States have shifted from citizen welfare to regulating flows, not withered away

Evidence

Since at least the 1980s what has materialized is not a withering of the state, as some had predicted in the 1990s, nor of its importance. Rather, there has been an increasingly profound if checkered shift in state function and form – what it does, who it is for, what modes of power it draws on, what regimes of regulation it stands for and promotes. So where the state previously had served as a more or less porous container looking out, if somewhat intrusively and imposingly, for the wellbeing of those contained, of its citizens, it is now a regulatory node. It is – and since 2001 more and more assertively – an intrusive and invasive regulator, what earlier I called a traffic cop state, invested in directing and ordering flows of goods, people, information, capital. So it is less concerned than it once was, and increasingly less, about the wellbeing of citizens than it is with the regulatory forces and flows internally and across states. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1804

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the traffic cop state concept from earlier in the book and to Foucault’s governmentality discussions of the state as a regulator of flows rather than a container. — connects to: The state now sorts citizens into lauded risk-takers and abject at-risk populations — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 266; Tax cuts shift funding from welfare to repressive state functions — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1747; The state’s core function shifted from enclosing citizens to regulating flows. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1804 (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle tracing how the state’s regulatory remit shifted from population welfare to flow management since the 1980s, with 2001 as the inflection point.