After the Future

Wearing Masks, the Corona Virus Culture War, and the Republican Cult of Incompetency

I get it. If someone was to quantify, by the logic of a pure utilitarian calculus, the quantity of suffering of Americans from the negative consequences of the Corona Virus (getting sick, dying, or having a loved one die) vs. the negative consequences of shutting down the economy (unemployment, bankruptcy, isolation, and involuntary constraint), there is more pain for the latter. For now.

I live in Seattle, one of the country's early hotspots, and I don't know one person who has been infected, and when I ask around nobody knows anyone directly in the area who has been infected. I've heard from a few who know somebody who knows somebody, who knows somebody who was infected but came out of it ok. So it's understandable that for most of us the idea that this is a serious threat is hard to relate to because most of us, statistically, don't know people who have suffered, and so our suffering from the shutdown, because it is not an abstraction, seems more significant. For now.

And it's understandable that since the epidemiological curves, for now, seem to be flattening or declining, that people are eager to return to normalcy. The abstraction of a likely second wave of the virus cannot compete with the urgency of relieving the very real, intensely felt economic pain.

That's why this crisis requires an imagination that too many Americans seem incapable of calling up. And while this would be difficult enough even if there was no culture war, the culture war makes it virtually impossible for the nation to develop an effective, coordinated strategy that would prevent things from becoming worse than what we have already gone through. Without a coordinated effort developed at the federal level, there is a very good chance by this time next year things will be far worse than we can even imagine right now. Things are bad now, but we're sowing the seeds now for making them so much worse. Maybe we'll be surprised with an earlier than expected release of a vaccine, but we can't count on that, and so we need to use our heads about preventing the worst case from becoming our future reality. 

And in this climate, the worst possible way of thinking about the virus is in the culture war binary, which has become symbolized by the wearing of masks. For the Trumpist right, mask-wearing has come to symbolize libtard, cowering pusillanimity. To not wear a mask has become by the peculiar logic of the Right, a badge of courage and defiance of the Fauci/Gates plot to ... I don't know... I can't keep these conspiracies straight. But wearing a mask is not for one's own protection; it's for the protection of others, and it's the key in the short run for containing the infection while we come out of social isolation. Hong Kong, one of the top three densely populated places on earth, has had only 4 deaths at this writing. Everybody wears masks there. 

Density is the breeding ground for this virus, and so managing density is the short-term solution, and wearing masks is an essential part of an effective approach. It's just common sense. It never made sense to me that CDC said at first not to wear masks--it undermined its credibility when it ultimately shifted to recommending that we do. I understand that the folks there were trying to preserve the supply of masks for frontline workers, but that bit of misinformation was an early sign to me that a gutted, politicized CDC and its spokespersons had their collective heads up their butts.

Early on, all the medical talking heads were robotically repeating the CDC talking points that wearing a mask won't protect you. That's true--it protects others by minimizing your shedding of the virus if you have it but don't know it. It's something you do for others and for the common good, not for yourself. People who see their not wearing a mask in public places as some grand, symbolic gesture of their defiance of the technocratic state. But they are just affirming their ideological blindness as to the best means to contain the virus and get people back to work.

It's been clear for a while now that we should not expect common sense or common decency from the White House. It's also been pretty clear that we should not expect even a minimal level of competency. This isn't just a Trump thing; it's a Republican thing. Republicans don't think that government can help, so when in power they gut government agencies or just use them to reward incompetent loyalists.

And so it becomes inevitable that government is impotent to help when we need it most. We saw this with Katrina in the Bush administration, and it's much worse now. Bush, unlike the current occupant of the White House, was a decent man if incompetent president. An ignorant incompetency seems to be the one consistent qualifier for Republican voters. To win the Republican vote, you just need to be a good ol' boy who talks the talk. Whatever you might feel about libtard Democrats, and there's plenty about them to feel bad about, they value competency. A Biden presidency is a deeply depressing prospect for me. But the Republicans have proved time and again they are really, really good at obstructing, and really, really bad at governing. They need to be removed at every level. 

The Corona Virus isn't like a hurricane that hits, destroys, and moves on. It hits and hovers, and then it hits again and again. Without a competent, federally coordinated containment strategy, things are going to get worse. It would appear that we will have to learn this the hard way--yet again.

Live free or die? There are some things worth dying for, but the freedom to cut off your nose to spite your face is not one of them. Voting Republican should qualify for an automatic Darwin Award nomination.

 

American Identity

Very often, you’ll hear historians say, we’ve seen this before and we’ve survived. But we saw it mostly in the 19th Century--which was an absolutely horrible time in U.S. history. And we only emerged from its horrors because of the Progressive Movement, which was at first more a Republican thing (TR) and then more of a Democrat thing (FDR). The Progressives of the early 20th century effected a genuine evolutionary step in American society, and yet huge swaths of America see Progressivism as anti-American. Because for them American identity is all about being self-reliant, to fend for yourself, to take pride in not needing anyone else's help, especially not the government's, which is the greatest threat to their freedom and independence. 

And so contemporary Republican zealots, starting with Reagan, began an effective program to restore a frontier imagination of American identity. It was a primitive, cruel mentality in the 19th century, but it was understandable given the daily realities that Americans faced on the frontier, in the Civil War, and later in the factories. These Republican zealots have for forty years now been striving to to dismantle Progressive institutions--even Social Security--and to regress us back into a time when there were no protections, when the powerful did as they pleased, and if you were poor it was your own fault for not being smart enough or ruthless enough to eat rather than be eaten.

Cruelty and viciousness we shall have always with us, but for the best part of the 20th Century American political establishment found a way to soften the hard edges of life in America. But the Right has done a remarkably effective job since 1980 of sharpening those edges again and making the U.S. a remarkably cruel place when compared to other economically developed societies. To celebrate 19th century America is a nostalgic delusion, and the non-zealots among us are quite right to be horrified. It was a cruel, viciously mean, dog-eat-dog era in which government mostly colluded with the meanest and the most vicious. In someone like Mitch McConnell you have a 19th Century throwback to that meanness. 

Regardless of SJW sneer that has recently become a trope, social justice is something to strive for--then and now. It improved the quality of life then in ways that we have come to take for granted now. And yet the people who are suffering the most from this meanness are the ones voting for and supporting the meanest. And they do it because there's meaning in meanness, it's what they're used to, and there's a dignity in suffering that they don't find in Liberal ideology, which they see as promoting a slothful dependency inimical to everything they believe is central to American identity and to their dignity as human beings. 

But the choice that Americans face in the political sphere is not binary. On the right, Americans think it better to be ruled by the law of the jungle and governed by Libertarian zealots because they fear living in an Orwellian dystopia governed by Big Brother. They see managerial liberalism and the bureaucratic technocracy embraced by Democrats as the route to this dystopia. But this is where clear thinking about the complexity of governing a country that will soon have 400 million people has to prevail. A Libertarian ethos is insanely inadequate for the challenges we face. But that does not mean that Big Brother is our only other option.

Self-reliance will always be an important part of American identity, but we are living in a society that is far too complex to think that the kind of life that people lived in the 19th century provides any viable model for us now. A balance has to be found between self-reliance and understanding how each of us is enmeshed in a complex national and global social system. Wishing things were simpler doesn't make them so, but dealing with complexity isn't something that interests zealots, and zealots, those who are most aggressively and ignorantly wrongheaded, are playing a disproportionate role in preventing us from thinking about and developing solutions to very real problems we all face together. 

The U.S. will survive in some form or another, but will it be a place that any decent human being would want to live in? That’s a very real question. And if Trump wins again, we take another step toward becoming meaner and more cruelly vicious. If you don't have a problem with that, shame on you.