https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/time-americans-are-doing-nothing/611056/Something
I sent to private mailing list last night:
This article orbits around a point I made a while back. It’s not just that the US lacks leadership or isn’t showing it; internally and externally, under Trump it has all but ceased to be or function as a single nation. That will become more and more true over time.
The glaringly obvious signs of this surround PPE issues now: regional groups of states have been negotiating en bloc with foreign governments, state governors have mobilized armed forces to protect shipments from federal raids, the Jared administration is using PPE as patronage perks, and Trump has made several different arguments about why they shouldn’t give any to states with Democratic governors. These things aren’t quite as crude as lobbing smallpox-infected corpses over city walls, but knowingly acting in ways that will increase sickness and death is basically biological warfare. We learned in the mid-20th-C that disguising that kind of deliberate activity as bureaucratic doesn’t make it any better.
If that seems like bombast, consider that in this evening’s Fox town hall Trump said the death toll could reach 100K. Now, I’m old enough to remember when death rates on that scale that were reserved for wild-eyed pessimists like me. And if Trump is owning up to 100K now, it’s safe to assume the number will go well beyond that. What does that tell us?
The obvious: To the extent that the US has any leadership, that leadership is committed to a path of “reopening” come hell or high water. In reality, this is a non-policy, and it’s just the latest name for what the Trump administration has been trying to do from the beginning: bullsh*t its way through the crisis. It hasn’t worked so far, and it won’t work in them future, because that’s not how pandemics or immune systems work. The captain of a ship would do as well to bullsh*t his or her way through an iceberg.
As the Atlantic article notes, the US used to be seen as the global standard-bearer for issues like this, but now it’s going down a road that guarantees the country will be bedeviled with overlapping waves and outbreaks for an indefinite period. But what does “indefinite” mean?
We know what stops C-19: isolation, social distancing, and the nearly universal use of PPE. None of these things will happen while Trump is president, and given the speed with which protests are building, and the growing involvement of disinformation networks in them, it’ll be extremely difficult (I think impossible) for a Democratic successor to rigorously impose them.
And that’s not even factoring in the economic damage caused by failed efforts to reopen. It’s widely understood that many state-level EOs [Executive Orders] are written with the intent of forcing businesses to reopen and forcing employees back to work — for example, by denying the legal basis for public and private insurance claims (unemployment, business continuity, etc). This is all based on the assumption that masses of consumers are clamoring to return to normal, but all the polling I’ve seen suggests that even in the reddest states the public would much rather play it safe. So we’ll shortly see a tidal wave of businesses explicitly going out of business, and with that new heights of unemployment claims. With that, the real economic pain will begin — far, far worse than anything we’ve seen.
It’s early May, and as recently as mid-March institutions like schools were only just realizing they needed to shut their doors. June, July, August, September, October, November… There are no know effective medicines, and even Trump, in his wildest fantasies, doesn’t see a vaccine before December. Even if we found one that was perfectly safe and effective, it’d take many months to scale up production to a level that could bring about (I hate this phrase deeply) “herd immunity” across the US.
It’s hard to see how these forces could do anything other than challenge the integrity of the US. I’m curious if any of you can see a different trajectory that doesn’t involve magical thinking.