Criminal Power

Over at The Nation, Jeet Heer homes in on a central element of the grotesquely disproportionate governmental response against largely peaceful anti-police violence protests around the country: the basic weakness of President Trump’s political position as the November elections draw inexorably closer.  Heer argues that the president has been drawn to a hyper-militarized response to protests in Washington, D.C. to compensate for his humiliating retreat to the White House bunker last week, and more generally as an effort to show strength as his standing with his base shows signs of fraying.

The president’s effort to deploy maximal levels of the U.S. armed forces to the streets of D.C., on top of the presence of thousands of members of various other security agencies, is so disproportionate to the actual threat — overwhelmingly peaceful protestors making their voices heard on the issue of police violence and systemic racism — that it inherently turns into a display of fearfulness, in the same way that a mobster who pulls a gun on a grandma who accidentally bumps into him says less about his fantastic draw speed and more about his psychotic overreaction. 

Of course, the president and his team have endeavored to validate their moves as a true show of strength by pumping up the threat in the streets to fantastical and mendacious levels.  Despite the fact that we saw last week the administrations’s cold-blooded willingness to tear gas peaceful protestors to provide the president with a campaign photo-op, the president and his defenders insist that they are beset by an unholy alliance of anarchists, antifa, and other malcontents who should collectively be considered as domestic terrorists, bent on relieving the republic of life and property, starting with the White House silver — a threat that they mysteriously seem unable to substantiate.

In other words, the president’s effort to appear strong relies almost entirely not only on the most paranoid and deluded lies imaginable about a nation besieged, but on simultaneously denying the import of the actual protestors and the issues they’re fighting for.  The inability and unwillingness to cope with urgent issues of justice surely count as a deep ineptness on the part of the president.

But it isn’t totally crazy for Donald Trump and his advisors to think that displays of military might and the infliction of violence on protestors can make him look powerful, and even be powerful — if power is thought of as the ability to impose your will on others without consequence.  But this is a crude notion of power completely incompatible with a democracy and its requirements of public participation, consent of the governed, open debate, equality under the law, and respect for human rights.   If the United States were to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power, we would all certainly consider that invader to be powerful — but powerful in a way wholly divorced from notions of justice, freedom, or our common good.  Such is the conceptual territory the president and the GOP are beginning to embrace.  It is the criminal power of strength through terror and authoritarianism.

The GOP's Shaky Bet on White Identity Politics

In a recent post at The Editorial Board, John Stoehr suggests that Donald Trump’s handling of the fallout of the George Floyd murder is spurring white Americans to view this administration, and American politics, through the perspective of African-Americans.  I think he’s 100% right, not least because this aligns with the argument I’ve tried to make here that Donald Trump has, since the 2016 campaign, effectively been forcing millions of white Americans to choose decisively for or against the explicit white supremacism that the president embodies.  But Stoehr’s reference to a shifting “point of view” among many white Americans — a point of view in which they are learning to see the United States more through the perspective of black Americans, with all the disheartening and enraging results that brings — helped crystallize my sense of a “meta-perspective” that can help us understand our current moment.

First, we can see how very much Donald Trump essentially embraces a viewpoint according to which nothing has really changed since 1968 and Nixon’s law and order backlash election, and in which nothing will ever change.  He believes that by identifying himself as the leader of white America, and the enforcer of racial privilege, he will win over enough white Americans to repeat his electoral college victory in 2020 (the fact that the president has apparently given up on winning a majority of votes is an important detail of our politics that is not often enough taken note of).  Trump, and his GOP confederates, seem to be betting their political future on a grandiose idea that nothing ever changes in the fundamentals of American politics — that white identity politics is a thing of such majestic gravitational pull that it can always be relied on.

But Donald Trump was only able to eke out a victory because for decades, the GOP had not only relied on mostly dog-whistle appeals to racism, but had also fought a scorched earth, anti-democratic campaign to deny Democratic Party-leaning African-Americans and other minorities the power of their votes, whether through outright voter suppression or dilution of such groups’ influence through precision gerrymandering.  That is, even as they acted as if the world had not changed, their very actions were reflecting the great degree to which it had changed, and continued to change – the United States was growing more diverse, and these GOP actions were an acknowledgment that without such ratfuckery, the Republican Party would inexorably become the smaller and less powerful of our two major parties.

And now this counter-revolution has gotten to the point where the president makes more or less explicit appeals to white supremacism.  But I think this discounts the important degree to which America’s growing diversity has made such appeals unpalatable to an ever-growing number of white Americans, who have had an increasing likelihood of living with, working with, or marrying minorities.  Trump is essentially betting that enough Americans are just as racist as he is to guaranty success through his white nationalist strategy — but he neglects to factor in the degree to which prolonged exposure to an explicitly white supremacist president might now cause millions of white Americans to take a look in the mirror, and say, Fuck that shit.  But the clincher is that many of these white Americans had already been changing their perspective before Trump came along, to use Stoehr’s helpful phrasing.  Trump is in many ways speeding along the process already under way (even as, tragically, plenty of other white Americans are indeed energized and inspired by his normalization of white nationalism).

Battlespace America, or, Crackdown as Crack-Up

Paul Waldman makes a very good point that helps show how Donald Trump’s support of white nationalism and police violence are not confined to attitude and moral support.  Since becoming president, not only has Trump encouraged police at multiple times to abuse the rights of Americans, but has “taken actions to encourage the militarization of police forces and remove accountability from departments with histories of abuse.”  In this white supremacist presidency, such actions are where the racist rubber hits the road, and why the current protests and police violence in response cannot be disentangled from Trump’s enthronement by a minority of voters in 2016 as their anointed King of the Racists.

The president’s announcement today that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, is now in charge regarding the nationwide protests (the president was vague on what he actually meant), alongside the president’s insistence to governors that they “dominate” the protestors, his call to name antifa as a terrorist organization (despite the lack of any legal framework to do so), and the Defense Secretary’s reference to the “battlespace” of American cities, are all frightening and infuriating, but also reveal the basic weakness and illegitimacy of this administration.  It has taken less than a week of civil unrest to spur Trump and his coterie to explicitly name protestors as terrorists, and to openly discuss a mindset that views the American people not as citizens but as a subject population to be brutalized into submission.

But I am wondering if this quick escalation to what has to be considered massively disproportionate threats of violence, and the calling out of antifa as a terrorist group largely behind the violence, might reflect incipient tectonic changes in American white supremacy.  First, it’s notable that the president has refrained from identifying African-Americans, or the Black Lives Matter movement, as the main mover behind the violence we’re seeing.  Even Donald Trump sees a political cost to seeming too overtly racist, of course — but what to make of singling out antifa instead. At the most basic level, naming antifa as a terrorist threat, but not white supremacist organizations, is an explicit tell of where the president’s sympathies lie; designating as terrorists a movement that is effectively an enemy of white supremacists and their ilk will be correctly interpreted by the latter as the president’s official seal of approval.   Beyond this, though, my theory is that Trump and his ilk are starting to grapple, consciously or not, with a potentially fatal challenge to the appeal and power of racism for politicians evil and unscrupulous enough to make it central to their appeal: the fact that increasing numbers of white people have turned, and continue to turn against, the very notion of white supremacism.  

Now, I don’t want to overstate the progress that’s been made.  The fact that African Americans continue to suffer from both structural and overt racism in American society, even as many white Americans in good faith believe themselves not to have a racist bone in their body, demonstrates the need for conscious, sustained, and self-critical efforts by white Americans in helping move us all towards an egalitarian state.  But it is too cynical to say that nothing has been changing.  The BLM movement has broken through to the conscience of many millions of white Americans, and partly as a consequence, we are seeing diversity in the current protests that we haven’t seen before.  At The Nation, Jeet Heer notes this fact as a crucial reason why the outcome of the present movement for racial justice — of which the current protests are only one thread — stands a chance of achieving a breakthrough that was not possible in say, 1968, the year to which many commentators are beginning to compare 2020. 

My somewhat speculative notion is that the president’s singling out of antifa, alongside the willingness of his advisers to seem to want to declare war not just on the protestors but on the American people more generally, is something of an admission that this is not just a crisis in which white people must be rallied against black people, but in which some white people must now also be considered as the enemy.  To me, this would explain at least somewhat the deranged notion that American cities are to be thought of as military “battlespaces,” akin to Baghdad or Fallujah.  One basic concept that haunted US efforts in Iraq was the idea that it was exceedingly difficult to tell a civilian from a terrorist — all those damned Arabs look alike, and plus, terrorists are devious and hide among the people!  In a way that seems analogous, racists like Trump must now contend with a reality in which to see a white person is not necessarily to see a like-minded racist soul.  Such people are deemed traitors. . . terrorists. . . antifa! 

I am wondering if what seems to be fratricidal threats against fellow Americans — which are on their face insane, and I think politically self-destructive — might reflect this addled calculation playing out among the president and his advisors.  A message must be sent not only to African Americans but to all who question the white supremacist mindset — and since we don’t know who those people are, a massive, over-awing show of force is necessary.  After all, federal agencies know that, despite the president’s attempts to whip up hysteria, antifa isn’t powerful, or even an organization at all; to act like it’s an existential threat to domestic security is absurd.

But the idea of white people abandoning white supremacy, even standing in active opposition to it and its defenders?  THAT would be the very definition of an existential threat — not to the United States, but to white supremacists like Donald Trump.

A Nation Without a President, But Only a Racist-In-Chief

In sifting through the nearly overwhelming amount of news in the past several days — protests in dozens of cities, police unleashing mayhem on their fellow Americans, lack of clear information about the number of peaceful protestors versus those engaged in violent acts, including white supremacist instigators — it’s best that we orient ourselves with some basic facts.  Donald Trump ran and was elected on an agenda of unapologetic white supremacism; he all but crowned himself King of the Racists, without shame.  When the murder of George Floyd led to demonstrations nationwide, Trump showed himself to be incapable of anything but placing the presidential bully pulpit, and the vast resources of the federal government, at the disposal of the same structures of racism and repression that lay behind Floyd’s killing.  There can be no doubt that his example and moral support have supercharged the worst tendencies in American law enforcement, so that across the country too many police sworn to protect and serve are unleashing violence against Americans protesting. . . police violence.

Donald Trump has made a reckless wager that he can incite a sufficient number of white Americans to fear and hatred of minority Americans to overcome the death spiral of his disastrous presidency.  This is reckless not only because of the vast evil of inflaming racist hate, but because the killing that sparked the current protests makes clear the wages of racism in spectacularly grim fashion.  The president is gambling his presidency on getting enough white Americans to explicitly agree that it’s fine for white police officers to murder an African-American in cold blood, when as clear a record as could be exists of this killing.  In embracing such a visceral, stripped-down assertion of the white supremacist vision — the arbitrary infliction of horrifying death on an African-American at the hands of whites — he is betting the farm on the hope that enough white Americans share his sociopathic sentiments.

It is the very embodiment of justice for Americans to engage in their right to protest and to demand that the police be held accountable for their actions and be purged of their role as enforcers of America’s racial hierarchy.  Against this, the president has sought to escalate the governmental response to murderous levels, urging that protestors be shot and suggesting that the US military be sent into American cities, as if the U.S. is just another Middle Eastern nation in need of a good invasion.  In a remarkable tweet, he also intimated that the Secret Service acts as his own racist police force, with his reference to attack dogs summoning images of Southern sheriffs assaulting Civil Rights-era protestors.

The fight for police reform necessarily involves action at the local level, but President Trump’s explicit interventions into this nationwide protest movement hammers home that there is no way forward against dismantling white supremacy that doesn’t involve removing from office the racist in the White House and the party that enables him.  He gives material aid and comfort to the worst people and most destructive forces in American society; without conscience, he incites American law enforcement to commit violence against not only protestors, but also against members of the press risking life and limb to document events for all Americans.  

The president’s promotion of a deranged fantasy in which African-Americans are violence-prone automatons who only understand the lash of a whip could not be more repugnant.  His attempts to bury the true purpose of the great majority of the protests — equality of all under the law — under racist hysteria that dark-skinned natives are coming for our lives is a particular moral test for every white American.

Given that defeat of the president in November would be the single greatest blow against white supremacy possible, whether this wave of protests helps or hurts that effort is a completely reasonable question.  The president obviously thinks he has much to gain, both from helping fuel them and stepping in as a strongman protecting the American people from chaos.  I think it’s far too early to tell what impact they’ll have, but taking a passive stance towards the answer would be irresponsible for anyone who wants Trump and the authoritarian GOP swept from power.  Ideally, enough Americans would turn out in peaceful protests to both overwhelm the hostile police response and the small factions of demonstrators inclined to violence, and help put to rest the president’s lie that protests for justice threaten the nation.  As we’re in the age of covid-19, it seems likely we’ll have to find other ways to press the fight, which extends beyond rolling back police violence and white supremacy to restoring the nation’s health and economy under the double blows of coronavirus and recession/depression.

Nearly all of us have an understandable preference for calm over conflict, but this inclination can be malignant when enforced at a societal level to paper over conflicts rooted in injustice and cruelty.  We’re at one of those phases in our history when such is undeniably the case.  There is no common ground to be found between police officer who murder citizens, and citizens protesting against those police officers.  One party is absolutely in the wrong; the other is absolutely in the right.  The party in the wrong must be defeated to as great an extent possible if we are to have anything that we might consider a civilized country.

You can get a sense of the destructive role that that Donald Trump plays in our national crisis in this hapless Washington Post article that puzzles over the president’s unwillingness to play the role of unifier in our current crisis even as it describes, without being able to name outright, that he’s made a conscious choice to divide the nation in support of his white supporters.  Even the title of piece captures the absurdity of pretending that the president isn’t the central player in our crisis: “As Cities Burned, Trump Stayed Silent – Other Than Tweeting Fuel on the Fire.”  By tweeting, Trump has certainly not “stayed silent” — he’s chosen the side of white supremacists and violent cops, even as he claims to advocate for “LAW & ORDER.”  The article goes on to describe how the “nation seemed to cry out for leadership,” but that “Trump made no attempt to provide it.”  That there is a discernible “nation” that might “cry out for leadership” is an unhelpful fiction, obscuring the way in which Trump has in fact provided leadership — in his promotion of state violence against largely minority protestors, he has confirmed his role once again as the King of the Racists, leader of the rump faction of Americans who quake at the thought that non-white Americans should be treated as equals.  To look to Donald Trump to unify Americans is to put aside the choice he made years ago: to be not the president of the American people, but the president of the 90%-white voting block that put him in office.

In Face of Racist Murder, Trump Doubles Down on White Supremacy

The GOP’s silence in the face of Donald Trump’s threats to slaughter Americans protesting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers is a chilling reminder that there’s no limit to what the Republican Party will accept from this president.  While Donald Trump may be unfit for office, the GOP is unfit for America.  The president’s need to instigate and celebrate violence is in direct proportion to his foundering presidency, an attempt to project strength where there is only panic, moral emptiness, and a grotesque commitment to white supremacy.  Standing by their man, the GOP signals that its vision for America is a future of racism, repression, and authoritarianism.

In tweeting his readiness to repeat on a mass scale the killing that sparked the Minneapolis protests, the president has demonstrated how a unifying thread of white supremacism links those police officers to the racist-in-chief.  Rather than seeing the killing as an indication that the police were out of control and need to be subject to the justice system — the perspective of any civilized person — the president instead sees it as a template for further violence, further injustice, further demonstrations of white supremacy.  Our failed president reaches for the thread of racism with all the desperation of a drowning man reaching for a life preserver. He’s trying to strike a pose of law and order, but using the power of the military to enforce racist fantasies is really the ultimate in lawlessness and disorder.  The president may have singled out “looting” (“When the looting starts, the shooting starts”) as a cause for killing, but it’s utterly blinkered and naive not to recognize that it’s the hundreds of African-Americans and others protesting this murder who are the intended targets of this fantasized violence.  At any rate, the idea of some people committing thefts amid the chaos in Minneapolis is utterly insignificant compared to the unacceptable attack on American society when officers of the law hide behind their badge to commit murder.

Objectively speaking, it would be the easiest thing in the world for a non-racist president to use the clear-cut murder of an African-American by police as a fulcrum point for making a stand for racial equality in America (as an example of what this might be like, look no further than this statement released by former President Barack Obama).  Presented with this softest of soft balls, though, our racist president is constitutionally incapable of acting in a way that would promote justice.  An obviously murderous act must be normalized by threatening the same against anyone who protests it; to the racist mind, to act otherwise is to at least tacitly acknowledge that racism is wrong.

The only way that Trump can succeed in his radical re-direction of American society into an abyss of white supremacism and authoritarianism is for enough Americans to stand idly by and let it happen.  His agenda is supported by only a decreasing minority of Americans, and the majority needs to sound off, now, relentlessly, both against this malevolence and in favor of an egalitarian future.  The president’s willingness to embrace violence is another indicator that we are at a crisis as a nation; this is not politics as usual, not by a long shot.  Not for the first time, but certainly in the most decisive manner yet, Donald Trump has acted in a way that renders him an illegitimate president.  He may have cheated his way into office with the help of Russia and the depraved anti-democracy of the Electoral College (thanks, Founders!), but threatening violence against American citizens strips away his moral authority to lead, and any obligation we might have to treat him as if he’s the president.

It doesn’t matter if I think this, of course, but it certainly matters if millions of us do — and if our elected officials start acting as if his lack of legitimacy actually matters.  Wielding his illegitimacy as a political weapon is one important way that we can counter-act his efforts to infuse politics with the threat and taint of violence.  With the country reeling from a pandemic and accompanying economic disaster that Donald Trump did almost nothing to protect us against, the president knows he’s a failure; the arguments people have been making that he’s now in a phase of flailing confusion and doubling down on his basest instincts towards violence and division are spot on.  Trump may be increasingly dangerous in his weakened state, but we can’t let his offenses against the republic blind us to the fundamental fact of his weakness.  Election 2020 is not a normal political contest, but one in which both the president and the GOP can be exposed to the majority as the handmaidens of mass death and destruction, and sidelined as legitimate voices in American politics.

But the lead-up to November will not be normal, either, as the president will continue to escalate his war on American democracy in both words and action — whether it’s attempting to force Twitter to communicate his lies unfiltered to the American people, lying about the need for and efficacy of vote-by-mail, or asserting that only the American military can halt the marauding of African-Americans.  To the greatest extent possible, Democrats need to frame anti-democratic actions like these, as well as GOP voter suppression, as beyond the pale of acceptability, and as the desperate last gasps of a failed party.  As the GOP enters into a frenzy of lawlessness, the Democratic Party needs to be confident in its defense of the rule of law, and trust that a decisive majority of the American people want to chart their own future, not see it hijacked by Donald Trump and the GOP.

Jobs Are Disappearing By the Millions, But These Guys Want to Cut Off Unemployment Benefits?

As a fresh demonstration that we are in a dire economic crisis for which the Trump administration has absolutely no plan, check out these two articles from The New York Times.  The first, titled “Many Jobs May Vanish Forever As Layoffs Mount,” reviews mounting evidence that the coronavirus is sparking shifts in the economy that could well suppress employment far into the future.  To date, some 38.6 million jobless claims have been filed across the United States.  But according to a study by a Stanford economist, more than 40% of these jobs may not come back.  Fewer people in offices will impact businesses that depend on their patronage, like nearby restaurants and stores; meanwhile, the incentive to automate jobs has increased exponentially.  It seems likely that evidence will continue to emerge on the pandemic’s depressive effects on employment.  In combination with the overwhelming fact that the economy cannot operate at anything like normal so long as Americans fear for their lives every time they come into contact with other people, the employment and economic picture looks ghastly.

To hear Larry Kudlow talk, though, you’d think he was living on a different planet than the rest of us.  Late last week, the White House economic advisor said that there’s no need to extend unemployment benefits past their current limits.  Apparently, Trump officials are convinced that too many Americans are choosing cushy unemployment over returning to non-existent or perilous jobs.  Ironically, in the same interview, Kudlow acknowledged uncertainty around the speed of the economic recovery, speaking more cautiously than President Trump and his assertions of the economy’s impending magical turn-around.  Yet this admission just makes his comments on unemployment benefits more nonsensical, and points to a basic truth of the White House response to our economic crisis: these guys really have no idea what they’re doing, and certainly can’t be trusted to navigate us out of the worst financial crisis in a century.

I don’t see how anyone can look at the predictions of an economy with permanently high unemployment levels, and not conclude that massive public intervention is needed to ensure our economy and society aren’t hobbled for years on end.  I worry in particular about the absolute devastation being inflicted on small businesses across the U.S.; these account not only for a disproportionate amount of job creation, but for much of the dynamism in the U.S. economy.  You would think that protecting them now and in the future would be a non-partisan issue — but the federal government’s maladministration of relief funds intended for such companies speaks to a basic indifference to this enormous sector of the economy.  I suspect this indifference is driven by a combination of basic incompetence, alongside an innate preference for the big corporate donors who stand to profit if they’re able to gain a greater share of the US market as smaller competitors die off.

This is obviously a huge and complicated topic, but leaving our economic future to the whims of predatory corporations, indifferent Trump administration officials, and the unavoidable impacts of the coronavirus is simply not an option.  We all need to be thinking about what sort of economy we want and need, and working to make sure we have a government that works for this vision.  At a minimum, this means continued aid to workers who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.  Anything else is cruelty and economic stupidity.

Professional Vandals

One of the well-documented pathologies of the Trump administration and the contemporary Republican Party is an opposition to professionalism and expertise.  In the Trump administration, this tendency can be found everywhere, from the nomination of incompetent judges to the appointment of Jared Kushner to positions of responsibility over areas about which he knows absolutely nothing.  Disregard for expertise is both a key enabler and expression of the president’s authoritarianism: expert opinion gets in the way of imposing the will of the maximum leader, and so must be dismissed and ignored when it doesn’t directly support the president’s whims.  Ignoring reality isn’t a great way for a person to live, and it isn’t so great for a country, either: as Exhibit A, witness Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to wish the coronavirus out of existence via happy talk and suppressing basic facts about its spread.

Not insignificantly, suppression of expertise not only enables authoritarianism, but opens the door to its evil twin, corruption; without verifiable or measurable standards, political and spending decisions can be far more easily made based on the personal wishes of the president and allied politicians.  As just one example out of many: if the president can lean on health agencies not to speak out decisively against the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus, the president’s cronies can more easily make money off sales of this sham treatment.

But as with other aspects of the danger that Donald Trump and the GOP pose to our country’s future, the attack on expertise can feel both obvious and abstract, something that might be seen as residing in a political realm separate from our daily lives, even as we grasp intuitively how its consequences might rain down on us in a thousand different ways, from higher mercury emissions from coal plants that sicken our friends and family, to money diverted to the president’s allies to build a useless border wall rather than build schools for the children of parents serving in the military.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that not only is the war on professionalism actually central to the broader Trump-GOP war on American democracy and society, but that understanding this can help put Americans more in touch with the urgency of the fight we’re in.  Not only does discrediting and ignoring expertise and knowledge enable the president to act in ways that serve himself and various constituencies at the expense of the American majority, it’s also a direct threat against anyone who takes pride in their education, training, and professionalism in the workplace. 

After all, even while we set up artificial distinctions between what might be considered the realms of politics, economics, and public health — to pick three of the biggest categories of all — the war on professionalism blows past such borders.  The president and his allies have every incentive to discredit expertise not only in government, but everywhere it appears – because everywhere it exists, it poses a threat to efforts to raise personal preference and connections over competence and knowledge. 

The elevation of grifting and plunder as the highest goals in life is an affront to every American who takes pride in their work, in their dedication, in their personal skills, and in the respect of their peers.  The Trumpist attitude is that anyone who has standards, who tries to do the best job they can do, and who treats fellow workers with respect, is simply a chump who doesn’t realize that all you have to do to get ahead is join the team that’s rigging the game.

Forget Immigrants and the Media - For Donald Trump, Democracy is the Real Enemy of the People

Today, President Trump threatened to withhold unspecified federal funds from Michigan and Nevada in retaliation for those states’ efforts to implement vote-by-mail in the face of the coronavirus.  While the form and syntax of the threats were typically bizarre — via Tweet, with random quotation marks mashed up against various lies and misrepresentations — the intent is clear.  The president opposes efforts to allow Americans to vote while a pandemic renders in-person voting a danger to the public health; and in his made-up allegations of fraud, he seeks to subvert Americans’ faith in our voting system, and by extension, our democracy itself.  By threatening to use financial pressure to implement his authoritarian hostility toward allowing people to vote, he has once again demonstrated that he is not simply unfit for office, but a self-avowed enemy of American democracy.

More specifically, of course, it’s the ability of likely Democratic voters the president opposes.  So he calls out Nevada and Michigan for supposed fraud, even as Republican-led states, and the Republican National Committee itself, take measures to enable vote by mail.  

Even if these two states stand up to him, the president’s threats may have the intended effect on other states considering vote-by-mail measures.  In a fiscal environment where states are facing massive disruption to their finances, and are deeply reliant on emergency funding from the federal government, they can be seen as particularly vulnerable to shake-downs like the president is engaging in against Nevada and Michigan.

For all the organized chaos, industrial-scale larceny, and gross incompetence of this administration that has led us to this point of economic free-fall and mass death, in some ways there is very little left to say.  Donald Trump, with the complicity and active support of the Republican Party, is clearly engaging in an effort to undermine and delegitimize the 2020 election.  He is doing this because he full well understands he will never win a majority of votes in a free and fair vote; in a parallel preparation for this authoritarian presidency, the Republican Party has worked for decades now to undermine Americans’ right to vote and elect officials of their choosing, via gerrymandering, voter ID laws, and purging of voter rolls targeting Democratic-leaning voters.  The president is despised by millions upon millions of Americans, while even many of his supporters question his mental fitness to serve as president.  Every day he continues in office is a calamity for our present and a curse on our collective future.  It is difficult to see a way forward that does not involve the complete political destruction of both Donald Trump and the GOP in 2020 and beyond.  A president and a party who don’t believe in Americans’ right to vote have no place in our democracy, full stop.

A Plan for the Coronavirus, Just Not For Fighting It

Ezra Klein has come out and stated outright what we’ve been seeing before our very eyes for months now, but which has been sometimes hard to perceive because of its sheer irresponsibility, stupidity, and casual indifference to mass death: the Trump administration simply has no plan or goals around fighting the coronavirus pandemic.  He notes that the nation-wide lockdowns over the last two months were supposed to buy the country time to implement plans, during which period

the US should have built the testing, contact tracing, and quarantine infrastructure necessary to safely end lockdown and transition back to normalcy — as many of its peer countries did. Instead, Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job. He has both dominated the airwaves and abdicated his duties. As a result, America’s progress against the coronavirus has stalled, even as the lockdown has driven the economy into crisis.

Much of the current public debate is posed as one “between endless lockdown or reckless reopening,” but Klein correctly notes that this dichotomy is due to “the failure to create a safer, middle path,” identifying this as “the most profound and complete failure of presidential leadership in modern history.”  As the title of Klein’s piece puts it, “we have no president.”

Klein’s assessment is clarifying, in that it redeems the maddening feeling I’ve had for weeks now that we have entered more and more into a phase of “re-opening” without actually doing the things (beyond enduring the lockdown) that would make this anything of a good idea.  Yes, states have been taking individual and sometimes collective actions like increased testing and implementation of tracing programs — but overall, the sensation has been that we are prematurely starting to return to normal without much of the infrastructure in place needed to stop fresh waves of the coronavirus in the coming months or even weeks.  According to Klein — and really, according to the known facts — this sensation is an accurate perception of reality.  We really are careening forward without a clear map, and this does seem to me to be indistinguishable from a form of madness.  It is a madness directly informed by the way the president has translated his personal sociopathy into governmental non-action — but it’s also a madness amplified by our collective inability to grapple with the basic fact of his de facto resignation from the role of president.  Donald Trump has no interest in protecting American lives, and anyone who thinks otherwise at this point is either a devoted partisan or naïve beyond belief — yet at some basic, gut level, we collectively keep acting as if he does care.  To always expect him to act otherwise is to enter into a complementary form of madness (maybe mass delusion is a better, more specific term), in which we expect something from Trump that he is unable to provide.  

But though the president has no plan for fighting the coronavirus, the president does very much have a plan for the coronavirus more generally.  This plan, none of us should be surprised to learn, is focused on the protection and preservation of Donald Trump’s political and economic fortunes.  In retrospect, he has never really done very much to hide this plan.  In his obsession with the nation’s economic health and simultaneous indifference to its actual health, the plan has always been to downplay the coronavirus and convince the American people that it’s not nearly as big a threat as they might otherwise believe.  This was his approach in the earliest days, when he spoke of the virus being contained to a handful of Americans before inevitably going away, to his early mystical phase of promising that the virus would disappear on its own, to his attempts to downplay the death toll by comparing it to the cost of car accidents or the common flu.  Once the death toll began to rise and it was clear that he had squandered the months of January and February, continued denial became the only path forward, because anything else would mean acknowledging his prior mistakes — which, as we all know, he does not do, because he cannot admit a mistake, and because he never wants to actually accept the responsibilities of his office.  He is only in it for himself.  That has always been the master plan, and it always will be.

It's Trump Versus the Trump Administration, as Lead Health Professionals Dare to Speak the Truth

Yesterday I noted a deluge of information hitting us daily that points to a nation very much unprepared to begin easing social distancing rules and widespread business closures, owing to the escalating spread of the coronavirus and the lack of various measures in place — testing, contact tracing, and the like — that can help mitigate and contain its spread.  A few more such sources are worth adding: the testimony of Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Robert Redfield to the Senate on Tuesday, and today’s testimony of Dr. Rick Bright, a former high-ranking health official turned whistleblower.  The New York Times characterizes their cumulative testimony as a “one-two punch for the administration,” an accurate assessment as far as it goes, but which leaves out the urgent moral and health dimensions of why this is so.

Dr. Fauci warned of “needless suffering and death” if states open up too quickly, while Dr. Bright said the U.S. would face “the darkest winter in modern history” if the Trump administration does not move forward with adequate national testing and accompanying mitigation strategies.  Against the urgency these two experts place on saving American lives, and on the need for both progress and plans before restrictions should be eased, is opposed the president’s obsession is with revving up the economy, without regard for the human cost, without consideration of the concrete measures that could make re-opening far safer, and without acknowledgment of the likely spiking of the virus that is likely to result as Americans begin to re-engage in behavior that facilitates its spread.

 While both doctors drew on their experience and expertise, the president’s criticism of their testimony demonstrates his ignorance and basic unfitness for office.  His remarks about Dr. Fauci’s testimony are particularly telling.  Responding to the doctor’s remarks about a too-quick re-opening of both businesses and schools, the president told reporters that, “I was surprised by his answer.  To me it’s not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools.”  Trump also commented that, “Now when you have an incident, one out of a million, one out of 500,000, will something happen?  Perhaps.  But you can be driving to school and some bad things can happen, too.”

 The idea that Dr. Fauci’s answer was “unacceptable” begs the question of what makes it so.  He is, after all, an expert on the subject on which he speaks; the president is very much not.  The quality that obviously taints Dr. Fauci’s response in Trump’s eyes is its truth.  The president seizes on the idea that the coronavirus doesn’t harm children, which in the first place is not true (witness the many cases in New York of a coronavirus-related inflammatory syndrome) and in the second, ignores the role that children can play as vectors for the disease even as it generally does not sicken them nearly as much as adults.  That the president would ignore, or be ignorant of, this crucial aspect of re-opening schools is staggering.  He considers himself the person in government who, unlike Dr. Fauci, can provide “acceptable” answers, yet they are based not on science or facts, but the overriding need to protect his power at all costs.  He feigns expertise and a special understanding of scientific reality, but what he demonstrates instead is a profound stupidity and unforgivable callousness towards American lives.  “Unacceptable” is the wrong word to describe Dr. Fauci’s expert opinion, but it’s the right one for the president’s nonsense and its deadly consequences.

And let’s not overlook the very important point that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield aren’t some rogue outsiders bent on destroying Trump’s presidency, but actual members of his administration.

 As I said yesterday, the president’s mind-boggling refusal to acknowledge reality is sustained in great part by the willingness of the GOP to embrace a similar fantasy view of the world, in which the coronavirus is an overhyped threat, and in which Democrats are interested solely in using the coronavirus to destroy the economy (the president tweeted as much on Monday).  And so Republican senators used their time with Dr. Fauci to ask questions that should embarrass any American with a passing knowledge of this pandemic.  Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee proclaimed that the nation has sufficient testing “to begin going back to work” (a lie), while Rand Paul of Kentucky insisted that children should return to school (like the president, ignoring the role that children can play in spreading the disease — a particularly embarrassing argument to make, given that Paul is a doctor, or at least claims to be).

 The president and the GOP are engaging in a strategy that’s breathtakingly cruel and almost certain to subvert their obsessive goal of goosing the economy in time for the November election.  Sure, you can let businesses open while infection rates are rising and testing remains far below necessary levels, but this doesn’t mean Americans will start shopping again.  I suppose the GOP’s next step is to enforce American consumption by means of creative penalties — for example by docking our future Social Security income by whatever amount we selfishly refuse to spend in the present.

 And if that fails, they can always resort to the more coercive arts of their armed allies, the gunmen who’ve threatened Wisconsin legislators and vowed to defend Texas businesses that defy shutdown orders; only now, instead of just arguing for a premature relaxation of coronavirus restrictions, these bearded buckos will go direct-to-consumer, forcing us at gunpoint to shop the local Walmart, to dare the inside of a nearby Starbucks, to stop at the CVS down the street for a solitary, gratuitous tube of toothpaste.  Though I doubt they will be content even then.  As we hesitate too long in choosing between Crest and Colgate, distracted not for the first time by the legendary rivalry of those iconic brands, I see these militia of capitalism offering barbed opinions about our slow decision-making, urging us to make a choice and be done with all the shilly-shallying, sliding off the safety of their AR-15’s in frustration as our continued indecisiveness enrages them further. . . honestly, it’s really hard to make those guys happy.

Sleepwalking Into An American Nightmare

A flood of data and reporting continues to reinforce the argument that, by prematurely relaxing social distancing restrictions on citizens and businesses, much of the United States is heading into an ever-greater health calamity of its own making.  The single greatest portion of blame goes to the president, who continues to embrace a sociopathic obsession with economic resurgence, even at the cost of countless lives, as key to his re-election.  But in an inversion of the saying about success having many fathers, but failure being an orphan, we can see here that failure is a truly multi-headed hydra of a family, the president’s deranged impulses being seconded by a grab-bag of governors, business leaders, and right-wing movements.  

In the most benign reading of the facts, many states are easing restrictions to protect millions of their citizens from continued economic pain, rather than in response to presidential pressure or the imprecations of powerful business interests.  But it appears that in most states, the public health measures that will prevent such re-opening from leading to a new, even worse wave of infections is simply not in place.  Testing is farcically inadequate and often inaccurate; contact tracing efforts are mostly in their preliminary stages; and the message that masks can play a large role in slowing the spread of transmission has been muddled by deranged right-wing pushback against the practice.  This New York Times piece has a great rundown of the various gaps in the health infrastructure that make a resurgence not just likely but virtually guranteed; as a former CDC director tells a journalist, “We’re not reopening based on science.  We’re reopening based on politics, ideology and public pressure. And I think it’s going to end badly.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is cultivating future disaster by consistently low-balling the extent of the virus within U.S. borders.  NBC News has obtained a coronavirus task force report that in fact details spiking infection rates across the country, such as Nashville, Des Moines, and Amarillo, TX.  Some of the states with these spikes, such as Texas, are actually relaxing restrictions even as the state case load continues to grow, which, as the New York Times article points out, flies in the face of the minimal guidelines promulgated by the Trump administration.

Despite such evidence, the president said earlier this week that “all throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly.”  This is an outright lie, and is as much an abdication of duty as his previous months’ neglect of adequately mobilizing the U.S. government to contain and mitigate this pandemic.  It is a lie meant to encourage the rapid relaxation of restrictions despite the president’s own knowledge that the national situation is very much the opposite of improving.  The obvious conclusion is in keeping with what we’ve been seeing all along from Donald Trump: he is willing for Americans to die unnecessarily in his monomaniacal quest for re-election — a re-election that he sees as wholly dependent on Americans’ perceptions that the economy is healthy.

It’s cold comfort to me that other Americans are also watching in horror this collective national nightmare, in which Americans are being lied to by their leaders and encouraged to begin resuming normal life activities with a false sense of their safety, and without the precautions we know will save lives actually being in place.  The profundity of our health and economic crisis can be traced directly to Donald Trump’s months of denial and dissimulation about the threat posed by the coronavirus.  Now the president, echoed by great swathes of the Republican Party, is insisting that Americans put their lives at risk to compensate for mistakes that were his, and his alone.

The horrific race and class dimensions of Trump’s “solution” to our economic damage are part and parcel of his willingness to send Americans back to work too early, and should be in the forefront of the consciousness of all Americans of good faith.  Such workers will disproportionately be working class and minority Americans who will find themselves forced to return to work, either because they can’t afford not to, or because they’ll lose unemployment benefits if they decline out of fear for their health.  And as Adam Serwer methodically outlines, the president’s concern for the deaths caused by the coronavirus has diminished as its death toll has fallen most heavily on non-white Americans; he concludes that, “The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them.”

Though it doesn’t amount to full-scale Democratic resistance to the president’s immoral willingness to send Americans to their deaths, I do see signs of hope in the Biden campaign’s apparent understanding that holding the president accountable for his coronavirus failures needs to be central to the effort to defeat him.  It is absurd that there might be debate over this, but we’ve already seen congressional Democrats shy away from a fuller indictment of the president’s murderous leadership.  Unconstrained by the House’s need to work with the Trump administration on legislation, the Biden campaign has more latitude to take a slash-and-burn approach; and ads like this one show an understanding that the president can’t be given any quarter over his coronavirus response.  I hope to god they keep it up.

In Absence of Adequate Coronavirus Testing, Trump's Strategy Is Simply "Let Them Eat Death"

This post from Greg Sargent at The Plum Line blog hit me with the shock of revelation.  With the president insisting that Americans act like “warriors” by risking death by returning to work (even as he and his inner circle stay safe via daily coronavirus testing), Donald Trump has seemed to throw himself headlong against an unyielding reality: the economy won’t begin to prosper so long as Americans fear going about their daily lives, which won’t happen until the virus is far more contained than right now.  Isn’t he just setting himself up for failure?

But Sargent zeroes in on a special ingredient that helps Trump’s approach make more sense, even if it makes it no less sociopathic: rather than trying to move the country to a state of normalcy, Trump is instead concentrating on creating the illusion of normalcy — even if, logically, actually taking the steps to save the country’s health will also help save its economy.  And so Trump attempts to convince the American people that the worst of the virus is past, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

It’s impossible to say exactly why Trump would choose a tenuous unreality that may well backfire over actual action that could realistically help preserve the economy, not to mention save lives, but the creation of appearance over reality has undeniably been the hallmark of Trump’s long and catastrophic career through the past several decades.  Sargent suggests something along these lines, referencing Trump’s faith in his “magical reality-bending powers.”  But Sargent also points to a way in which reality itself (apart from the glaring disaster of the pandemic and economic meltdown) is shaping Trump’s fantasy response: there’s a relatively short timeline until the election, which the president could well see as not nearly sufficient to reverse the current crisis enough to assure re-election.  A corollary of this that Sargent doesn’t mention outright is also true — this finite time frame also means the illusion need only work until November, after which, from Trump’s perspective, who cares?  All that matters to Trump is re-election, not governance or the actual lives and livelihoods of the American people.

In a Twitter thread that references Sargent’s column, Salon writer Amanda Marcotte singles out a powerful through-line of Trump’s effort to convince voters of an alternate coronavirus reality: the president’s resistance to adequate testing in the United States.  Just as a few months ago the president opposed allowing a cruise ship to dock in the United States because it would raise the number of cases in the U.S., the president now openly admits that he wants to keep the numbers artificially low (in a separate column, Marcotte documents his previous efforts to slow down the testing effort).  In a similar vein, we’ve also seen reports in recent days that the president and his allies intend to start disputing the coronavirus death tolls, which is both not surprising and completely abhorrent. The clear objective is to keep the virus from appearing as bad as it actually is. This attitude is reflected in policy, as the Trump administration continues to deny its responsibility for taking the lead on testing nationwide.

Marcotte’s prescription for battling the president’s effort to re-open the economy at the cost of tens of thousands or more American life has the power of simplicity and moral clarity, and aims dead center at his efforts to corrupt the coronavirus statistics in his favor; it also seems like an excellent start to rolling back the president’s wish to create the illusion of premature victory over the coronavirus.  Stop getting sucked into the open-versus-closed debate, Marcotte advises, and just start asking “Where are the tests?” at every opportunity.  I think this is exactly right.  Against Trump’s denialism and appeals for American workers to die for his re-election, holding fast to the importance of basic facts, such as the extent of the pandemic and measurable points at which re-opening measures might be more safely undertaken, is a supremely simple way to wield verifiable reality against presidential propaganda.

Taken together, Sargent’s and Marcotte’s arguments lend yet more urgency to fighting back against Trump’s ongoing dereliction of duty as the coronavirus continues to sicken and kill Americans.  A president who has given up on saving American lives, and prefers instead to try to convince Americans that things are better than they are by suppressing the evidence and deploying the full propaganda power of the White House, clearly deserves political annihilation.  But Sargent and Marcotte also implicitly make the case that the president’s strategy is weak, even fatally flawed, and can be taken apart by the steady application of facts and logic, not to mention moral suasion.

At this point, the lack of a coordinated and relentless Democratic assault on the president’s insane and immoral strategy to essentially let the coronavirus run its course, while demanding that Americans die for the economy, amounts to an unbelievable failure of leadership from the opposition party.  It seems to me that if you are an elected Democrat, and are not consumed with a righteous fury to save the country and the American people from the mass death inflicted by this mad president and the discredited GOP, then you should resign and make way for new blood that actually gives a damn about American lives and American democracy.  One of my darkest fears is that the Democratic leadership is satisfied to stand back and let Trump destroy himself in the coming months, even at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives, rather than internalizing the need to expose and roll back his monstrosity with every of ounce of energy and creativity they have, starting yesterday.

As Heather Havrilesky writes in a  recent cathartic Twitter post, “You wake up some mornings and you just need to see one single Democrat in office visibly losing their shit over this murderous fucking clown.  That’s all you want: One human being in power, reflecting our shared reality by spontaneously combusting over the nightmare world this hapless homicidal buffoon ushered in.”  Exactly so: and it makes me wonder if the Democrats are also holding back, not because they might fail in their opposition, but because the righteous fury building up around the country will also hold accountable even those Democratic politicians who have failed to rise to this dreadful, apparently endless moment in our history.

Trouble in Smallbusiness-ville

The coronavirus epidemic is a crisis for our country on multiple fronts: medical, political, economic, and beyond.  At The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey zeroes in on the devastating losses among small businesses across America as both an immediate and long-term problem for the country.  She notes that prior to the pandemic, only half of small businesses had sufficient cash reserves to last more than two weeks in the event of a closure like so many are now undergoing.  Although relief programs designed to benefit small businesses made it through Congress, those were insufficiently funded and funneled money disproportionately to larger businesses. Lowrey notes that “researchers found no evidence that money went to the places and industries hit hardest, as measured by business closures and declines in hours worked.”

But as bad as the current situation is for small businesses, Lowrey looks to the future — and the outlook is grim, both for these companies and for the health of the U.S. economy going forward.  The dispensing of funds is leaving minority-owned firms out in the cold — one study found that an estimated 95% of African America-owned businesses, 91% of Latino-owned businesses, and 75% of Asian-owned businesses had almost no possibility of receiving emergency loans from a “mainstream financial institution.”  The consequence would be a perpetuation and growth of inequalities that already punish minority groups in America and hobble our collective economy.  Beyond this, a future in which millions of small businesses are forced to close is a future with slower job growth and thus collective wealth for average Americans.  Lowrey notes that small businesses are responsible for net job growth in the U.S., and that the alternative — a country where industries consolidate — will both keep wages lower and increase prices for goods and services.

It's a depressing picture, but it’s hard to see how it won’t more or less come to pass without public awareness and decisive action to turn this trajectory around.  I have to hold onto the hope that millions of Americans will find this projected culling of the most vital sector of the American economy both unacceptable and in urgent need of remedy.  The small business emergency cross-cuts with the disproportionate impact the pandemic is already having on the finances and health of minority and lower-income Americans; without adequate government intervention, the likely consequence is that both established businesses and the better-off are more likely to be spared, and will even prosper in the aftermath of the pandemic, while those less fortunate are harder hit, with a diminished future to look forward to.  It seems likely that the Republican Party will try to pin these injustices on the pandemic, if it chooses to acknowledge them at all, but political choices created these inequalities to begin with, and only political choices can get us out.  In this way, as in so many others, the coronavirus points inescapably to the conclusion that only massive, ground-up reform will keep our country from an unending future path of immiseration for the majority.

McConnell's Bankruptcy Comments Reveal His Own Moral Bankruptcy

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell floated the idea that the federal government should allow states to declare bankruptcy, rather than Congress send funds to those states facing massive holes in their finances due to the fallout of the coronavirus epidemic.  McConnell left no doubt that this was a nakedly partisan move, referring to the potential of such relief as “blue state bailouts” and specifically identifying state pension programs (and their benefits to union members) as something he has no interest in helping out.  Savage and spot-on critiques followed from many corners, from politicians such as New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo to Hot Screen favs like The Plum Line and Jamelle Bouie.  Among other things, critics remarked on how blue states pay more into the US Treasury than red states, and get less in return; and that allowing states to descend into fiscal chaos will deepen the economic downturn we’ve already entered. 

While McConnell’s opposition to the government providing public goods is long-standing, some have raised the reasonable question of why he’d pursue what would seem to be a strategy with decently high risks of backfiring against his party in this time of crisis.  Philadelphia Inquirer Columnist Will Bunch laid out some explanations, including the possibility of McConnell using an eventual relief bill as leverage to gain political advantage over states; that the resulting pain may somehow be pinned on Democratic state leaders; or simply blind ideological belief that this is the right thing to do, no matter the circumstances.

My sense is that all three possibilities are probably at play, reinforcing each other in malignant ways.  But the third is closest to the core reason why not just McConnell, but so many others Republicans as well, are on board with using this crisis to advance a broad anti-government agenda.  A central identity of the Republican Party is a long term-opposition to government intervention in the economy for the benefit of the majority, twinned with support for as deep a privatization of American life as possible. McConnell, Trump, and other Republicans aren’t now urgently pressing for ideologically-pure measures simply out of inertia or a willingness to put a crisis to good use in service of long-term goals (more on which shortly), but because of a recognition, conscious for some and only intuited by others, that the coronavirus and attendant economic crash constitute an existential challenge to the meaning and continued viability of the Republican Party.

On the economic front, the GOP has for years essentially argued that the goal was, as Grover Norquist appallingly and unforgettably put it (and as Bunch reminds us), to shrink government down in size sufficiently to be able to drown it in a bathtub. Now, along comes an event that not just reminds us why a competent and well-resourced federal government is essential, but that demonstrates on a daily and escalating basis why the anti-government ideology of the GOP has always been bankrupt.  The once-in-a-generation threat of the coronavirus is something that ideally called for long-term, methodical, and non-partisan preparation — a federal effort that in fact existed, but which was undercut by the GOP anti-government mindset over many years and then eviscerated under the Trump presidency.  Likewise, the economic damage that has ensued — damage that deep economic inequalities have amplified — requires massive government intervention to counteract.

While Republican willingness to allocate trillions of dollars in economic relief superficially suggests an abandonment of principle when the chips are down, it in fact more specifically represents a doubling down on their general aim of protecting giant corporations and advancing privatization over public goods in this country.  The vast $500 billion slush fund that the Treasury Department aims to dole out with no requirement that corporations retain workers or not use the money to do stock buy-backs; the small business relief that’s been gobbled up by decidedly not-small businesses; the undersize relief checks that have been delayed due to the obscene need to mark them with the president’s name: these efforts as a whole aim to enhance the status of the largest players in the economy while tossing peanuts to the little guys.  The logical outcome will be a U.S. economy even more tilted to oligopolies and monopolies, and enervated by the destruction of small businesses.

As I noted above, we presently see the GOP applying the principle of never allowing a crisis to go to waste, and using it to advance long-held objectives.  But this should not be surprising, or be seen as particularly out of bounds in and of itself.  By their nature, massive crises that shake the pillars of our society and economy steer us in the direction of first principles: How do we best protect ourselves?  Do we want to return to the status quo that made the crisis possible or forge a new, better future?  The problem is not that the Republican Party is trying to implement big changes, but that the big changes they are trying to implement are destructive, anti-democratic, and bound to exacerbate the very problems that have made our current crisis so horrific.

The coronavirus crisis is an existential threat to the GOP not only because the pandemic discredits its bedrock attitudes towards government and the economy, but also because it simultaneously highlights the immorality of the party’s white supremacist core.  Fighting the coronavirus has required mass public adherence to social distancing measures, hammering home the idea of our fundamental equality and interconnectedness; we can only get through this by all Americans pulling their weight, which reinforces the argument that being American isn’t about your race or skin color, but about your commitment to the greater good.  Against this, racial tribalism appears as plainly insane.  At the same time, the relatively high proportion of minorities in lower-wage occupations that are belatedly being recognized as essential has exposed an inexcusable prior denigration of such jobs and workers; this will rightly continue to send shockwaves through U.S. society in the coming months and years, a truth that cannot easily be repressed. In the face of the coronavirus, our overarching need for solidarity — a humanistic, democratic principle — is a dagger that reality has stuck in the heart of Republican racism and hyper-capitalism.

Capitol Offensiveness

The wave of right-wing protests against measures to contain the coronavirus pandemic came to Oregon this weekend, with a few hundred people gathering around the State Capitol building in Salem on Saturday.  While their right to protest should be supported by all Oregonians, the lack of social distancing at the event, combined with the absence of mask-wearing by nearly all participants, demonstrates that their beef is not only with the state government’s measures, but with science and reason as well.  How else to explain the lack of fear at spreading and being infected by this dangerous disease?

Rejecting basic anti-coronavirus measures while protesting state quarantines and shuttering of businesses, they turned a political rally into a potential super-spreader event. Not only does this threaten the lives of their fellow Oregonians, but it could well prolong the necessity of the very measures they came to protest.  In this, their demonstration is not just against the explicit target of state government, but against the idea of solidarity with their fellow Oregonians.  It is a statement of contempt for the rest of us.  Attempting to portray themselves as heroes of a make-believe resistance against a fictional governmental tyranny, they are in reality the dupes and villains of the story, dismissive of both germ theory and democratic governance in one dumb, fell swoop.

“You can’t just place citizens under house arrest and enforce those orders,” said Adam Ellifritt, an event organizer.  But of course “house arrest” is an intentionally incendiary and misleading term that decontextualizes the actual stay-at-home orders from their purpose.  Like other such protestors, Ellfritt would have us believe that state governors arbitrarily issued such mandates because they hate liberty and freedom and America.  Denying the reality of the coronavirus is essential, because otherwise they’d have to concede that the governors are indeed trying to protect our freedom — our freedom to live, and to prosper in a future in which this pandemic has been contained and defeated.  Opening that door would also raise intriguing questions, such as why they choose to direct their ire at governors, rather than at the inept president who failed to act decisively against the spread of the virus, who called it a hoax and a Democratic plot as it spread through Washington state and New York City and beyond?

As these right-wingers attempt to raise a ruckus and claim that they’re the true patriots, and as frustration and fear begin to climb about the economic effects of social distancing measures, it’s essential to remember that the great majority of Americans have risen to this awful occasion.  In what political writer John Stoehr describes as “the biggest political story of the year,” we are witness to “tens of millions of  Americans sheltering in place for the sake of their own well-being and safety, and for the sake of all Americans.”  Stoehr urges us to realize that our collective willingness to do so is a political act, one that should hearten us all about this country’s willingness to behave with democratic intent and a liberal spirit.  In this, Americans are repudiating the (white) nationalist smallness of President Trump, and the scattered right-wing protests, with what constitutes a mass demonstration of patriotic sacrifice.

This is not to say that Americans shouldn’t be pressing our government to take actions that will allow the relaxation of extreme social distancing measures as quickly as possible — but not by ranting about governmental tyranny and overreach, but by ensuring that the government acts democratically, responsive to our collective interests in both protecting our health and our livelihoods.  To demand that measures be ended without meeting necessary public health thresholds is simply to supercharge the virus’ reign of death and economic destruction.  To make the point that should by now be a cornerstone of all such discussions: allowing businesses to re-open when the general public is too scared to patronize those businesses, and in a way that allows those businesses to act as vectors of disease for those customers who do venture out, only means that we will be seeing a second wave of the virus in the coming months.  This is a horrific situation, but it is also our reality: a reality ensured by a sub-par federal response that continues to be crippled by a president who engages in denialism, magical thinking, and a sociopathic prioritization of his re-election effort above all else.  Just as Americans have demonstrated great democratic spirit in adhering to social distancing guidelines, we now collectively need to take a more active role in demanding that state and federal governments have realistic, measurable plans for rolling back the virus.