This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't think discussions of state capacity are very fruitful. It's too ambiguous of a term that it can mean practically anything. It's like a somewhat more intellectual version of talking about "bullshit jobs" or "strong men create good times, etc". You're not getting any actual rigorous analysis, you're just getting people grinding whatever axes they think apply, which will be quite varied due to the provocative ambiguity.
For "state capacity", you get people discussing basically any long-run issues the US has. Climate change, decline of manufacturing, health care cost disease, economic inequality, political polarization, rise of the New Axis (China+Russia+Iran), infrastructure decay, military decay + failed wars, racial tensions, national debt, etc, etc. You can list problems forever, as peoples' negativity bias means the news is more likely to cover them. On the other hand there are quite a few areas where the US is doing well: leader of innovation, solid economy, politically stable despite Trump, massive network of alliances, leading financial system, energy independence, etc. So a lot of the question is just doomer vs bloomer.
Then there's the question of how much the federal government actually engineers beneficial changes, which is ostensibly what the conversation is about in the first place. In practice though it's far too large of a question to really measure in it's entirety, and it's a much better idea to break it up into smaller chunks and evaluate specific policies. Overall, the US has probably lost some amount of state capacity from polarization, as it's effectively become a vetocracy in many areas (e.g. housing), although to some degree the totality of this issue is overblown.
I define it as the -capacity of the state to initiate, direct and complete projects.
-enforcement of laws on the books
If any stupid construction projects gets delayed for years, if state continually loses money in weird scams, if laws are not being enforced, that's all a minus.
..politically stable? You've got intelligence services meddling in politics, gigantic loss of legitimacy ever since Trump. Sure nobody's trying actual insurgencies but the regime is considered illegitimate and unjust by half the population, though it changes which half.
And your 'network of alliances' is actually a bunch of provinces you're busy ruining economically. Biden inflation reduction act was offering money to EU businesses to relocate to USA. You blew up their natural gas pipeline.
And as to solidity of economy...... if democrats keep being in office and keep attacking energy supply, that's not going to last.
Ukrainians did that. But I advocate the US government destroying Russian pipelines. Not all of them all at once, but little by little to help wean Europeans off if Russian fuel. The pipelines are impossible to defend. Every now and then a bomb could go off or the pressure could be set wrong causing an explosion and the US could deny responsibility.
This happened back in the Cold War. Every now and then misfortune would strike an oil pipe. Turns out it was the CIA.
Allow me to be skeptical about that. The explosions were very powerful, on the order of useful load for a yacht that size. It smells of a cover story, really.
Don't you think it's up to Europeans to decide who they're going to buy fuel from ?
Are you not worried this kind of thing could result in drones randomly blowing up US nat-gas liquefaction facilities. Attacks on infrastructure are not a good idea, not against people with means.
Especially seeing as US border is pretty much unsecured, US has hugely long coasts and there's a lot of ship traffic and all that.
Russia endlessly attacks Ukrainian infrastructure. It appears to be a great idea and in fact key to winning wars.
Pipelines are entirely undefesible. So let's say any nation with the desire has a veto on this decision.
And yes, Europe is the most feckless and counterproductive allies the US could have. A parasite society hiding under our defense umbrella, using our hard-found pharmaceuticals without paying to support them and endlessly funding our enemies.
Who would be drone bombing American LNG plants? Not Europe for sure. We've seen their complete inability and extreme passivity in this conflict. You think Russia would do it? I suppose it is possible. But the US has historically been extremely shielded from direct counterattack like that. 9/11 being the one exception.
Ukraine is a poor corrupt country with very little means of retaliating. Russia provides up to 10% of world's material inputs in most cases. I don't even mention that it has a steel and chemicals industry with output on par with WW2 US. And that it's currently apparently outproducing NATO as Ukraine is .. not doing very well on the artillery front, and NATO has little reason to hold back artillery and shell production seeing as the next war is a naval and air war against China,where artillery is of little to no use.
Wars. Do you understand what a 'war' is? Attacking infrastructure, outside of a war situation, risks that it becomes a war.
Nice trolling, but the biggest trade partner of China is the United States. Also Europe isn't funding Iran or North Korea - Iran is mainly funding itself with its oil revenue.
You forgot that WTC was bombed, that Muslim terrorists almost blew up a dozen airliners, the LA bomb plot. And then of course, 9/11 itself. A massive strategic victory for Al-Qaeda, in that it gave Americans a blank cheque to waste all their power through sheer stupidity.
And all of these plots were far harder than bribing a particular crewman on a cargo ship to open a particular container, input a code and push a button, watch a dozen drones zoom off and then dump the packing materials off board.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your post is a good example of how the discussion goes awry: not really focusing on "state capacity" in and of itself, but rather using it as a springboard to grind the usual axes. Talking about stuff like supposed FBI bias wouldn't be particularly high up on the list of concerns in regards to state capacity, but it can jump to #1 if you wanted to talk about it anyways!
I disagree with many of your object-level concerns, and think they're interesting discussions, but don't think they have much to do with state capacity.
In any case:
The US is certainly polarized, but political stability of the kind capitalism requires to do basic business hasn't been impacted on a widespread scale, outside of maybe the BLM riots of 2020 which tend to be overblown by those on the right.
Equivocating the EU as a "bunch of [American] provinces" or as "puppets" as I've heard other claim is just flatly false. Also, nearly all evidence of the Nordstream bombing points to Ukraine, not the US.
Under Biden, the US has produced more oil than any nation in history. Not just US history, but world history in its entirety.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would agree with the limits of the term as you describe them, and add to this that 'capacity' is a measure of potential, not utilization. You can have capacity, and be inefficient in doing so. You can have capacity, and choose not to utilize it. You could change capacity by reallocating resources from other competing priorities- and this just broadens the question of what capacity specifically refers to in terms of 'capacity for what?' You can reassign personnel between organizations, but a skilled chemist is probably not going to make for a skilled software engineer even though 'capacity to analyze bioterrorism risks' and 'capacity to counter intercontinental missiles' are both functions of state capacity.
There's also a point that a lot of effective utilization of state capacity is, well, invisible by design and citizen preference. A voting (or non-voting) public doesn't particularly want to be accosted on the streets by policemen doing random searches. A state with sufficient state surveillance capacity doesn't need to- they can just monitor surveillance cameras / communications / informants, and tailor interventions to a narrower degree so that law-abiding people have less to notice. This takes a lot more capacity, and produces far fewer observables.
In a sense, it's comparable to people who complain online that no one builds impressive feats of engineering anymore. On cell phones with more computing power than Cold War space programs, over an internet that reaches over half the global population despite being mostly theoretical 50 years ago, and conveyed on ocean-spanning cable networks hidden beneath the waves. Just because you can walk through or over engineering feats without noticing them doesn't mean they aren't there. The same principle can apply to state capacity.
Very good points! Maybe state capacity is like that old adage about bathroom janitors: you only really notice them if they're not around to do the job. That doesn't mean they're not doing their job in the vast majority of other cases.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with most of this, but I also think that the financialisation of many Western economies probably has exerted a significant toll on industrial state capacity. My suspicion is that the US couldn’t pull off the same feats it managed in WW2 or much of the Cold War because it simply doesn’t have enough welders, factories, machine shop operators, aeronautical engineers, stevedores, and so on.
Likewise, while I think the narrative that “we don’t build things any more” is largely false, we’ve certainly transitioned into building different kinds of thing, with an emphasis on bits over “its”.
I’m less sure about other forms of state capacity. While the US was able to enforce COVID rules fairly effectively, this doesn’t impress me much; largely the rules were about convincing people to refrain from doing certain things and enforcing this. It’s less clear to me that the US could, for example, mobilise an additional 10 million military personnel as it did over the course of WW2.
If I’m focusing on war scenarios here, it’s because the possibility of a war with China looms large here. While the opening days of any such war will draw on stockpiled munitions, in any prolonged conflict the US will be sorely tested in its ability to rapidly regenerate stockpiles and replace losses, especially of surface combatants.
I’m eager to have my pessimism here overruled, but there are times when the tide goes out and you realise which states have been swimming nude, and I worry the US isn’t wearing trunks.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is an ambiguous terms, but ignoring the concept might be more of a loss in understanding.
I think if there is anything that should be meant by state capacity it should mean the ability to wage war. Specifically to get shit done that allows for the waging of war. That would include industrial mobilization, but it would also include a competent and efficient bureaucracy, and a willingness and ability to use force to achieve ends
War is the one thing governments do that most other organizations don't do. And it was historically how you replaced badly functioning governments, so it was the only thing where the government had some incentive to do it well
America is in a unique situation that no one can really challenge them on the same footing in a war. They've had constant foreign adventures and occupations since world war 2. And if you didn't watch the news you could probably have gotten away without noticing any of them.
So there is no way to fully test the US's state capacity, and it likely doesn't matter too much if no one is around to defeat us. At least not yet.
This is exactly what I'm talking about: People use it to talk about whatever they personally want to. For you it seems obvious that warfare should be the primary concern of state capacity, but for lots of other people I've seen discuss state capacity it has often only been mentioned in passing.
I think we get better results about being specific. If we want to talk about how well the US could fight a modern war, make that the main focus. It's certainly an interesting topic. US naval hegemony is rapidly declining, but how much that's due to US dysfunction is a matter of debate. China was always going to become more competitive in the area when its economy dectupled over a few decades, so any US shipbuilding issues might be tiny by comparison. Then there's the issue of recruitment more generally, with shortages reported in nearly every force. But is that due to a lack of "state capacity", or rather the military becoming a less appealing profession given relative wage gains in other areas?
I don't really worry about someone invading + conquering the mainland US, as that's still decades away at the very least.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link