The Richest Third-World Country

Summary

The other day a friend asked me whether it made sense to call America “the richest third-world country”. I’ve been hearing people ask similar questions for decades, and before, I always thought they were a bit silly and histrionic. Yes, the U.S. has dirty and run-down inner cities, high crime rates, and crappy public transit. But the average American lives in sprawling suburban comfort that only the wealthy of other developed countries can attain. America has chosen a different lifestyle and development pattern than France or Japan, but at the end of the day its middle class is still much richer.But nowadays, when people call the U.S. a “third world country”, I find myself taking the epithet much more seriously. American politics is starting to look decidedly like something you’d encounter in a dysfunctional middle-income nation — Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, or Israel. Like in those countries, a populist strongman won power through democratic means, and then proceeded to usurp unprecedented power to the executive, often through open clashes with the country’s key institutions. Consider a partial list of things that Donald Trump has done in just the last couple of weeks:Although violent crime in the U.S. is at a 20-year low (and near the all-time lows from the early 1960s), Trump declared a crime emergency, and called the National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. He’s now planning to replicate these military deployments in other cities across the country, as well as creating special Guard units and rapid reaction forces to carry out domestic policing duties. So far, the guardsmen have been patrolling low-crime areas instead of high-crime ones, and have not been making arrests; instead, they’re just walking around with automatic weapons. It’s pretty clear that this is not really an anti-crime operation, but a show of force — a threat against potential civil unrest, and an attempt to intimidate the educated progressive residents of Democrati...