot be what anyone who wishes democracy well had in mind. As journalist Peter Schrag argues in California: America's High-Stakes Experiment (2006), the state's people are groaning under the weight of all the weapons they have been given to fight the interests. California, he writes, has

seven thousand overlapping and sometimes conflicting jurisdictions: cities, counties, school districts, community college districts, water districts, fire districts, park districts, irrigation districts, mosquito abatement districts, public utility districts, each with its elected directors, supervisors, and other officials, a hyperdemocracy that, even without local and state ballot measures, confounds the most diligent citizen.

[...] Progressivism has a better record of promoting conscientious, congenial, efficacious governance in states with long, dark winters, such as Wisconsin and Minnesota. It's a lot easier to get a respectable turnout for a city council or school board meeting in those states than in one with 840 miles of coastline and 1,100 golf courses open year-round. Victor Davis Hanson, a native Californian, suggests, "Perhaps because have-it-all Californians live in such a rich natural landscape and inherited so much from their ancestors, they have convinced themselves that perpetual bounty is now their birthright—not something that can be lost in a generation of complacency." [...]

Muy, muy buen artículo. Un poco largo pero vale la pena leerlo todo.