The Associated Press ran a story last night all too familiar to critics of bothsidesism, or “false balance.” The headline: “Pandemic fallout tracks nation’s political divide.”

Washington bureau chief Julie Pace wrote that while Donald Trump and Republican governors rush to “reopen” their states in the middle of a coronavirus outbreak that has killed (so far) 45,300 Americans, Democratic governors “are largely keeping strict stay-at-home orders and nonessential business closures in place, resisting small pockets of Trump-aligned protesters and public pressure from the president.”

I’m as tired as the next critic of the press corps’ anti-morality. It wouldn’t hurt a reporter’s credibility in any way to privilege the side of the sick and powerless over the side of the healthy and powerful. But there is some value to the AP’s bad habit of setting “regional and demographic divisions” side by side. It’s a chance to choose.

What’s the choice? First consider that states are forming coalitions to address the pandemic in very different ways. All six New England states have teamed up with New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey to battle the pandemic, shutting themselves down before reviving in an organized, careful and gradual manner. On the west coast, California has joined Washington and Oregon to follow suit. Meanwhile, according to Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, southern states are organizing themselves to be in line with the president’s desire to “reopen” the nation as quickly as possible despite risking a second wave of mass disease and death.

Consider also how Colin Woodard described these “regional and demographic divisions” in his book American Nations. In it, he said the original European settlements established modes of thinking about economics and society, and as a consequence established the political divisions still with us today in one form or another. Woodard’s characterization of each region lines up with the coalitions being formed by the states and their various and opposing approaches to the pandemic. From these characterizations, honest Americans can choose which mode is better.

Woodard’s “Deep South” and “Greater Appalachia” overlap with DeSantis’ southern coalition: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. “Greater Appalachia” was settled by white immigrants “from war-ravaged Ulster, northern England, lowland Scotland. Deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty; intense suspicion of external authority.” “Deep South” was “established by slave lords from English Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society. Modeled on slave states of the ancient world — democracy was the privilege of the few.”

Woodard’s “Yankeedom” fits neatly over the New England bloc. (“Yankeedom” spreads from the east coast through the upper Midwest all the way through Minnesota.) “Puritan legacy; perfect earthly society with social engineering, individual denial for common good; assimilate outsiders; vigorous government to thwart would-be tyrants.” Lastly, his “Left Coast” is the west bloc. “Left Coast” was settled by “New Englanders (by ship) and farmers, prospectors and fur traders from Appalachian Midwest (by wagon). Yankee utopianism meets individual self-expression and exploration.”

“Yankeedom” and “Left Coast” are very different regions, obviously, but what binds them together is the same thing binding together the northeast and west coalitions — a commitment to liberty by way of service to the common good. The common good is more than a slogan. It’s the deeply moral principle by which a political community presumes its many and varied participants share a common purpose, something so valuable that in times of crisis everyone can and will sacrifice for its benefit. In a time of the coronavirus, that common purpose is maintaining basic good health. In working together, as a political community, short-term sacrifice can lead to long-term liberty.

The same cannot be said of the “Deep South” and “Greater Appalachia” nor can it be said of the southern coalition currently falling in line for the president. The common good exists but it’s a limited resource. Like democracy, it’s only for the privileged few. Given the common good often requires a government to enforce it, it’s met with hostility by people committed to “personal sovereignty and individual liberty” even if blind devotion to those otherwise honorable principles is one step closer to death. In a time of the coronavirus, opposition to the common good is opposition to freedom.

Indeed, it’s suicide.

I said the AP’s bad habit of setting “regional and demographic divisions” side by side is an opportunity to choose, but I suspect most Americans have already chosen. (I don’t mean choosing between north and south, or that southern politics is monolithic; it isn’t.) If the most recent Pew survey is any indication, a majority of Americans understand, even if unconsciously, that one of these modes of thinking about economics and society is better than the other (at least during a pandemic).

In other words, most Americans are making moral decisions the anti-moral press is in the bad habit of avoiding altogether. Most Americans, I think, understand that what’s needed in a national emergency is more civic morality, not less. That means a renewed commitment to the common good, and that’s means sharing freedom, not hoarding it.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 April 2020

Word Count: 839

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If you’re like me, you came of age during the “Reagan Revolution,” and therefore have not seen a day go by without some “conservative” lecturing you on the true meaning of freedom.

Granted, freedom meant something different back then. At the time, there really was a Cold War, and there really was dread of global nuclear annihilation, and there really was fear that if good American liberal democracy did not triumph, then some kind of totalitarianism would.

I’m overstating a bit (tensions had eased quite a bit before a newly elected Reagan ramped them up again), but only to make point. There was heft behind the rhetoric. Even if you tired of them hectoring you about liberty — and believe me, Generation X is nothing if not tired — you believed at least they were sincere about it, even if you suspected them of being a little daffy.

Today, the “Evil Empire” is an ancient ruin. The US has not faced an existential menace since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet “conservatives” continue to rail against the threat of “government tyranny” as if air quality controls, gun safety laws, or Title IX lawsuits signal black helicopters coming to ferry them off to the gulag. Moreover, the president believes that peaceful cooperation with foreign nations equals ceding American independence. What used to be a serious high-stakes debate over the meaning of freedom has turned into something else.

Last week and this, so-called patriots held demonstrations in swing states necessary to Donald Trump’s reelection in order to protest state-based stay-at-home orders that have held the national death toll from the coronavirus pandemic to just over 43,000. (The original prediction was deaths numbering close to 300,000.) These state orders are literally saving individual’s lives by keeping them apart from each other and thus slowing the spread of the disease. The majority of Americans obeying them, as David Perry wrote, are practicing patriotic love. Yet pretend patriots behave as if governing in everyone’s interests is a violation of their “liberty.”

I don’t doubt they hope to succeed in forcing governors into lifting entirely their respective stay-at-home orders, and if they do, they will have succeeded in turning conservative history all the way around so that instead of resisting totalitarianism, they will have powered it. A nation that controls its population through gross negligence in the thick of a pandemic is the moral equivalent of a nation that controls its population with imminent threats of forced labor.

We understand what’s at stake in terms of politics and public health. The president is rushing headlong into “reopening” the economy in order to stave off an economic collapse, and therefore better position himself for November. GOP governors, like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, stand ready to accommodate. As the experts keep warning, however, the faster we “reopen,” the faster a second wave of the pandemic will crest, killing off more Americans than the first.

But we do not understand what’s a stake in terms of freedom, an ideal that “conservatives” have historically held in the highest regard. What is liberty in a context in which the president, first of all, refuses to govern in everyone’s name, and second of all, as a consequence, wedges millions between two impossible poles: their health or their wealth? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipelago, never saw the new coronavirus. But I’m sure the Soviet defector and conservative icon would recognize our feelings of paralysis and imprisonment.

Years from now, it might be clear what happened.

The president committed treason when he invited a foreign nation to sabotage the 2020 election, but his party refused to hold him accountable, clearing him of all charges. Liberated from all constitutional responsibility, as well as his oath of office, Trump failed to take the necessary steps toward preventing a pandemic from killing more Americans than all those who died on September 11, 2001, and the wars in Vietnam and Korean, combined. Trump’s and the people’s freedoms are inversely proportional. The more for him, the less for everyone else.

In a way, it makes sense. Trump built his real estate empire by perfecting corruption. As president, he is cheating the American people by stealing their liberty — their freedom of action, even their right to choose — then encouraging confederates into goading state governments into playing along in a scheme resulting in millions being forced to make an impossible choice.

The old conservative meaning of freedom appeared to stand in contrast to totalitarianism.

This new confederate meaning of freedom, however, does not.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 April 2020

Word Count: 754

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Inequality and the coronavirus

by Liz Theoharis

My mom contracted polio when she was 14. She survived and learned to walk again, but my life was deeply affected by that virus. Today, as our larger society attempts to self-distance and self-isolate, my family has texted about the polio quarantine my mom was put under: how my grandma fearfully checked my aunt’s temperature every night because she shared a bedroom with my mom; how they had to put a sign on the front door of the house that read “quarantine” so that no one would visit.

Growing up with a polio survivor, I learned lessons about epidemics, sickness, disability, and inequality that have forever shaped my world. From a young age, I saw that all of us should be valued for our intrinsic worth as human beings; that there is no line between the supposedly deserving and the undeserving; that we should be loved for who we are, not what we do or how much money we have. My mom modeled for me what’s possible when those most impacted by inequality and injustice dedicate their lives to protecting others from what hurts us all. She taught me that the dividing line between sickness and wellbeing loses its meaning in a society that doesn’t care for everyone.

Here’s the simple truth of twenty-first-century America: all of us live in a time and in an economic system that values our lives relative to our ability to produce profits for the rich or in the context of the wealth we possess. Our wellness is measured by our efficiency and — a particular lesson in the age of the coronavirus — our sickness, when considered at all, is seen as an indication of individual limitations or moral failures, rather than as a symptom of a sick society.

About 31 million people are today uninsured in America and 14 states have not even expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The healthcare system is seemingly structured in defiance of the people it should serve, functioning as yet another way to maximize profits at the expense of millions. In this coronavirus moment, many more Americans are finally awakening to the bitter consequences, the damage, wrought when even a single person does not have access to the resources he or she needs to live decently or, for that matter, survive. With the spread of a pandemic, the cost to a nation that often treats collective care as, at best, an afterthought should become apparent. After all, more than 9,000 medical workers, many not adequately protected from the disease, have already contracted it.

For decades, both political parties have pushed the narrative that illness, homelessness, poverty, and inequality are minor aberrations in an otherwise healthy society. Even now, as the possibility of a potentially historic depression looms, assurances that the mechanics of our economy are fundamentally strong (and Covid-19 an unexpected fluke) remain commonplace. And yet, while that economy’s productivity has indeed increased strikingly since the 1970s, the gains from it have gone to an increasingly small number of people (and corporations), while real wages have stagnated for the majority of workers. Don’t be fooled. This crisis didn’t start with the coronavirus: our collapsing oil and gas industry, for instance, points to an energy system that was already on the brink and a majority of economists agree that a manufacturing decline had actually begun in August 2019.

The cost of inequality It should no longer be possible to ignore the structural crisis of poverty and inequality that has been eating away at American society over these last decades. Historic unemployment numbers in recent weeks only reveal how expendable the majority of workers are in a crunch. This is happening at a moment when it’s ever clearer how many of the most “essential” tasks in our economy are done by the least well-paid workers. The ranks of the poor are widening at a startling clip, as many more of us are now experiencing what dire insecurity feels like in an economy built on non-unionized, low-wage work and part-time jobs.

In order to respond to such a crisis and the growing needs of millions, it’s important to first acknowledge the deeper history of injustice and pain that brought us all here. In the last years of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., put it well when he said that “the prescription for the cure rests with an accurate diagnosis of the disease.” To develop a cure not just for this virus but for a nation with the deepest kind of inequality at its core, what’s first needed (as with any disease) is an accurate diagnosis.

Today, more than 38 million people officially live below the federal poverty line and, in truth, that figure should have shocked the nation into action before the coronavirus even arrived here. No such luck and here’s the real story anyway: the official measure of poverty, developed in 1964, doesn’t even take into account household expenses like health care, child care, housing, and transportation, not to speak of other costs that have burgeoned in recent decades. The world has undergone profound economic transformations over the last 66 years and yet this out-of-date measure, based on three times a family’s food budget, continues to shape policymaking at every level of government as well as the contours of the American political and moral imagination.

Two years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair alongside Reverend William Barber II) and the Institute for Policy Studies released an audit of America. Its centerpiece was a far more realistic assessment of poverty and economic precariousness in this country. Using the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure as a baseline, which, among other things, measures family income after taxes and out-of-pocket expenses for food, clothing, housing, and utilities, there are at least 140 million people who are poor — or just a $400 emergency from that state. (Of that, there are now untold examples in this pandemic moment.)

As poverty has grown and spread, one of the great political weapons of politicians and the ruling elite over the past decades (only emphasized in the age of Trump) has been to minimize, dismiss, and racialize it. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” coded it into Republican national politics; in the 1980s, in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the fabricated image of “the welfare queen” gained symbolic prominence. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s welfare “reforms” enshrined such thinking in the arguments of both parties. Today, given the outright racism and xenophobia that has become the hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency, “poor” has become a curse word.

It is, of course, true that, among the 140 million poor people in the U.S., a disproportionate number are indeed people of color. The inheritance of slavery, Jim Crow, never-ending discrimination, and the mass incarceration of black men in particular, as well as a generational disinvestment in such populations, could have resulted in nothing less. And yet the reality of poverty stretches deep into every community in this country. According to that audit of America, the poor or low-income today consist of 24 million blacks, 38 million Latinos, eight million Asian-Americans, two million Native peoples, and 66 million whites.

Those staggering numbers, already a deadweight for the nation, are likely to prove a grotesque underestimate in the coronaviral world we now inhabit and yet none of this should be a surprise. Although we couldn’t have predicted the exact circumstances of this pandemic, social theorists remind us that conditions were ripe for just this kind of economic dislocation.

Over the past 50 years, for instance, rents have risen faster than income in every city. Before the coronavirus outbreak, there was not a single county in this country where a person making a minimum wage with a family could afford a two-bedroom apartment. No surprise then that, throughout this crisis, there has been a rise in rent strikes, housing takeovers, and calls for moratoriums on evictions. The quiet fact is that, in the last few decades, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, and homelessness have become ever more deeply and permanently structured into this society.

Covid-19 and the descent Into poverty Over the years, one political narrative has been trumpeted by both parties: that we don’t have enough to provide for every American. This scarcity argument has undergirded every federal budget in recent history and yet it falls flat when we look at the 53% of every federal discretionary dollar that goes to the Pentagon, the trillions of dollars that have been squandered in this country’s never-ending war on terror, not to speak of the unprecedented financial gains the wealthiest have made (even in the midst of the current crisis). Of course, this economic order becomes a genuine moral scandal the moment attention is focused on the three billionaires who possess more wealth than the bottom half of society.

Since the government began transferring wealth from the poor to the very rich under the guise of “trickle-down” (but actually gusher-up) economics, key public institutions, labor unions, and the electoral process have been under attack. The healthcare system has been further privatized, public housing has been demolished, public water and sanitation systems have been held hostage by emergency managers, and the social safety net has been eviscerated.

In these same years, core government functions have been turned over to the private sector and the free market. The result: levels of poverty and inequality in this country now outmatch the Gilded Age. All of this, in turn, laid the groundwork for the rapid spread of death and disease via the Covid-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on poor people and people of color.

When the coronavirus first became a national emergency, the Fed materialized $1.5 trillion dollars in loans to Wall Street, a form of corporate welfare that may never be paid back. In the following weeks, the Fed and a congressional bipartisan stimulus package funneled trillions more in bailouts to the largest corporations. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans were left out of that CARES Act: 48% of the workforce did not receive paid sick leave; 27 million uninsured people and 10% of the insured who couldn’t even afford a doctor’s visit have no guarantee of free or reasonably priced medical treatment; 11 million undocumented immigrants and their five million children will receive no emergency provisions; 2.3 million of the incarcerated have been left in the petri dish of prison; three million Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients saw no increase in their benefits; and homeless assistance funds were targeted at only about 500,000 people, although eight to 11 million are homeless or housing insecure. Such omissions are guaranteed to prove debilitating, even potentially lethal, for many. They also represent cracks in a dam ready to break in a nation without a guaranteed living wage or universal healthcare as debt mounts, wages stagnate, and the pressures of ecological devastation and climate change intensify.

Recently, news reports have made it far clearer just where (and whom) Covid-19 is hitting hardest. In New York City, now the global epicenter of the pandemic, for instance, the areas with the highest rates of positive tests overlap almost exactly with neighborhoods where the most “essential workers” live — and you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that most of them are poor or low-income ones, 79% of them black or Latino. The five zip codes with the most coronavirus cases have an average income of under $27,000; while, in the five zip codes with the least, the average income is $118,000.

Across the Black Belt of the southern states, the poor and black are dying from the coronavirus at an alarming rate. In many of those states, wages are tied to industries that rely on now interrupted regular household spending. They also have among the least resources and the most vehement anti-union and wage-suppression laws. That, in turn, leaves so many Americans all that more vulnerable to the Covid-19 crisis, the end of which is nowhere in sight. Chalk this up, among other things, to decades of divestment in public institutions and the entrenchment of extremist agendas in state legislatures. The Black Belt accounts for nine of the 14 states that have not expanded Medicaid and for 60% of all rural hospital closures.

Nor are these the only places now feeling the consequences of hospitals being bought up or closed for private profit. In Philadelphia, for instance, Hahnemann Hospital, which had served that city’s poorest patients for more than 170 years, was recently bought and closed by a real-estate speculator who then attempted to extract a million dollars a month from the local government to reopen it. Now, as the coronavirus ravages Philadelphia, Hahnemann’s beds sit empty, reminiscent of the notorious shuttering of New Orleans’ Charity Hospital in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In fact, lessons from the catastrophe of Katrina resonate heavily today, as the poor suffer and die while the rich and their political allies begin to circle the ruins, seeing opportunities to further enhance their power. After Katrina, many poor and black residents of New Orleans who had to evacuate were unable to return, while the city became a laboratory for a new onslaught of neoliberal reforms from health care to housing. One state legislator was overheard telling lobbyists, “We finally cleaned out public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” It hardly takes a stretch of the imagination to envision similar braggadocio in the post-coronavirus era.

Inescapably bound together The dual crises of pandemic and inequality are revealing ever more clearly how the descent into poverty is helping to destroy American society from the inside out. In a remarkably brief span of time, these crises have also highlighted our collective interdependence.

One of my earliest memories is of helping my mom walk when I was younger than my youngest child is now. As we slid down the wintry streets of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, my small hand in hers, she suddenly fell and I went down alongside her. I had been unable to keep us from crashing to the ground.

And yet, even when I couldn’t do what needed to be done alone, I recognized, with the clarity that perhaps only a child can have, how much we as a family (and, by extension, as a people) were inescapably bound together — that when one of us falls, so many of us fall. And that’s why, whatever Donald Trump or Jared Kushner or the rest of that crew in Washington and across the country may think, we can no longer tolerate leaving anybody out.

Hasn’t the time finally come to reject the false narrative of scarcity? Isn’t it time to demand a transformative moral agenda that reaches from the bottom up?

If the wealthy were to pay a relatively modest amount more in taxes and we shrank our war economy to support the common good, then universal health care, living wages, and a guaranteed income, decent and affordable housing, strong programs for the poor, and even more might finally be within reach. This crisis is offering us a striking demonstration of how an economy oriented around the whims of the rich brings death and destruction in its wake.

A society organized around the needs of the poor, on the other hand, would improve life for all of us — and especially in this Covid-19 moment, exactly this might be possible.

Liz Theoharis is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. She teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. This article first appeared at TomDispatch.com

Copyright ©2020 Liz Theoharis — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 April 2020

Word Count: 2,558

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Democratic leaders don’t typically borrow from the playbook of GOP politics, but in light of last weekend’s “engineered protests,” I think they should make an exception.

The Washington Post reported Sunday far-right militias, led by three brothers, have used Facebook to organize “anti-quarantine protests” at state capitols around the country. Tens of thousands have joined their Facebook group, giving the impression that a “populist libertarianism” sentiment is emerging more than opinion surveys would suggest.

This activity is being amplified by the president, who appeared last week on Twitter to encourage armed resistance to state-based initiatives aimed at containing the novel coronavirus pandemic with orders to stay home. The “protests” were in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and others swing states Donald Trump needs to win reelection.

Meanwhile, the Pew Center, which is the gold standard for measuring public opinion, released a new survey in which 66 percent of Americans fear their state governments will lift restrictions “too quickly.” Sixty-five percent said “Trump’s initial response” to the COVID-19 pandemic was “too slow.” Moreover, 73 percent said the worst is yet to come. (Implicit is the widespread doubt of Washington’s ability to face the challenge.)

Someone here represents America’s majority view, and it’s not the people ginning up outrage on social media and make-believing revolution for the benefit of television cameras on the steps of state capitol buildings. Indeed, the majority view isn’t getting the attention it deserves, because the majority is doing what it believes must be done in times of severe crisis: working together, as a nation, to combat a collective peril.

The majority view, in other words, is silent. That’s why I think Democratic leaders should invoke Richard Nixon. In 1969, he coined the term “silent majority” to claim a mandate from “middle Americans” who did not demonstrate in huge numbers against his prosecution of the Vietnam War but instead supported his wartime policies.

To be sure, “silent majority” is what fascists have said for decades when they need to contravene a rapidly changing view on, say, an overseas war going south. “Silent majority” is what a literal minority invokes to smash a literal majority in the face. Even so, Nixon’s words should resonate right now when 41,000 Americans are dead from COVID-19. Nixon said, “If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society.” Individuals can’t be truly free. In the collective, however, can be found the meaning of freedom.

In this sense, the protesters have it backwards. They believe (or pretend to believe; more on that in a moment) that government coercion is the opposite of individual freedom. Stay-at-home orders infringe their liberty. If they want to risk getting sick — or dying — that’s their right. No government has the authority to tell them otherwise.

This thinking ignores the fact that one person’s right to liberty ends with another person’s right to security, and that all governments are charged with balancing all of those rights for everyone’s sake. (Whether a government is striking the right balance is usually reflected by the majority view.) For this reason, coercion is not the opposite of freedom during a pandemic. Coercion, at least for now, is in the service of freedom. Only when everyone is acting in everyone else’s interest can this crisis be overcome.

But let’s not give these people too much credit, shall we? As the Post reported, “protest” organizers were not acting in good faith. They were pretending to believe what they say they believe. Organizers knew unwitting participants (some of whom no doubt were acting in good faith) would get sick, or die, therefore spreading the disease. Death, even their own, is an acceptable consequence of meeting their political goals.

These “protest” organizers call themselves “patriots.” Fair enough. Equally fair, however, is calling them insurgents, or even domestic terrorists, willing to commit suicide by way of infecting themselves and others to destabilize public trust as well as the political union of these United States. They say they stand for liberty. They really stand for disloyalty, disunion and death. Americans invoking patriotism but disobeying stay-at-home orders do so with the moral justification of a suicide bomber.

If “protesters” risked harm to themselves only, it might be appropriate to characterize them as a kind of “death cult.” (It might be funny, in a grim way, to joke about “culling the herd.”) But these people do not only put themselves as risk. The World Health Organization warned today the pandemic has yet to peak. “Protesters,” therefore, threaten us all. As Nixon said: “If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society.”

You are the real “silent majority.”

Don’t forget it.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 April 2020

Word Count: 800

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In the weeks since the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic, it’s become clear that the outbreak of disease can paralyse national economies but not the flight of desperate people across the Mediterranean to apparent safety. How else to explain the fact that migrants are still travelling from Libya towards Europe? In the last week or so, more than 500 migrants left Libya for Europe, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). On April 12, the Italian government had, perforce, to quarantine a ship-load of migrants at sea.

The good thing is it didn’t try to send them back. The way things are going right now, “no state wants to rescue” migrants, according to the German non-profit Sea Watch. Libya, Italy and Malta have all shut their borders citing the pandemic. Last week, Libya refused entry to about 280 returning migrants. IOM initially said Libyan ports appeared to have closed altogether. But later, the UN Refugee Agency’s special envoy for the central Mediterranean Vincent Cochetel clarified that “Libya’s Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration does not seem able or prepared to take more detainees.” Under the terms of a deal between Italy and Libya’s UN-backed government, signed in 2017 and renewed last November, the Libyan coastguard is meant to stop migrant boats heading for Europe and return their passengers to Libya. But the pandemic seems to have thrown all of that into doubt.

So what rights, if any, do refugees have during a once-in-a-century pandemic? The first point to note is that refugees and asylum-seekers are recognised under international law. Although unprecedented times require unprecedented measures, it’s reasonable to say that migrants of all sorts should at least be entitled to just and humane treatment. In this context, there is no more shining example than Portugal. Earlier this month, Portugal granted full citizenship rights, through June 30, to all refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants with pending applications for residency certificates. This will allow them to access healthcare, a government spokesperson explained. The decision stands as one of the more heartwarming instances of pragmatic humanism in the age of the coronavirus.

Elsewhere, not so much. The exceptional circumstances of a pandemic have justifiably prompted border closures and travel restrictions, but it’s all too clear that several countries are simply using the coronavirus outbreak to push the same restrictionist policies they pursued before. It was on March 1, before a single coronavirus case was recorded in Hungary, that it suspended the right to claim asylum in the country, claiming there was a connection between the disease and illegal migration.

Landlocked Hungary has the luxury of self-isolation afforded by its geography, but not island nations like Malta. On April 13, Malta’s foreign minister and home minister jointly wrote to the European Union’s (EU) High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell to demand “imminent and substantial” humanitarian assistance for Libya to deal with “the rapidly deteriorating migration situation in the Mediterranean during this testing hour.”

Malta’s argument was stark. Unless the EU launches a humanitarian mission for Libya with at least 100 million euros “today and not tomorrow,” there may be little or no “incentive” for migrants to stay put in Libya rather than making for European soil. Accordingly, the Maltese ministers wrote, the EU should “boost the empowerment of the Libyan Coast Guard in enhancing the control of its borders, as well as concretely ensuring that Libya represents a safe port for the disembarkation of migrants.”

The issue will be discussed at an emergency EU meeting. But a second tangential point may be harder to confront. With the pandemic triggering the worst economic downturn since the 1930s’ Great Depression, poor countries face the prospect of debt crises and political turmoil. This, in turn, could prompt massive outflows of migrants towards the rich world, especially Europe. As Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, recently noted: “Trouble travels. It doesn’t stay in one place.”

The implications are dire for conflict-scarred countries like Libya. In the Maltese letter to EU High Representative Borrell, the ministers described Libya as “a complex landscape plagued with difficulties across conflict, health, humanitarian and migration dimensions, all of which are snowballing at this very moment.” The COVID-19 crisis, they added, is “leaving its mark in Libya and is weakening an already fragile health system.” More than 650,000 people wait to “leave Libyan shores for Europe,” they warned.

In the circumstances, an EU humanitarian package might serve as a band aid but not much more.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a regular columnist for The Arab Weekly. She blogs at www.rashmee.com and is on Twitter @rashmeerl

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 April 2020

Word Count: 748

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WASHINGTON — COVID-19 has triggered fears of food shortages across the Arab region. Distributors and experts now warn that the pandemic is creating significant disruptions in global food networks and inflation in food prices, to which Levant countries are more vulnerable than other Arab states.

A slowdown in shipping, movement restrictions and border closures are impeding the production and transport of food products at the global level. Thousands of containers are now left stranded across ports and airports, as ships and aeroplanes remain grounded because of strict lockdowns and confinement measures imposed by international governments. Fewer ships and fewer flights make food exports more expensive and complicated, warns Hani Bohsali, president of the Syndicate of Importers of Foodstuffs, Consumer Products and Drinks, which represents around 50 importers in Lebanon.

The pandemic has limited the number of ground employees working in transit areas. Fewer containers mean that shipments now need to be consolidated before they are sent to their destination, explains a freight forwarder speaking on condition of anonymity. Clearance procedures are also taking more time, with fewer employees working and greater delays in obtaining shipping papers, necessary for processing merchandise.

“Confinement measures are leading to labour shortage in the food industry,” says Michel Maalouf, a fast moving consumer good (FMCG) consultant based in Saudi Arabia. Restrictions on movement and borders closure could also have repercussions on crop harvests as fruits and vegetables are now left to rot.

With countries worrying more about food security, governments are increasingly adopting protectionist measures, which could have grave repercussions on food supply levels. “Romania has banned grain exports, while Russia has limited wheat exports and Serbia, sunflower oil,” underlines Maalouf.

Such disruptions are already translating in higher food prices. In a recent article, Reuters reported surges in wheat futures, adding that the benchmark Thai white rice prices had already hit their highest level in eight years.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) warned in a report released late in March that a protracted pandemic crisis could quickly put a strain on food supply chains, involving farmers, agricultural inputs, processing plants, shipping, retailers and more.

Making the disruption of the food supply chain worse is the lack of visibility food traders are facing in terms of the infection timeline, points out Maalouf. “No one can predict when the pandemic will end,” underlines the FMCG expert.

“Food is a matter of national security and countries are now making sure they have sufficient reserves. India has enough rice for the next 18 months, while China’s reserves can cover its needs for two to four years,” says Maalouf.

Countries in the Arab world are unequally prepared to face food shortages. The United Arab Emirates has approved a law organising strategic stocks of food commodities in emergencies. It has enough reserves for three months but can also count on the massive stockpiles of the Jebel Ali port. Saudi Arabia has banned sales promotions on food staples including rice and vegetable oil indefinitely. The Kingdom has nonetheless achieved high levels of sufficiency in many agricultural products, with 60% self-sufficiency in poultry, 60% in vegetables, 109% in milk and dairy products and 55% in seafood products.

Levant countries are nonetheless more vulnerable to disruptions, as they are plagued by collapsing economies, conflict and corruption. For Maalouf, Jordan is possibly vulnerable in the mid-future, as it is highly reliant on imported food items. Lebanon is in far worse shape, as a financial collapse and dollar shortages complicate food imports there. Alia Abbas, general director at the Lebanese Ministry of Economy and Trade, underlines that the country has three to four months of basic staples and that the government is negotiating grain purchases from other countries. Iraq conversely has a margin of manoeuvre as it disposes of large agricultural land. Trading economics estimated that food products represented less than 8% of the country’s total imports in 2014. Syria’s divided political geography could also hinder the movement of grains from east to west.  Oppression, competition and discrimination among the Syrian population could undermine access to food.

Day by day, the coronavirus appears to aggravate food insecurity in the Levant region, already challenged by failing economies and conflict.

Mona Alami is a French-Lebanese analyst and a fellow at the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East of the Atlantic Council. She lives in Beirut.

Copyright ©2020 The Arab Weekly — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 April 2020

Word Count: 696

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My partner and I have been fighting about politics since we met in 1965. I was 13. She was 18 and my summer camp counselor. (It was another 14 years before we became a couple.) We spent that first summer arguing about the Vietnam War. I was convinced that the U.S. never should have gotten involved there. Though she agreed, she was more concerned that the growth of an antiwar movement would distract people from what she considered far more crucial to this country: the Civil Rights movement. As it happened, we were both right.

She took off that fall for college at the University of California, Berkeley, where, as she says, she majored in history with a minor in rioting. I went back to junior high school. And we’ve been arguing about politics ever since.

So maybe it’s no surprise that, since the coronavirus pandemic exploded, we’ve been fighting about the president. Not about his character (vile and infantile, we both agree) or his job performance (beyond dismal), but about whether anyone with a conscience should watch his never-ending television performances. Since 2016, she’s done her best not to expose herself to either his voice or his image, and she’s complained regularly about the mainstream media’s willingness to broadcast his self-evident lies, to cover any misconceived or idiotic thing he might decide to say at rally after rally as if it were actual news. More recently, she’s said the media should send their interns to cover his Covid-19 “news” conferences. (Of course, MSNBC and CNN now no longer always broadcast those events, whose ratings the president so treasures, in full. In fact, by April 13th, CNN appeared to have let their chyron writer off the leash to run legends below that day’s news conference like “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session” and “Breaking news: Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes.”)

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been watching each live broadcast of the Trump Follies, otherwise known as the White House daily coronavirus task force briefings. Readers who, like me, remember the Vietnam War may also recall the infamous “Five O’Clock Follies,” the U.S. military’s mendacious daily briefings from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, during that endless conflict. There, its spokesmen regularly offered evidence, including grimly inflated “body counts” of enemy dead, that allowed them to claim they were winning a losing war. The question today, of course, is whether the present pandemic version of those follies offers at least a small glimmer of hope that the president may now be mired in his own Covid-19 version of Vietnam.

After I’ve spent a couple of irretrievable hours of my life gaping at the muddled mind of Donald Trump, I always feel a sickening sensation, as if I’d kept eating Oreo cookies long after they stopped tasting good. But it doesn’t matter. The next day, I just turn it on again. I wonder if it’s people like me who are responsible for that TV ratings bump of his?

It took my partner a while to catch on to what I’ve been doing. The reason: like an alcoholic whose bottles are stuffed away in secret corners, I’ve been hiding this perverse habit by sneaking down to the basement and watching while working on my loom. Or I would catch my Trump fix while she was out on the streets of San Francisco taking photographs for her 10-year project to both walk and record every voting precinct in the city.

But one evening, returning a little early, she walked in on me before I had time to slam the laptop cover down. “Nobody should be watching those press conferences!” she said emphatically, when she twigged to what I’d been up to. “How can you sit there and listen to lies? Why are you exposing yourself to that crap? Anything you actually need to know you can read in newspaper summaries the next day.”

What’s the appeal? And I have to admit that those were fair questions. Why am I exposing myself to such a pure, unmediated stream of falsehoods, ignorance, and preening self-congratulation day after day? Why, though I loathe his lies as much as she does, do I keep listening to them in real time? As he typically said at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 6th, “Anybody that wants a [coronavirus] test can get a test”; “The tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right?… This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good.” (No one knows what “letter” he was referring to, though he probably meant the summary transcript of his phone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.)

Why don’t I switch the press conferences off when he begins to praise and congratulate himself as he always does? (“I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”; “Every one of these [CDC] doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.”)

Why am I fascinated by the way just about everyone on the podium fawns all over him, starting with Vice President Mike Pence, the titular head of “the president’s” Coronavirus Task Force (unless, this week, it’s Jared Kushner)? Why do I keep listening to Pence intoning, “The president has directed that…” or referring to “President Trump’s 15-day coronavirus guidelines,” as if Trump himself had written them and designed the oversized postcard outlining them, which arrived in people’s mail at the end of March? Why am I mesmerized as assorted business “leaders” like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell trip over themselves outdoing each another in praising the president? Lindell, in fact, used his minute and a half of fame to tell the world that God had essentially elected Donald Trump in 2016. (I guess that explains it! I knew I hadn’t voted for him.)

I think what provides me (and so many others) with that nightly hit of dopamine is the sheer brazenness of the president’s lies on show for all to see. Not for him the mealy-mouthed half-truth, the small evasion. No, his are, like the rest of his persona, grandiose in a way that should be beyond belief, but remains stubbornly real.

Here he is, for instance, in mid-March, speaking of Americans flying back from Europe: “If an American is coming back or anybody is coming back, we’re testing. We have a tremendous testing setup where people coming in have to be tested… We’re not putting them on planes if it shows positive, but if they do come here, we’re quarantining.” Anyone who saw the photos of weary travelers crammed together in U.S. airports then knows that none of this was faintly accurate. But no matter.

Then there’s Trump’s use of those television performances and the audiences they garner as the ultimate measure of presidential achievement. By now, who isn’t familiar with his delight in the ratings the coronavirus press briefings have attracted? As he tweeted on March 29th:

 “Because the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc. are so high, ‘Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers’ according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. ‘Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him,’ said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!”

So it’s no surprise that he also uses media ratings as the metric by which he judges the performance of everyone working to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. For him, governing is nothing but a performance. At his March 29th briefing, for example, he gave himself credit for the media attention being paid to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and someone he called “the General” (whose name he seemed to have forgotten). After observing that the Washington Post, like my partner, thinks Americans should shun his pressers, he pointed out that he’d inaugurated other people’s TV careers:

 “We’re getting the word out. We’re getting the accurate word out. And a lot of people are happy about it, and a lot of people aren’t. But they should be happy. When I have the General, when I have Seema [Verma, head of Medicare and Medicaid Services], and when I have Tony [Fauci], and when I have our — our incred- — these are, like, people that have become big stars, okay?”

Then there’s the astonishing ignorance he’s so happy to put on display regularly, as at the April 10th task force briefing. Asked whether “reopening” the country would depend on having enough Covid-19 tests available to make it possible to do surveillance and contact tracing, he replied that such tests would be unnecessary in “vast areas of the country” because they don’t (yet) have outbreaks. Given that no state by then lacked coronavirus cases, it was yet one more display of his inability to grasp the basics of the potential for exponential growth in a highly contagious disease.

Finally, there’s the eternal assumption in just about everything he says that no one could possibly know more about any subject than he instantly grasps. In a terrifying exchange on April 10th, a reporter asked what metrics he would use in deciding when and how to reopen the country, a decision he had just falsely claimed he has “absolute authority” to enforce.

“The metrics right here,” he replied, pointing to his temple and, presumably, the brain behind it. “That’s my metrics. That’s all I can do. I can listen to 35 people. At the end, I got to make a decision.” He went on to explain that he had just figured out how big a decision it was. “And I didn’t think of it until yesterday. I said, ‘You know, this is a big decision.’” Who could possibly have known how big a decision it was until that very moment when the president claimed to have grasped that reality?

Strange attractors In the end, maybe what truly draws me to those news conferences and keeps me hooked is the cognitive dissonance of it all. I’ve never been a fan of reality TV, partly because I don’t like watching people be mean to one another, but mainly because what happens on such shows is anything but “real.” Mean (or “nasty”) as he may be, Trump’s press conferences are real. And isn’t that the contradiction, the eerie fascination, of it all — that the unbelievable is actually true? Donald Trump is, in fact, the president of the United States, even if watching each of those televised events is like encountering a creature from another dimension, a being who simply doesn’t conform to earthly reality. And that, in a terrifying way, is fascinating. I can’t look away.

The field of mathematics called chaos theory, which deals with extremely complex, dynamic systems like the movements of liquids or gasses, has a concept called “strange attractors.” An attractor is a point that a graph of the system keeps cycling around and returning to over time. (Not being a mathematician, that’s the best I can do.) Strange attractors are fractal, meaning that each part of one of them will display the same pattern no matter how much you magnify it, no matter how deep you go — in other words, very much like the mind of Trump.

Some strange attractors are part of chaotic systems that don’t repeat at any regular interval and will vary greatly over time. The weather is like that; a small difference in temperature or pressure at a given moment can affect whether a local change becomes a hurricane. But if a chaotic system has strange attractors, then, over many years, the same initial conditions will most often settle into one of two results, the equivalents of a clear day or a bad storm. You can’t say what will happen in any given year, but you can say what is most likely to happen over 100 years. As Wikipedia puts it, “Thus a dynamic system with a chaotic [strange] attractor is locally unstable yet globally stable.”

Should — the gods and statistics forbid — Trump win reelection this November, we’ll have a real-life example of a system that is locally unstable, but globally horribly stable for the next four years. In his case, of course, we’re talking about how a “very stable genius” will be able to spin the chaos he creates into an ever more authoritarian regime.

Oh, and as that Wikipedia article adds, “Strange attractors may also be found in the presence of noise…” Let me apologize instantly for perverting some poor mathematician’s meaning, but how can I not point out that our presidential Strange Attractor is indeed surrounded by the constant noise of the media, fake and otherwise, cycling around and feeding off the one constant point that is Trump in the chaos of his universe.

So who’s right, my girlfriend or me? Just as was true years ago, I suspect we’re both right. No one should engage with that chaotic noise and the strange attractor at its center. All of us should deprive Donald Trump of attention of every sort, which is the oxygen that sustains him. And yet, someone has to watch, because strange as it is, our lives depend on it.

Rebecca Gordon writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). She teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Copyright ©2020 Rebecca Gordon — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 April 2020

Word Count: 2,197

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I hope it’s clear by now that Donald Trump won the last election by riding a wave of grievance and rage on the part of the petty bourgeoisie, not the white working class. The real white working class, the one that does not enjoy the power and privilege of press representation, shares with the lower-middle class a lack of a college education. Other than a few other cultural similarities, however, that’s pretty much all they share.

Unlike the real white working class, the petty bourgeoisie resents earning as much or more than college educated types while also feeling inferior, dispossessed and weak. The real white working class, meanwhile, earns less and usually votes Democratic, because Democratic policies really do serve their political and economic interests.

Sam Francis understood well the resentments of the petty bourgeoisie. The white supremacist advisor to Pat Buchanan’s campaigns is an Ur-source of Trumpism.

He insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity.” These were sacred principles for members of a new “post-bourgeois proletariat” drawn from the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Lacking the skills prized by technocrats, but not far enough down the social ladder to win the attention of reformers, these white voters considered themselves victims of a coalition between the top and bottom against the middle.

Francis didn’t live to see Trump’s victory. (He died in 2005; Pat Buchanan’s campaign was a model for Trump’s 2016 campaign.) And from what I can tell from Timothy Shenk’s now-classic piece (quoted above), Francis was just terrible. But it’s worth asking if he was right. Francis said the petty bourgeoisie needed a champion, a man to fight against “the managerial elite” (think: “globalists,” bankers, Jews, etc.) as well as hordes of minorities and immigrants trying to take away what is rightfully theirs. Four years into this presidency, did Donald Trump make Sam Francis’ dream come true?

On the contrary.

The petty bourgeoisie seeks refuge in the Republican Party from their feelings of inferiority, dispossession and weakness compared to college educated Americans more adept at living, working and thriving in the 21st century. But “seek” is not find. Instead, they find the illusion of refuge, a fabricated solace bent on exploiting votes for the sake of enriching the very same “managerial elites” they despise. This would be abundantly clear to the petty bourgeoisie if it weren’t for their white supremacy.

Nowhere is that betrayal so evident, I think, than in the president’s push to “reopen” the economy before the worst is over in a pandemic that has killed, as of this writing, nearly 38,000 Americans in five weeks. The president and his media confederates are trying to convince the petty bourgeoisie that harm to the economy, as a result of a pandemic that has vaporized 16 million jobs, is worse than harm to human beings. They are trying to convince them that a few million deaths is a small price to pay for avoiding an economic depression that will surely tank Donald Trump’s presidency.

In a very real sense, the president and the Republicans are like the managers of Carnival’s Grand Princess, and the petty bourgeoisie are the ocean liner’s captive passengers. According to Businessweek, company executives knew the ship was lousy with coronavirus. They knew Carnival would face wrongful death lawsuits. Yet they decided to let passengers party on as usual. About 1,500 have gotten COVID-19 since early March, and dozens have died. Dead people seem to be a cost of doing business.

The president needs Americans to go back to work in order to jumpstart a depressed economy threatening his reelection. Governors privileging human lives over business output won’t play along, of course, but governors privileging Republican power will. Just as Carnival executives kept the party going knowing that passengers would die, some governors will return to normal life in the hope that doing so will gin up the economy in time for Election Day, after which workers can die at their convenience. It won’t matter by then. Dead people seem to be the cost of doing presidential politics.

Will the petty bourgeoisie recognize the president’s betrayal?

On the contrary.

The president spent the past two weeks talking up the need to “reopen” America, even declaring the total authority to overrule state governors in pursuit of that goal. Then last night, the White House issued the plan. It was anti-climactic. After weeks of table-pounding on Trump’s part, the plan ceded almost all authority to governors. It was a textbook example of this president being all bark, no bite, and categorically weak.

The petty bourgeoisie will love it. They are weak. Trump is weak. But they will never admit either. It’s their bond. The refuge they seek in the president and the Republican Party might be illusory, but it is part of their identity. This president doesn’t just (appear to) represent their interests. He represents who they are. The hair, the makeup and the gilded Greek columns are fake, but fake doesn’t matter. It’s worth dying for.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 April 2020

Word Count: 855

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Let’s not give these people too much benefit of the doubt, shall we? Thousands of demonstrators rallied at Michigan’s Capitol in Lansing Wednesday to protest Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order. “Conservatives, including state lawmakers, argued it went too far and was inconsistent,” according to the Washington Post.

The evidence?

 

“Confused shoppers found they could buy liquor and lottery tickets … but couldn’t visit the vegetable seed aisle … The order required large stores to shut down plant nurseries and rope off sections where carpet, flooring and paint were sold, provisions that conservatives found both arbitrary and harmful to business owners.

Michigan’s order does appear to be rather strict. But most people most of the time are willing to temporarily tolerate bureaucratic oddities — like not being able to purchase paint — in the name of public health and the greater good. Some people, however, will not recognize their civic duties. They will exploit oddities to grind yet another ax.

More significantly, some people will never recognize good faith in their political enemies even when good faith can be measured in bodies. Michigan has the third-highest death toll in the US right now from a viral pandemic that has killed more than 28,500 Americans in just over a month. Whitmer isn’t ordering people to stay home to violate lives and liberty. She’s ordering them to stay home to protect lives and liberty.

I’m guessing most Michiganders get it. The death toll itself is proof they can trust their governor to act in their best interest. Some minds, however, are hardwired to distrust the evidence of their eyes. For some people, it’s just not possible to trust anything — or anyone — that’s not on their side. They can’t, because, to them, there is no such thing as truth independent of self-interest. They can’t believe anyone would act in the interest of the common good, so when someone does, it’s cause for deep suspicion.

I agree with Charlie Sykes, who said this morning that protest, even mindless protest, is embedded in our nation’s psyche. “The Michigan protest had a sort of Zombie Tea Party vibe, a grassroots-like movement complete with a full-throated Don’t Tread On Me ethos,” he said. “And that ethos has deep roots, not just in conservative politics, but also in the national character, so don’t be too quick to simply dismiss it.” We shouldn’t dismiss it, but we also shouldn’t give it too much benefit of the doubt.

The paranoid mind tends to express itself with a kind of chronic intellectual dishonesty. If demonstrators were truly protesting overreach or unfair rules, they wouldn’t also be flying Confederate flags and chanting “Lock her up!”

If they were honest about protesting Whitmer — because they don’t like her, which is totally fair — they wouldn’t bother rationalizing their grievance with absurd anecdotes about confused shopping. The paranoid mind is socially aware enough to know it can’t attack the enemy for no good reason. So it invents one, regardless of whether it has bearing in real reality.

The flip-side of intellectual dishonesty is anti-intellectualism, which was the beating heart of yesterday’s protest. Whitmer and her public-health managerial elite can’t possibly know what they say they know about the coronavirus for reasons that don’t matter because those reasons have no bearing in real reality. What matters, to the paranoid, is that Whitmer is a Democrat acting in service of the common good, something they are hardwired to misunderstand as dispossession and tyranny.

Those reasons don’t matter to the paranoid, so they shouldn’t matter to everyone else. Unfortunately, intellectuals like Sykes end up making them matter when they use fancy phrases like “populist libertarianism,” as if the paranoid worldview were not a closed circuit of rage and resentment hostile to the very idea of republican governance.

Worse is when public intellectuals weaponize the paranoid complaint against fellow intellectuals with the singular goal of one-upping rivals instead of being wrong or right. Anti-intellectualism usually means anti-expert. But there are plenty of otherwise respectable intellectuals who care less about morality than they do about winning.

There is a simple way to test whether Gretchen Whitmer is trustworthy — if protesters get sick after getting out of their cars, shaking hands, hugging and (for God’s sake!) handing out candy to kids. If none of them dies, she’s wrong. It’s one dies, she’s right. The ultimate truth — death — won’t change the paranoid’s mind, though. There is no such thing as truth independent of self-interest. We shouldn’t dismiss paranoids.

But we shouldn’t give them too much benefit of the doubt, either.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 April 2020

Word Count: 755

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In retrospect, it’s no surprise that, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, dystopian fiction enjoyed a spike in popularity. However, novels like George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which soared on Amazon, would prove more horror stories than roadmaps. Like so many ominous sounds from a dark basement, they provided good scares but didn’t foreshadow the actual Trumpian future.

Of course, it didn’t take an Orwell or an Atwood to extrapolate from the statements of candidate Trump to the policies of President Trump — and such projections bore little resemblance to the worlds of Big Brother or an all-powerful patriarchy. Many Americans quickly began bracing themselves for something quite different: less totalitarian than total chaos. There would likely be unmitigated corruption, new wars, and massive tax cuts for the wealthy, along with an unprecedented reduction in government services and the further concentration of power in the executive branch. And it was a given that there would be boastfully incoherent presidential addresses, as well as mockery from officials in countries that had only recently been our closest allies. A Trumpian dystopia would be a Frankenstein monster constructed of the worst parts of previous administrations with plenty of ugly invective and narcissistic preening thrown in for bad measure.

And yet, there was still a lingering hope that those unsettling noises from the basement were just the equivalent of a broken furnace — annoying and expensive to fix, yes, but nothing like a living, breathing monster. Trump, after all, was going to be a singularly incompetent leader, or so his multiple bankruptcies and failed ventures suggested. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to do that much damage tweeting from the White House or phoning in from the links. And even if his minions in Congress did manage to push through some disturbing legislation, the guardrails of democracy would continue to contain his administration, and dystopias would, for the most part, remain the stuff of scary novels, not everyday life.

For many Americans, a Trump presidency did indeed usher in harder times. The earnings of farmers, dependent on exporting their crops, plummeted during the trade war with China. Nearly 700,000 people were poised to lose access to food stamps. Hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees from Haiti, El Salvador, and other countries faced the loss of their temporary protected status.

Still, many of those farmers received government subsidies to offset their losses and the courts blocked the administration from following through on some of its cruelest immigration policies, at least postponing the worst nightmares. Meanwhile, the 2018 midterm elections signaled a possible post-Trumpian future, as the Democrats, led by a crew of new women candidates, won control of the House of Representatives. Admittedly, the ultimate failure of the impeachment effort was a setback, but it was still just a matter of holding on for less than a year until election 2020 and then quite possibly waving the Trump era farewell.

That has now all changed.

Thanks to the coronavirus, dystopia is here, right now — but with a twist. As science fiction writer William Gibson once so aptly put it, “The future has arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In April 2020, the same applies to our new world.

Pandemic Dystopia arrived not with a bang, but a cough. The culprit wasn’t a looming monster or a totalitarian state, but a microscopic speck that’s technically not even alive. And that basement, by the way, turned out to be far-off Wuhan, the Chinese city where the novel coronavirus first appeared. With Hubei province overwhelmed by sickness and death, China responded by using the powers of a centralized state to shut down everything — from travel to restaurants, public gatherings to dissent — in a draconian fashion.

The Trump administration chose to ignore those warnings.

Meanwhile, given the level of international travel in a globalized economy, other countries soon became hotspots. South Korea used technology — widespread testing, contact tracing, and apps to monitor quarantining — to contain the problem. Iran’s initial poor response, even as members of its leadership took sick and in some cases died, was compounded by punitive Trump administration sanctions. The hospitals in northern Italy were overwhelmed by Covid-19 and the government suddenly shut down the country in a belated attempt to stave off disaster.

Still, Washington dawdled. Trump and his crew squandered 70 full days during which they could have implemented valuable lessons being painfully learned elsewhere in the world.

Now, Covid-19 has decisively put the lie to American exceptionalism. Not only can it happen here, but it’s happening here, far worse than anywhere else. The United States is adding upwards of 30,000 new infections daily, twice the rate of China on February 12th, that country’s worst day, and nearly five times what Italy faced at its peak on March 20th.

Meanwhile, adding depression to disease, the U.S. economy has crashed. Claims for unemployment benefits have risen by an astounding 17 million in just three weeks, pushing the jobless rate close to 10% (and still rising fast). Yes, the whole global economy is taking a hit, but other countries have moved in more sensible directions. China’s blunt-force quarantine has now enabled it to restart its economy, South Korea’s pinpoint approach has so far avoided a full-scale economic lockdown, and Denmark has paid its companies directly to maintain their payrolls and retain workers during the downturn of self-isolation.

In other words, in true dystopian fashion, Washington has managed to fumble both its response to the pandemic and its potential economic recovery plan. Presidential incompetence, incomprehension, and intransigence have been key to these glaring failures. The myriad defects that Donald Trump displayed from his first day in the White House, then largely grist for the monologues of late-night talk-show hosts, have now turned truly tragic. They include his stunning disregard for science, his undeniable compulsion to spread misinformation, his complete refusal to take responsibility for anything negative, his thoroughgoing contempt for government, and his abrupt vacillations in policy.

Most of all, the president exhibited extraordinary hubris. Out of a belief in his own infallibility, he thinks he knows better than the experts, any experts, no matter the topic.

As it happens, he doesn’t.

In ordinary times, such an epic fail might bring thousands, even hundreds of thousands, out into the streets to protest. Not in this pandemic moment, however. Most Americans, if they can, are now sheltering in place, watching a dystopian scenario unfold in real time on their screens and expressing gratitude to front-line workers who are suiting up to fight the microscopic monster every day.

When the world outside becomes too much to bear, we escape into stories. Right now, however, dystopian fiction about other times and places just doesn’t do the trick. Instead, desperate to understand how and why this fate has befallen us, we’ve been watching films about infectious disease. In early March, 2011’s Contagion became the number one streaming movie of the moment, while Outbreak recently cracked Netflix’s top 10 even though it came out 25 years ago. And when we’re not streaming, we’re reading novels about epidemics that, from Camus to Crichton, are back on bestseller lists.

Don’t be surprised if you’re feeling a nagging sense of déjà vu. Bingeing on stories about plagues during a plague? Doesn’t that ring a bell? Could it have been something you were assigned to read or see on stage back in school?

Know Thyself — Or Not In 430 BC, the second year of its war with Sparta, the legendary democracy of Athens in ancient Greece was struck by an unknown infectious disease. The Athenians first suspected that the Spartans had poisoned their reservoirs. As it turned out, though, their undemocratic adversary wasn’t to blame. According to the historian Thucydides, the plague came from faraway Ethiopia and entered the city by ship. Since Athens had built its empire with naval power, it was perhaps grimly fitting that its greatest strength would prove in that moment to be its signal weakness.

The plague spread quickly. “At the beginning, the doctors were quite incapable of treating the disease because of their ignorance of the right methods,” wrote Thucydides. “In fact mortality among the doctors was the highest of all, since they came more frequently in contact with the sick.” (Sound familiar?) The disease soon overwhelmed the city’s rudimentary health-care system and dead bodies lay about the streets, rotting and unburied. And yet, despite the plague, the Peloponnesian War continued. That forever war of the ancient world (sound familiar again?), already in its second round, wouldn’t end until 405 BC, a quarter-century later.

Over five years and three successive outbreaks, the plague would, however, ultimately claim more Athenian lives than the war. Nearly a quarter of that city-state’s population, an estimated 100,000 people, would die from the disease. Even its esteemed leader, Pericles, would lose two sons. Another victim: the vaunted Athenian political system. According to classical scholar Katherine Kelaidis, “The Great Plague of Athens wrote the first chapter in the end of Athenian democracy.”

During those plague years, Athens didn’t, however, completely lock down the city. It continued, for instance, to hold its annual drama festival at the Theater of Dionysus where, at some point, a new play by Sophocles had its debut. In itself, that was anything but unusual as he wrote more than 100 plays during his long lifetime. But this drama also proved painfully topical. Sophocles took the legendary story of Oedipus the king and added a wholly original element: he set its plot in motion with a plague.

Oedipus Rex takes place in Thebes while “a fiery demon” grips the city. Its king, Oedipus, desperate to understand why the gods have called such a plague down upon his realm, sends an emissary to the famed Delphic Oracle to find out. Its answer is unexpected: to rid Thebes of the plague, he must bring to justice the murderer of the previous king. As it happens, Oedipus himself killed that previous king. What’s worse, that king was also his father. In doing so, Oedipus had, however inadvertently, fulfilled the first part of a previous Delphic prophecy: that he would kill his father and marry his mother. In other words, he is the cause of the religious pollution that has brought plague down on Thebes.

All of this qualified Oedipus as the classic example of the tragic hero, a son of nobility who lacks self-knowledge, in this case an understanding of his true origins. Moreover, he demonstrates an extraordinary arrogance, believing that only he can rule wisely or save Thebes. Even when the oracle predicts a tragic outcome for him, he scoffs, believing that the will of the gods is no impediment to his actions.

The Greek word for this kind of arrogance is hubris and, in Greek drama, it’s associated with the pride that precedes the fall of a powerful man. The inevitable result of hubris is a visit from Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, often depicted with a sword and scales.

Focused as it was on the inevitable downfall of a tragic hero in a plague-stricken city, Oedipus Rex must have been deeply disturbing, if not terrifying, to watch in the Athens of that moment. Given the pandemic at hand, it’s remarkable that Athenians were still staging plays at all. But like Oedipus, its citizens undoubtedly wanted to better understand the cause of their affliction. This early example of horror fiction — with its plot twists involving murder, incest, and pandemic — surely helped some of them come to terms with their predicament and decide who or what to blame for it, just as, almost 2,500 years later, we watch films or read novels about plagues, among other things, to try to grasp ours.

In that first season of the plague, the citizens of Athens would indeed turn their fury against their leader, Pericles, and drive him from office. Later, after a brief return to power, he, too, would die of the disease.

Every society gets the tragic hero it deserves Now, another democracy is being overwhelmed by contagion. It, too, is involved in endless wars and led by a man whom millions of its citizens once believed to be the last-chance savior of the country.

Donald Trump didn’t kill his father or marry his mother, nor is he the cause of the coronavirus.

Still, in other respects, he hews to a distinctly modern, reality-TV version of the tragic hero. He, of course, became as rich as Croesus, even as he bathed in the adulation of his television viewers. Thanks to the Delphic Oracle of the Electoral College, he then rose to the most powerful political position in the world. Yet, through it all, he has exhibited virtually no self-knowledge. To this day, his understanding of his own faults remains near zero, while his amplification of his imagined strengths is off the Richter scale. Admittedly, Donald Trump lacks the gravitas of Oedipus and would never have been able to answer the riddle of the Sphinx, but this is twenty-first-century America, not ancient Greece, and every society gets the tragic hero it deserves.

As with Oedipus, the president’s extraordinary arrogance has put the country in peril. His denial of the scientific evidence for climate change prompted him to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, a monumental blunder that will plague later generations. His “deconstruction of the administrative state,” the unravelling of government institutions patiently constructed by his predecessors, significantly crippled his administration’s response to the coronavirus. His gargantuan pre-pandemic addition to the national debt through simultaneous tax cuts and military budget increases put the country at great economic risk. All of these policies were pushed through over the advice of wiser counsels, even within his administration.

Now, on a daily basis, the president appears before the American people and pretends to know much more than he does: about when to lift shelter-in-place restrictions (Easter because “it’s a beautiful day”), which experimental drugs to use (“I’m not a doctor, but I have common sense”), and how to meet the needs of states desperate for ventilators (“try getting it yourselves”). Serial failure has not tempered his hubris, not faintly. In adversity, he’s simply fallen back on a tactic he’s deployed his whole life in the face of adversity: double down. If hubris didn’t work, then uber-hubris is the cure.

Through it all, Donald Trump has somehow eluded the grasp of Nemesis. Poised with her scales of justice, the goddess watched over last year’s impeachment hearings. Yet courtesy of a phalanx of Republican senators, Trump was not brought to justice, despite his unconstitutional behavior.

Now, it seems, Nemesis has returned, this time brandishing her sword.

Trump’s incompetence in the face of Covid-19 has helped cause a soaring American death toll. The U.S. is being serially laid to waste, a reality for which he accepts no responsibility. Unlike Oedipus Rex, Trump Rex has not the slightest interest in confronting the truth of his sins or the horror of his actions. Don’t expect the president to put out his own eyes, as Oedipus does at the end of the play. No need, in fact. Trump has always been blind and, not surprisingly, his blind ambition combined with his blind greed has culminated in an administration in which the blind are indeed leading the blind.

Come November, it falls to the American people, if all goes well, to deliver the ultimate judgment of Nemesis.

The end of the world? Dystopian fiction is about how the world ends — not the extinction of the planet but the end of our familiar world. How we got from here to dystopia isn’t normally central to such novels. In fact, the end of that familiar world has usually taken place before you open the book and you may, at best, see it through brief flashbacks. The point is to plunge you directly into a future from hell like, for example, the post-apocalyptic landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Nightmares don’t work with long explanatory introductions.

In a similar fashion, we’re not experiencing the end of the world itself right now. We’re not (yet) in the midst of nuclear annihilation or, say, the extinction of the human species via some extreme version of climate change. The current coronavirus pandemic is an apocalypse, to be sure, but a passing one. As Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki wrote long ago about the everyday horrors of communism in A Minor Apocalypse, “Many generations have thought the world was dying, but it was only their world which was dying.”

Herein lies the sobering reassurance of such stories. They remind us that worlds, like people, die all the time, only to be replaced by new worlds. Cities fall and rise again, as do civilizations. Even dystopian places like Idi Amin’s Uganda or the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodian killing fields eventually burn out. The handmaid lives to tell her tale and Gilead, too, crumbles in the end.

Athens survived the plague, though its democracy was compromised by war and disease. America, too, will live on. But it will have lost some further measure of its greatness thanks in no small part to the man who, however cynically, wanted to make it great again.

John Feffer writes regularly for TomDispatch (where this article originated). He is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and book two of his Splinterlands series.

Copyright ©2020 John Feffer — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 April 2020

Word Count: 2,861

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