I’m just tryin’ to protect my stacks
Mitt Romney don’t pay no tax
-Kanye West, “To The World”
If the current occupant of the White House wishes to see himself as a “wartime president,” the results help explain why libertarians and some liberals are so leery of the government’s attempts to phrase every major government endeavor as a “war.” Not just because “war is the health of the state”, but because as with the Energy Crisis, the War On (some) Drugs and the less-rhetorical War On Terror, the main results of our war on coronavirus seem to be spending gigantic amounts of money that mostly goes to people and companies that already have money and government influence while the population at large get crumbs at best, and our personal liberties and standard of living all continue to erode… for the sake of “freedom.”
It’s been mentioned by quite a few people that we can’t keep up coronavirus shutdown, or quarantine, or whatever you want to call it, forever. And so after two months of a haphazard, half-assed, containment regime that is more state-by-state than federal, more governors are starting to open their states, greatly aided by Russian Viceroy Donald Trump riling up his redcaps to “liberate” their states from the majority who wanted to keep things locked down. Of course, just because we call America a democracy doesn’t mean that the majority rules. This week the same Wisconsin Supreme Court that mandated a physical state election in the face of the coronavirus and poll shutdowns also decided that they would approve a Republican legislative challenge against Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ stay-at-home orders.
Not that other countries have been able to keep up a containment regime indefinitely, but they were doing a better job of it than we were, and even they are experiencing their own virus resurgence as they start to relax controls. But the mostly (not entirely) Republican leaders in state government, following their Leader, don’t even have that level of patience, and knowing we haven’t gotten anywhere close to beating this virus, have decided that America is going to declare victory and go home.
Except we already are home. If we had achieved victory, we could leave.
It might be that the Trump Organization thinks they can live with this because unlike some people, they could actually live with this. They have a regular coronavirus testing regime in the White House and for Vice President Pence, even as they have refused to standardize testing for the nation, since, as Trump put it, “by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad“. But Trump said that last Thursday, and this was a day after one of the presidential valets, a military man not identified, was confirmed as positive for coronavirus. Trump was reportedly “lava level mad” when he heard about this, and you know what? I would be TOO! The whole purpose of presidential security is so that the President and Vice President are protected from immediate danger. And yet less than 24 hours after this, Mike Pence’s aide, Katie Miller, tested positive for coronavirus just before his plane was about to take off, delaying his schedule by an hour. Miller is the wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller. It is not yet determined if Stephen Miller himself got the coronavirus, because that would require a second jump between species. In response to this, Trump said, “She’s a wonderful young woman, Katie, she tested very good for a long period of time, and then all of the sudden today she tested positive. She hasn’t come into contact with me. She’s spent some time with the vice president. This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.” So because a prophylatic measure isn’t necessarily perfect, better not to use it at all. I think Stormy Daniels said this was pretty much Trump’s approach to condoms.
But if this is the level of security that the elites can expect in their ivory house… how safe is anybody?
Memo to Donnie: Sanitary measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, in addition to washing hands and surfaces, wearing masks in public and practicing social distancing, also include not walking around with your thumb up your ass for over two months.
But here’s the thing, whatever sense of Schadenfreude I might feel at Trump’s suffering is counterbalanced by the fact that it wouldn’t do any good. I mean really, he’s already wheezy, coughy, discolored and suffering obvious circulation problems, so if he got coronavirus, who would know? If he got it – which at this rate might be inevitable – he would either continue in oblivious denial or do what he usually does and make his position the standard that all the other Republicans have to follow if they want to stay in the Real American Patriot He-Man Woman Haters Club.
“Oh yeah, I’ve got a doozy of a virus. Nobody’s sicker than me. You see that lung I just coughed out. Ooh, that’s a beautiful lung. That I can tell you.”
Again, if even governments that don’t have their thumbs up their asses can’t contain the virus under normal conditions, we need to get serious about treating it rather than declaring victory or wishing it away. Let’s look at another issue that’s got everybody’s undies in a wad. There’s supposed to be an impending meat shortage that has already affected prices in most markets – and thus the business chances of those restaurants that are re-opening. Why is that? “It’s actually not a supply problem. It’s really more of a production issue,’ said Katherine Jacobi, President of the Nevada Restaurant Association.” Last month, Smithfield Foods had to close a major meat-processing plant in South Dakota because nearly 300 employees tested positive for COVID-19. This isn’t because the industry is getting shut down. The governor of South Dakota is a Trump supporter. Viceroy Trump, no vegetarian he, actually bothered to use the Defense Production Act to mandate that meat plants stay open, when he was reluctant to do so to boost the manufacture of testing supplies. (Or as I like to say: ‘Priorities.’) The production issue isn’t that the industry was shut down. The meat industry is essential. It’s still running. There is no evidence that the virus can be spread through packaged meat. The problem is that as plants have continued to run at the same or higher pace, more people have been getting the virus and spreading it, and plants have been shut because it is no longer feasible for those people to work. This is exactly what you would expect to happen at the current rates of infection if we do nothing, which we basically are. And that means that what happens at meat processors will happen in other industries. So rather than “recover” the economy and then deal with the virus, we need to deal with the virus and then re-open the economy. If the virus wasn’t already undermining the economy, we wouldn’t have shut it down in the first place.
In the immortal word of Billie Eilish: “Duh.”
Which leads to another private industry that a lot of people think should be public. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, hospitals were closing across the country, especially in the rural areas where Trump has usually been strongest. And part of that is because hospitals are private businesses that operate on profit motive like everything else. Part of this is that the public system is state funded and a lot of states are not funding Medicaid services. By contrast, urban hospitals rely largely on “elective” procedures to cover their margins and most of their patients are covered by employer plans, whom they can charge more than Medicare/Medicaid services. But now those hospitals are swamped with COVID-19 cases. It doesn’t help that health coverage is also a for-profit business, which for practical reasons is tied to employment for most people, and the economic shutdown means tens of millions have lost their health insurance along with their jobs.
When liberals disparage the concept of libertarian government or public services, they usually say something like “let’s privatize the fire department.” And actually, we can see from the current clusterfuck that we would be better off with a stronger, more organized federal approach to medical care and redistribution of resources. The problem is that the real reason why we would be better off also reveals why a lot of libertarians would rather privatize the fire department. The point of having less national control over everything is not that things wouldn’t be more organized under a stronger government, it’s that that would only work depending on who’s doing the organizing. A privatized fire department would in theory be worse than a public one that is not built around profit incentives. But even if the public institution were acting on profit incentives, it would make a difference if the company is run by Bill Gates versus Donald Trump. And the fact is that Trump is not a president who just happens to be a businessman, he is a businessman who just happens to have the world’s largest government in his portfolio. Because that’s the way he runs it. And putting a public resource under such a businessman means that rather than socializing our resources, you’ve taken the worst-case scenario of privatization and applied it to the entire country.
The liberal conceit is that we not only can socialize resources, but must do so, and it’s a conceit because it assumes that everyone in government is going to be civic-minded. The premise of libertarianism and (former) conservatism is that we cannot and should not socialize everything because we CAN’T trust that everyone would be civic-minded, and since there is nothing inherently different between humans in the private and public sectors, any person who would be corrupt and vicious in the private sector would be corrupt and vicious in the public sector, only in their case they would have the government’s monopoly on force and authority.
For instance, this week the Supreme Court has been hearing a case between prosecutors in the state of New York and Mr. Trump (using the Justice Department basically as his defense team) in which the prosecutors are asking for the defendant’s financial records and the defendant saying he should be immune to subpoena simply because he’s the president. A legal question which Trump’s old buddy and predecessor has already decided.
If the business sector is corrupt and out of control, there’s a balance against that: the government. But what if the government is corrupt and out of control, and is in fact taken over by corrupt businessmen? Vote them out! But what if the majority vote against the (more) corrupt party doesn’t matter due to the Electoral College? “It’s a republic, not a democracy!” And if what’s left of our checks-and-balances try to hold the corrupt Administration accountable to existing laws and standards? “They’re thwarting the will of the people who elected Our President!!”
Not like it’s going to matter, because the screaming incompetence of government under Trump is going to lead to an even bigger government under Joe Biden, in the increasingly more likely event that he’s elected. A recent New York Magazine focus takes excerpts from Biden’s brainstorming while sitting in quarantine, such as “he said he would forgive federal student-loan debt – $10,000 per person, minimum – and add $200 a month to Social Security checks.” Author Gabriel Benedetti: “And while 2009 shows that spending unprecedented amounts of money alone doesn’t necessarily make a presidency transformational, the pandemic and the economic collapse it has produced have expanded Biden’s sense of not just how much relief will be required but what will be possible to accomplish as part of that recovery. … While it’s impossible to tell where the country is headed, Biden’s camp is in the disorienting position of scaling up its laundry list of proposals to match the ambition, and the political appetite, he thinks the American people – desperate for relief – will have in January.”
And any Republican wails against all this will be taken as just more bad faith from the same people who wail about Tara Reade after over four years of worshiping Monsieur Coup de la Pousse’. These same people will look at the new New Deal, or Great Society, or whatever it’s going to be called, and they will invoke “checks and balances” and the “rule of law”, and all the Democrats will have to do is play the tapes of Adam Schiff at the impeachment trial invoking “the rule of law” to Republican Senators while they sneered and played with fidget spinners.
Thanks to “conservatives” who would rather identify with Russian autocrats than American liberals, most non-Trumpniks see any calls for “freedom” and “states’ rights” as meaning only some people’s freedom to do what they want regardless of who gets hurt.
All the Trumpniks, even the former conservatives whom I know have good brains, have rationalized their worship of the gold-plated calf as a “lesser evil” because he’s supposed to be the only thing protecting American capitalism from a takeover by socialism. Yet as we’ve seen, the capitalist economy, which Trump can only take credit for insofar as he passively chose to not interfere with what he inherited from Obama, is now ruined because of Trump’s active policy of confusion and incompetence. And his ultimate legacy, in creating a need for government assistance, government healthcare, and organized government policy, is that Donald Trump will end up doing more to create socialism in America than any president since FDR.
And that’s if he loses in 2020.
If he wins re-election, of course Trump will do that much more to turn America into a socialist country. Of course, since Trump is a self-described nationalist, his Socialism would be more of the National type.