On the literal level, of course it isn’t. The very idea is bizarre.
There is a deeper meaning to the statement, though. Major global threats are no longer linked to any specific territory and, thus, constitute a deathly menace to the nation-state. There absolutely is an existential threat (and actually more than one) to our nation-state and all other nation-state. And ISIS is evidence of that threat.
The election cycle is highlighting differences but there is something we all share. Like blind people palpating an elephant, we are noticing different parts of the same phenomenon.
Look at Flint, for instance. First, capital fled, happy about its newfound mobility. The industrial lifestyle collapsed. Those who could imitate the capital’s mobility left. The rest were stuck in the degraded landscape of the post-industrial ruin.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, the nation-state decided to inscribe its abandonment of its duties not only on the landscape but on the actual bodies of the human beings it now considers surplus, unwanted, cumbersome.
Nobody declared a war, nobody invaded. But the people of Flint were destroyed just as methodically and surely as any enemy combatant ever could. The nation-state is no longer even pretending to fight these crucial battles for us. This is something that should bring us all together. But first we need to open our eyes and finally see the elephant.
Clarissa's Blog 
One reason I think people don’t frame these threats the way you do is because they all feel part of a familiar pattern.
State sponsored terrorism hasn’t been a thing for decades. The “religious apocalyptic death cult” thing is a huge throwback in terms of mentality.
Flint is just one of many cities in the Rust Belt. True, Flint suffered from deindustrialization, My hometown, for example, deindustrialized long before I was born and there are sad towns in the surrounding metropolitan area. Flint also happens to be a majority black city right now in a majority white state, so the former blue collar workers who might otherwise care don’t. There’s a long history of
redlining and governments just happening to put the toxic waste dump and the high way in the middle of the black community.
Of course something like this happens in poor white communities as well. I’m still not sure if the water situation in this town resolved completely
Oh wait: someone is actually going to jail for this…for a year.
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Yes! You are absolutely right. This process started back in 1970s. Since then, there has been a massive body of scholarship predicting every single facet of what we are seeing today. The current refugee crisis, for instance, has been a commonplace of such discussions since at least the 1990s.
The problem is that there is a huge disconnect between what the analysts and the policy-makers know and what everybody else knows. The abyss between the elites and the non-elites is growing so fast partly because of the information lag. The majority operates within the categories that have long been dead. And as a result, it keeps losing, time and again.
In my very modest way, I want to do something to narrow this information gap. I don’t have any delusions of grandeur and I know that my reach is very minuscule. But it’s better than nothing. Once the ideas start to get out there, that will be at least a beginning.
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