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Discussion starter, but something I'm sincerely interested in and don't have strong opinions about: do modern Western states (e.g., the US, UK, Japan) have more or less state capacity than they did 20, 40, 60 years ago?
The concept of state capacity seemed to enter mainstream geopolitics wonkery about a decade or so ago, and I find it very useful. I'm sure most of you have heard of it, but in short it refers to the ability of the state to accomplish its policy goals through the use of military, industrial, infrastructural, economic, and informational resources. Each of these is important, but I'd flag that informational resources have a special role insofar as they directly feed into the efficiency by which other resources can be deployed for ends. For example, a piece of infrastructure like a new dam or a rail network may advance policy goals or it may be a waste of time and money, and informational resources will help the state predict which will be the case.
Two other key points to note. First, state capacity of course does not only refer to internal state capacity (i.e., resources proper to the state), but also the ability of the state to persuade or coerce domestic non-state actors such as corporations to co-operate with the state's goals. Most of the major players in WW2 - Britain, the United States, but also Germany and Japan - drew most of their state capacity from these more indirect mechanisms. Second, state capacity is hard to directly assess for the simple reason for it is a fact about potentiality rather than actuality: outside of wars or similar crises, there are good reasons both political and pragmatic for the state not to use the full force of its coercive power.
Recent or ongoing test cases for state capacity in the West include the COVID pandemic, ramping up of basic munitions production like 155mm artillery rounds (especially in Europe), and the new vogue for industrial policy in critical industries like ship-building in the US. My gut instinct is that right now, state capacity in the West is historically at a very low ebb, possibly lower than it has been for more than a century, and that this may be helpful for understanding the behaviour of governments. However, I don't have strong confidence in this assessment, and would love to hear what others think.
20 years might be higher. I could go either way. Same for 40; Reagan feels like he should be a high-water mark, but I wonder if I’m giving him too much credit. It is coming right off the abysmal OPEC years, and political will is only a small part of the picture.
60 or more, I’m confident we win out on the basis of technology. That starts to take away lots of power infrastructure, most of the useful nuclear applications, logistics by helicopter, more and more of transistor electronics. Without those, the strong will of the World War era doesn’t go nearly as far.
I do think the 20th century West was generally better at producing materiel. We gave up that institutional knowledge for comparative advantage, and that really would hurt us in a “war economy” scenario.
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We have been declining in state power for decades.
We cannot bring crime rates down, and in fact, in major cities it’s entirely possible for gangs of criminals to show up to a store in broad daylight, carrying trash bags and loot the store. Large areas of major cities are no-go zones for law abiding citizens. In urban centers, the received wisdom is “don’t lock your car, because you are going to get your window smashed when the people come to steal out of your car.
Schools at least in America suck at education. Kids rarely graduate reading at grade level, and very seldom can high school graduates do math on grade level. This is one reason that so many jobs that “don’t require college “ require a degree — at least you still need to be literate and numerate to graduate college. The only things school even tries to do are push propaganda, act as state daycares, and as social activities for teens through sports and clubs.
As far as Covid goes, I mean convincing people to work from home in their PJs doesn’t particularly strike me as high state capacity. In fact, at least in the USA, it crumbled rather quickly once people decided to not comply and to protest.
Personally, I believe that the West is in serious decline and may well be headed towards a dark age. We are basically coasting off of the capacity built by our great grandparents and generations before them. We are uneducated, lazy, undisciplined, and are not investing in our own future. I keep looking at the candidates we have for president— Trump, Biden, Harris, and RFK, and I can’t convince myself they could manage a Taco Bell.
I was under the impression that that was by design.
There is no loss prevention in stores and no effective policing because it’s functionally illegal to do that, and there is no performance criteria in education because it’s a jobs program for adults (improving kids is a side-effect).
That doesn’t sound like a raw decline in state power; it instead sounds like a major increase in the people’s willingness to tolerate that. Which are not quite the same thing.
It means the state capacity has moved from attempting to solve problems to preventing them from being solved.
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I think we might need to distinguish between positive capacity and negative capacity here. Consider the contrast in an example just written up this afternoon. The ability for an arm of the (US) state to quickly get people to the moon may not be as high as it was 60 years ago; the ability for other arms of the state to ensure that leisurely reexaminations of their own concerns take precedence may have never been higher.
Link summary: either Musk has started writing the SpaceX blog himself, or even the grunts have moved from diplomatic to pissed about licensing timelines "derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd". I'm surprised the "it uses literal drinking water" quote (bold in original) doesn't link to a hot take on
TwitterX.On the other hand ... do you have any quantitative analysis of the munitions problem? I think issues with artillery production are somewhat more alarming than issues with Starship development, because the latter is designed for long-term economics rather than to give a middle finger to Russia (like the Apollo program or current munitions production) or to secure weapons capabilities (like 1960s expendable rockets in general or current munitions production). DoD isn't yet interested enough in Starship to butt in the way I'd expect them to do for an ammo factory, so any issues with that must be more fundamental than just bureaucratic infighting.
It could, of course, be that the government has pushed more patently absurd and frivolous issues onto SpaceX as licensing obstacles for some reason as of late. Not like Musk is a political enemy of the ruling party or anything.
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This has nothing to do with state capacity and everything to do with states not placing longterm orders for 155 shells. Expansions in capacity won't magically appear unless customers place orders. The industry has communicated that it stands ready to expand and that the states only have to say the word, the states aren't and not because they lack the financial capacity.
The problem isn't state capacity, it's political will.
During WW1 shell crisis in Britain, the government was able to ramp up production from 500,000 shells in first few months of the War (since August-December) to 16 million shells in 1915.
During shell crisis the reasons were similar - UK was missing some key chemicals like acetone, now Europe and to some extent US have shortages of guncotton and other basic materials. By the way during WW1 Dupont was able to produce 500 tons of guncotton a day. We are now two years into a conflict where Western powers know they are draining their munition reserves and they still cannot produce near the volume of munitions that countries were able to produce 100 years ago. In fact US and EU is reliant on guncotton production from China
You may say that it is problem of state orders, but that itself is a problem of state capacity or to better say incapacity. No decision can be straigthtforward and is mired in endless internal battles due to incompetence and other reasons.
That may hold true for America but not Europe. The issue isn't internal battles but internal indecision or naive hope. The governments have in general not been split and it has been 100% up to the current rulers which investments to make. They have chosen not to invest.
For America, I agree that polarisation seems fairly directly decrease effective state capacity because of how the government functions, but even then I think it's important to delineate between lack of action due to political deadlock and an actual material lack of capacity.
Why are we not sending more military aid to Ukraine? Is it because we can't or because we don't want to? Its because we don't/didn't want to.
There's a federal/state distinction, so the test would be to check states with one sided partisan control- they should have more state capacity. Both Texas and California have been in the news for doing things no one really expected them to get away with doing unilaterally, so it passes a vibe check.
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I'll note that 'want' also obscures factors of strategy and consideration of other factors.
If, for example, the US has sent categories of aid in advance of it's allies willingness to do the same, then there was a risk that the countries that felt their concerns were bypassed would refuse to send similar aid. The example that comes to mind is tanks- before the Germans objected to sending tanks on grounds that the US hadn't sent any, there was a more general German consensus that tanks were too escalatory. It wasn't until internal german political dynamics had changed that 'we won't send tanks before the US' replaced 'no one should send tanks because tanks are too escalatory, and if you do we won't.' Given the risk was that doing so would prompt the Germans to not do the same, and the German military aid value substantially outweighs the value of individual systems sent without German assent (in the case of Germany-derived tanks) or over German objections (US-derived tanks), and this creates a circumstance of actors wanting to send aid but not wanting to send aid because they want to send more aid overall but doing what they want gets in the way of what they want for what they want.
Which is a heck of a mess of wants, and complicates an over-simplified analysis.
When it comes to the pro-Ukraine coalition in general, I sincerely believe an underappreciated part of the Western war strategy is how the strategy has prioritized building and maintaining the coalition of donors, particularly Germany, over immediate deliveries of on-hand assets. This has been apparent since 2022, but rarely remarked upon, even though the difference of approaching something as a short-term versus long-term problem have considerably different implications. For example, how one views this year's Russian advances in the Donbass; the implications change considerably depending on whether you believe the war ends if the Russians take all the administrative boundaries of the Donbas (a short term paradigm), despite the Donbas not being particularly important to Ukraine's ability to continue fighting (a long-term paradigm).
But to bring this back to political capacity- this sort of perspective does challenge the state capacity in a different way, since the capacity of individual states is being subordinated to the capacity of a coalition as a whole, which makes this a coordination-issue rather than a matter of just beuracratic capacity.
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I discussed this in the TG group.
In 1886 the US standardized all rail gauges, moving 11,500 miles of track in 2 days: http://southern.railfan.net/ties/1966/66-8/gauge.html A few decades before, they raised Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago That was more track than modern Spain, 5x more than modern Ireland. Yet they can't change their gauges... Similar issues occur in the Baltics, although they're building new lines using standard gauge to link Poland to Finland. At any rate, the Spanish do build high speed rail, while California...
Self organizing was very common, with public committees of leading citizens popping up left and right to solve common ills and dissolving themselves when the task was done. (We can also contrast this with modern charities which find new goals, to maintain the bureaucracy, funding pipelines etc.) https://scholars-stage.org/lessons-from-and-limitations-of-the-19th-century-experience/ goes into the decline in self governance. During the civil war, Elizabeth Blackwell (et al.) created the 3rd biggest organization, after the army and republican party, with 7000 chapters, who believed they could do a better job than the government: https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/30/a-school-of-strength-and-character/
Hell, look at the canal building around 1820, far more than Africa, Latam, Central Asia or Southern Europe are doing. Look at the crane sketches: https://www.thoughtco.com/building-the-erie-canal-1773705 Also Dismal Swamp, Bellows Falls, Santee, Middlesex... They built many canals at this time. (The Dutch are at least still reclaiming land. China is also doing things, including in Africa.)
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State capacity isnt unipolar. Most Western states have increased capacity against fake criminals, aka dissidents, while pseudo-intentionally having lower against real criminals.
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Absolutely not. At least in EU, state capacity is the lowest it's been since 1800.
Everything is wrapped in red tape. Nothing can be done fast. British were recently found to have wasted 500k pages on a planning application. Oh - that was debunked, it was only 63000 pages.. Been 9 years and 260 million pounds though. On a planning application.
Granted, EU is not this bad, that's Britain, but Europe is still pretty screwed and there's no indication the worst offenders - judges, courts and activists that basically decide what the law is are going to be removed. Most salient example is that removing undesirables is impossible in Germany and France, both countries have hundreds of thousands of people ordered to leave who are still there, committing crime and iirc also collecting welfare.
The power structure is currently occupied by declaring its few citizens willing to speak up for their own interests are dangerous far-right radicals. Yes, and as always trying to pass chat-control. New round of that idiocy in december.
Didn't it take something like a decade for the new Berlin airport to open after construction was completed?
What happened to Prussian efficiency?
Prussia hasn't existed since '47. Modern Germany has vastly different legal system and ethos. I guess it died with that.
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Feels like this is hefty hyperbole or you are taking a very narrow view of state capacity. States in the 1800s were much, much simpler; even 100 years ago, the populations of western European nations were considerably smaller than they are now. Universal healthcare, pensions and wider welfare were all post-WW2 inventions. Regardless of whether these are good things, they are absolutely colossal administrative tasks.
In transport, 19th century nations were able to quickly roll out train and canal infrastructure, but they were building over nothing and there was very little in terms of good road networks and air traffic was yet to exist. Modern nations are running much larger transport networks with far more participants.
In infrastructure, national electricity networks were pretty much not a thing until post-WW1. Now there are grids crisis crossing nations with far more complex load balancing and generation mixes.
Universal education was another thing that didn't exist until the late 19th/early 20th century, and even once it was introduced the years spent and scale of schools needed were much smaller than today.
I think the reason for the poor view of modern state capacity can be mapped to a divergence in capacity and complexity. If you took 1800 as a starting point, you would see capacity grow with basically constant, linear growth, whereas complexity is exponential. Thus, there was a long period where capacity had a healthy gap to complexity, but eventually complexity surpassed state capacity and the gap has only grown. So even though absolute capacity is higher than it ever was, it looks like governments are incapable as the scale of challenges has grown a lot faster.
Ok, lot of countries were quite primitive in 1800. But ability of states to get things done has taken a big nosedive since WW2 at the very least.
These are not good things. Pensions are basically declaring "we don't care about the future, we're going to bleed reproductive age people". They were invented in an age of rapid population growth. Now they're eating up state finances. The entire European social state model is hardly sustainable. Also pensions are.. much older..
Bismarck started with it in late 1880s, when the average person died 2 years before they could collect any, and there were cca 8x more young people than old.
I don't know where you live, but I don't expect to get any pension other than symbolic, and wouldn't expect it even if I were paying lot more taxes. Government debt is always increasing and economic growth is unlikely or impossible. AI is something to be regulated, not used, industry is a dirty word and energy is supposed to be expensive to "save the planet".
Look at the tempo of railway construction in 19th century. A feat like that is unimaginable today. Or how much of Europe was built then. Now much of Europe has unaffordable cost of housing because we can't or won't build.
Seeing as vast majority of university graduates use nothing whatsoever from their degrees, and it's purely a credential proving they can sit down & study, a lot of it is pure inefficiency. Same for universal high school.
The capacity of a state is orthogonal to the merit of its actions. A lot of people would say that wars and the ability to conduct military actions are a bad thing, but everyone understands that a strong military is indicative of state capacity. Likewise welfare and education. These are massive administrative challenges that modern governments handle fairly well.
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That's high state capacity, not low. The state has great capacity to stop anyone from building anything. Low state capacity would be if despite their best efforts they could not stop it.
"Is able to threaten to destroy a building with sufficient credibility that nobody invests a large sum of money building it" is a very, very low bar. "Is able to build the things it wants to build" is a much higher bar.
Nimbystan has higher state capacity than countries which can't prevent unauthorised construction at all, but lower state capacity than countries that can choose whether or not to build things and execute on either decision.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Maybe we should distinguish between state capacity and realized results?
The US has the power to find and remove drug dealers from circulation if it wanted to. If drug addicts can find dealers, so can police. There are open-air drug markets in several US cities, it's not hard to find them. When Xi went to San Francisco they cleaned everything up for him.
The US chooses not to maintain safety in its cities, it chooses not to arrest drug dealers at scale. But when Jan 6th happened, then they actually were serious about jailing the rioters/protesters. They found ways to imprison people who weren't even there and keep them in prison, they stopped messing around.
I think state capacity in the West has declined but not nearly as much as the willingness to use said capacity. There's definitely massive malaise and grifting but there's also a lot of deliberate apathy, that's the anarcho-tyranny part. I think this is dangerous because there are a lot of fairly relaxed policymakers and leaders who know that they're not running things efficiently. They might well think 'if there's a major crisis, we'll rev up the engine to full power and show the world what we can do'. But the engine is rusty and the oil should've been changed ages ago. The state machinery isn't used to high-performance operations anymore, the engine might jam or explode if they try. There'll be a huge performance gap between expectations and reality. It reminds me of how Britain and the United States were thought to be the best prepared for a pandemic at the start of COVID, then everyone ran around like a headless chicken for 6-9 months.
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COVID demonstrated that the domestic state capacity of modern Western states is enormous. The state said lock down and put on the mask, everyone said "how many", "yes master", and the few who didn't got arrested or debanked.
US state capacity on the international level is also quite high, though probably not at its highest ever (that would be the aftermath of WWII).
It also radicalized an enormous amount of people who are now extremely pissed off because the covid hysteria was needless, wasted enormous resources and all that. And then there was the jab, which was at the very least pushed onto younger people who could not benefit from it unless they were blobs. I'm unclear on the reports of somewhat elevated cancers, but it's worth looking at in detail.
So whether there's any state capacity left especially for any pandemic measures now is a very open question that's not easy to answer.
What, a single-digit percentage of the public that was supporting RFK Jr.? There's more people still wearing masks.
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I don't necessarily disagree, but I suspect that you may be confounding state capacity and sheer raw power here.
Just because Louis XVI could imprison people at will doesn't mean he had the capacity to solve the agro-economic issues that doomed the Ancien Régime.
In fact I'd be ready to claim that the use of hard power is an argument against state capacity being high. All that is being expended on control can't actually be used for new productive ends or to adapt to novel problems.
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