The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same

                           The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same

In the midst of the corona virus pandemic the United States is experiencing tremendous instability as all of our institutions are stressed in response to the crisis.Whether it is our system of healthcare delivery, K-12 and higher education, food production and distribution, or immigration, observers have been saying the way all of these things are handled is likely to look very different on the other side of corona than they looked before.

Predictably, the racial divide in the country has also been on display across these months. Whether its the disproportionate death of Black and Brown people at the hands of the virus, the demand that "essential workers" (disproportionately POC) in places like nursing homes, agriculture, or meatpacking plants go back to work, protective gear or not; or, the spectacle of almost all white protesters, sometimes armed, demonstrating at state capitols demanding that social isolation mandates be lifted so they could get back to work, we see the racial divide playing out.

A lot of things are undergoing rapid change in response to corona, but our racial cleavages are not changing. They're simply being more deeply exposed. And in these last couple of weeks we've now had news of the white vigilante killing of Ahmad Arbery in Georgia, and white police killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville and George Floyd in Minneapolis. In Georgia the prosecutors were sitting on Arbery's case, until the video of it was leaked. Then the state bureau of investigation took it over and indicted the perpetrators. Taylor's case is now under FBI investigation. And as I write, the cop who was on video pinning his knee on Mr. Floyd's neck has been arrested, a full four days after his execution was captured on video and put out.

The initial news of investigations and indictments are good things. But we know that as cases like Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and Philando Castile made their way through the system the perpetrating officers were not convicted of murder. So we sit on the edge of our seats as we await the verdicts in this latest round of white vigilante and police homicides.

So corona is changing our thinking about a lot of things in this country these days, but can we change the callous way that our criminal (in)justice system treats Black bodies? That's what I want to know.

Don't Pity the US Because of Trump, Oppose Him, Isolate Him Aggressively

And from yours truly,

Fintan O’Toole wrote a devastating evaluation of the state of American leadership under Donald Trump for the Times last Saturday. He declared that whereas “the rest of the world” has viewed the country with a panoply “of feelings from “love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

While I largely agree with Mr. O’Toole’s assessment of Trump’s America, and even the notion that the state of the affairs in the country is pitiful, there are two points upon which I want to take issue with him. First, I think there are some nuances in regard to the role of race in American politics that he overlooks. Secondly, I urged my fellow citizens of the world not to pity Trump’s policies, but to aggressively oppose them.

O’Toole’s analysis of the way that the Republicans have rolled over in the face of Trump and the potentially horrific impacts of their posture in the COVID-19 crisis is spot on. He concludes that the party’s failure to stand up to Trump “is deliberate and homicidal stupidity.”  He finds the reason for the party’s stance in the contradiction between its desire “to control all the levers of governmental power” even as it has built its “popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.”

O’Toole is only partially right here. Republicans may be no more interested in total control over the government than Democrats. But what the corporate wing of the party seeks is a control that cuts taxes and regulation of the economy as much as possible. Such cuts include axing the social programs of America’s attenuated welfare state as much as possible. That agenda could never have been majoritarian. But since the presidency of Richard Nixon in the 1970s, and ever more aggressively from the time of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Republicans have used the resentment of white Americans unhappy with the civil rights reforms of the 1960s to craft a reconfigured national party coalition. That coalition featured economically conservative capital and socially conservative white racists (and fundamental Christians as well). So it is not “homicidal stupidity” as much as corporate greed and white racism that animates the Republican base and makes it all but impossible to make rational public policy.

The corporate wing was the party establishment. For half a century they were able to dupe working class whites into believing that big government was “evil,” because it helped people of color to white people’s disadvantage. But as communism collapsed and with it, the logic of “big government,” free markets were unleashed, flight of capital toward cheap labor overseas ensued, and social programs were slashed. Black and brown people certainly didn’t benefit from those policies, but neither did the white working class.

Getting angrier and angrier, especially after the trauma of the Great Recession in 2008-09, white racists, by now termed “white nationalists,” engineered the Republican victory in the 2010 mid-term US Congressional elections, let us recall, with a black man in the White House. And when too many establishment politicians (Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio) stayed in the 2016 primaries too long and split the establishment vote, racist whites coalesced around Donald Trump and propelled him to the nomination … The nation was in shock! America continues to have its problems around race, but as O’Toole admits, most of us didn’t vote for Trump and we certainly didn’t ask for a president like him.

In my work I have talked about how with the demographic shifts this century, America is becoming two nations: a traditional America which is older, whiter and more male, and a progressive America, which is younger, more multiracial, female and gender non-conforming. People of Color had been pounding on their chests since the millennium observing that by mid-century America would be a majority-minority nation. Many scholars and activists have proclaimed that for people of color, “the future is ours” (Bowler and Segura, 2010). The oncoming majority is generally thought to be the natural constituency of the Democratic Party.

Unfortunately for progressives, Republicans were also reading that data. In states they controlled Republicans passed state-level policies imposing strict voter identification standards and the configuring of electoral districts in ways that concentrate racial minority voters into fewer districts and minimize the number of Democrats winning office. Policies such as these forestall the day when the true American majority can exert its will in the halls of government and public policy.

Working class and poor whites support Trump, because they feel marginalized in 21^st century  America. When they hear “build the wall” to keep Latinos out, or immigration bans on mostly Muslim countries, they also hear “make America great again” as “make America white again!” O’Toole is right. Trump does embody this mindset, “but he did not invent it.”

On the question of the world’s pity for the United States, American progressives and moderates, still the majority, need not your pity but a greater determination on “your part” to oppose Trumpism more aggressively than has been the case up until now. Yes, you were appalled as Trump pulled out of the Paris environmental accords, and stunned when he abrogated US involvement in the Iran nuclear deal; but you didn’t do anything about it. This is especially true in regard to the Iran deal upon which world peace might reside. Trump promised sanctions against any country whose corporations continued to do business with Iran. So even while European governments remained in the deal, the European corporations immediately stopped doing business with Iran so they could continue to do business with United States. In the end EU governments are but paper tigers and EU corporations are no different than greedy anti-humanitarian American corporations, and Trump.

In this regard then, Europe is no less pitiful than the United States. In fact, the entire North Atlantic world which has dominated world politics even beyond the last 200 years Mr. O’Toole talks about is ineffectual in the face of Trumpism and the right-wing populism he represents. I would advocate that European politicians openly assault Trump’s character and make fun of him with a devil may care attitude! Screw him! Treat him the way he treats you. I would also suggest that European companies should return to doing business with Iran in defiance of Trump and risk sanctions. Multinational corporations are always nervous about severely affecting their global market opportunities. But could US sanctions be any worse than the shock from nowhere --- COVID 19?

I don’t suspect European corporations to stand up frontally to Trump over Iran, but I do think that the risk for EU politicians is less, as he bumbles his way through the corona crisis. Let me just close by saying that in America, unlike Europe, there is a very courageous populist left matching Trumps’ populist right and represented by Bernie Sanders and people like Elizabeth Warren. It is not at all certain that we will win the November elections, because of the structural inequities alluded to earlier. But we are very vocal and determined to take our government back. What we need from you is international solidarity!

O'Toole: Pity the US

Dear friends,
Long time away, read this piece from an Irish journalist abut  how pitiful the US is these days, and then read my response in next post. Hope it's not too much!

Irish Times
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.