I was driving back from a Bernie rally in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in February of last year when President Trump came on the radio breezily predicting that the Covid outbreak, then consisting of 15 identified cases, was “completely under control” and would soon be history. This sounded overconfident even with the little we knew at the time. But what struck me was the former president’s hypnotically persuasive style. His worldview was so carefree, self-assured, and emphatic that it felt almost churlish to resist his imperious optimism.
Six hundred-plus thousand deaths later, the former chief executive would have no problem revarnishing that moment if confronted with his own words, perhaps by casting the blame far and wide for what went wrong or maybe by shifting the discussion to his (quite real) successes with the vaccine rollout. In fact, the pivot in public identification of the vaccine as a Trumpian triumph to an oppressive Biden-led power grab is one of the many bizarre manifestations of life in Covidland.
In the highly charged political atmosphere surrounding everything Covid—indeed everything about everything—we all have our favored punching bags, our designated bad guys. Some of us have identified heroes or heroines as well, voices in the wilderness whose warnings we believe clearly were vindicated by subsequent events. That’s not especially troubling in itself; people will disagree about things. However, the idea that we could have a meeting of the minds of any sort around what has happened, is happening, or should happen is frankly inconceivable—that is problematic. The point of public life today is that everything is their fault, whoever “they” happens to be for each. The idea of joint action as a nation around Covid or anything else is fast becoming a taboo; those in charge should be worried at this sign of chronic, organic dysfunction.
Despite what we’ve learned at such painful cost, a future outbreak isn’t likely to be handled much better. In this I dissent from Michael Lewis’s conclusion as aired on “60 Minutes” a few days ago in a segment on his recent book, The Premonition. Lewis, also the author of The Big Short about the great financial meltdown of 2008, spins a series of fascinating secondary tales in the new book about the seemingly endless pandemic.
Lewis is a highly successful commercial author, and you don’t get there by being a Debbie Downer. In the film version of The Big Short, the Christian Bale character sees the future and walks away with a cool billion, a sort of happy ending if you’re Christian Bale rather than a newly homeless lady in Baltimore. In The Premonition, Lewis stays upbeat by concluding that the unsung champions of the Covid debacle, the ones whom Trump, the CDC, and most state governors ignored, have showed us how to do it better next time. No doubt they have, but so what? We still agree on nothing, including that.
One half of the country considers Trump’s eerie capacity to redraw the parameters of reality for his tens of millions of followers as a worrisome legacy of his scattershot presidency. An important corollary implicitly held by the other half is that there is a more real reality in there or out there somewhere, if we could just get to it, find it, agree on it, and from there settle on how to act upon it. This is Pollyannish, misguided, and equally delusional. It presumes that Trump introduced fantasy to our polity and ruined functional governing structures that, without his malign presence, would have let us do things right.
We’ve seen this Manichean mindset play out repeatedly over the course of the pandemic. For example, the CDC’s Nancy Messonnier drew Trump’s wrath early on when she finally blurted out that Americans should prepare for “when” rather than “if” coronavirus would bring mass illness and death to the country. Trump had a cow over that, and promptly Messonnier became a symbol of courage and sobriety as an apostle of The Science. Instead, as Lewis’s book shows, she was part of a sputtering, wheezing CDC bureaucracy that had been burying its head in the sand for weeks while medical providers and local public health officials tried to sound the alarm. One wag quoted in the book renames the CDC the Center for Disease Monitoring and Observation that couldn’t “control” a disease outbreak if it happened in the office next door.
The dysfunction goes far beyond Messonnier’s personal qualities or qualifications. The agency was politicized way back during the Reagan era when its head was made a presidential appointee rather than a protected, career civil servant (like Fauci, whom Trump could not axe). It had already lost ground due to the swine flu vaccine debacle of 1976, the last time the CDC responded energetically to a possible problem—that never materialized. On that occasion, CDC leaders saw a potential epidemic unfolding and acted on the precautionary principle. In other words, they did what a public health authority should do, and a sane polity would have appreciated the protective caution after grumbling and venting about the inconvenience and collateral harm. But because we have no capacity as a nation for social solidarity or sacrifice, the epidemic-that-wasn’t quickly became another club in the arsenal against all things governmental, and the stage was set for Reagan, the anti-government warrior par excellence, to then make sure that a real epidemic—AIDS—was ignored.
So much for the CDC, but the problem goes even deeper. What institution now commands enough general credibility in the nation that its leaders could call upon us to sacrifice or put up with discomforts and burdens in the spirit of shared social goals or, to cast it in archaic language, to “promote the general welfare”? New York’s subway and bus workers have a shockingly low vaccination rate, according to The City. When asked why they are reluctant, many of the employees—half of whom are minorities—said they didn’t trust their bosses at the MTA, reminding the reporter that no one did anything to get them protective equipment at the height of the epidemic when hundreds of their colleagues died. I think they’re being short-sighted, but they’re not irrational.
We’re #1
One of the most peculiar aspects of this sustained display of national incapacity is that, despite it, we retain our assumptions about the place our country occupies. We remain stuck in the triumphal post-WW2 moment and cannot recognize that things have fundamentally changed. Our political class insists, and we nod along out of habit, that the USA remains preeminent, the essential nation, the standard-setter, the rule-maker, the final authority. We still expect to explain to everyone how people should live and to be the model of what others should strive for and emulate.
We remain convinced that everyone wants to be us, failing that, to be like us. Despite our creeping recognition that not all is well here, we have been successfully brainwashed to believe that American “interests” extend to all corners of the globe where American influence or perhaps control should, as a matter of course, be accepted as right, fitting, and necessary. These postulates survive through another form of hypnotic insistence, and it has nothing to do with Trumpian hyperbole. (In fact, Trump was dismissive of many aspects of empire, especially anything that got in the way of his businesses.)
Our leaders regularly gulp their own Kool-Aid and seem not to notice its lack of nutritious components. Hardly anyone pays much attention to U.S. diplomatic activity unless it’s a media-led focus on some enemy du jour, like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, or China. We should. Trump’s foreign policy apparatus was a clown-show amateur hour, but Biden’s is not much of an improvement. Both teams operated under the assumption that the U.S. is in charge, lectures others what they’re doing wrong, and expects them to behave or face retaliation. A good recent example was Wendy Sherman, Biden’s No. 2 at State, embarrassing us in China by playing schoolmarm with the Chinese foreign minister; her boss Anthony Blinken bombed in Anchorage several months ago trying to do the same thing.
Sherman, who has no experience in Asia, has never lived there, speaks no Asian language, and doesn’t know diddly-squat about the continent, wormed her into an inappropriate meeting with the Chinese foreign minister (she’s not his equal in rank) and proceeded to trot out Beltway talking points as if her audience were pimply congressional interns in a summer program at the Atlantic Council. The Scrum‘s Patrick Lawrence summarized her bizarre performance: “We want to knee you in the groin on questions of this that, and the other, those things that are useful for our propaganda ops as we wage a new cold war against you, but we want to cooperate on climate change and other sorts of virtue-signaling matters.
Lawrence opined: “Berating the Chinese as just enumerated is not a China policy: it is an admission the Biden regime cannot figure out anything that would even resemble a China policy.” It was also, he adds, a telltale sign of weakness.
The Chinese had something to say in reply two days later:
“The United States always wants to exert pressure on other countries by virtue of its own strength, thinking that it is superior to others. If the United States has not learned to get along with other countries on an equal footing by now, then it is our responsibility, together with the international community, to give the U.S. a good tutorial in this regard.”
If we’re not taken aback by the idea of a Chinese “tutorial” coming along soon, we should be. The entire Washington establishment seems dangerously lost in its own propaganda bubble and has not recognized that 2021 is not 1945 nor 1990. Like Sherman, our diplomats as a matter of course insult their counterparts, convinced that America is the only game in town and that no one remembers how the U.S. (with Biden’s full backing) played first century Roman emperor by trying to conquer Iraq.
We are headed to a very rude awakening that could well happen, like bankruptcy, “little by little and then all at once.” The overconfident Americans continue to go off half-cocked into ill-considered diplomatic, political, and military adventures, and it’s only a matter of time until they get their asses handed to them. Meanwhile, nowhere are seen any adults in the room, any sober realists tugging at the emperor’s sleeve to suggest that perhaps the legions might not win this time. America is #1, has always been #1, and will remain #1.
American spokespeople insist that
democracy is stronger and more adaptable than authoritarian alternatives while
we proceed to provide evidence to the contrary. Depending on who is up and who
is down, policy zigzags unpredictably; the country appears run by competing
warlords (a scenario the Chinese know well). When the truth finally cannot be
ignored any longer, the traumatic shock will make our various Covid neuroses feel
like a mosquito bite. From all appearances, then and only then will we be
tempted to see each other as fellow citizens.
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4 comments:
Awesome post, thanks!
Indeed awesome.
Excellent.
Yes, well done, Tim. I was heartened to see you still hold out hope -- OK, thin hope -- for a return to social solidarity in this benighted land.
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