The Longer Arc of Covid History

The short story of the U.S. 21th century is the tale of four disasters.  The first was the response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001--the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ensuing era of permanent war and suffering in the greater Middle East.  The second was the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: that's Kanye West at left intoning his immortal line, "George Bush doesn't care about Black people."  The third was the 2008 financial crisis. The fourth is unfolding now--the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic depression likely to ensue.

The failed response to these disasters has a common element. It is the Republican party and its world view.

George W. Bush ignored intelligence warnings about the activities that led to the attacks, which caught the enormous US military completely off guard. Military solutions made the situation worse, and were overcompensations for the initial failure.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 became a human catastrophe, particularly for Black residents of New Orleans and southern Louisiana, through the Bush administration's then-astonishing failure to manage basic disaster relief.  FEMA was run by a political crony.  Much talk of reform ensued, but the structural problems persisted and then got worse under Trump, leading to the failures of 2020 that we are living through.

The 2008 financial crisis was created by Republican economic policies, which always center on tax cuts, government starvation, deregulation of business and banking, the continuous priming of equity markets with low interest rates and other tools, and asset securitization and other financialization processes that attracted capital out of production and non-financial services.

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic will be greatly worsened by another Republican administration's refusal to prepare for it.  A comparison to a competent public system like Germany's is profoundly painful. Why can't we do that here? The U.S. is now a formerly-1st world country, not a leader in any domain that requires cooperative skill in the use of large-scale structures.

Why have Republicans presided over all of these disasters - 4 out of 4? Bad luck? My selective reading? (true, I forgot Benghazi!)  Neither.  It's because their core belief is that "government isn't the solution to our problem, government is the problem." Government isn't something that creates and orchestrates common goods. Government is a piñata to hit with the political bat until the candy falls out for you.

To rehearse: Step 1 is to appoint political allies rather than competent professionals--allies you control.

Step 2 is to neutralize regulatory power or independent oversight. The knowledge-creating function of government agencies is silenced if not destroyed.  The same goes for unvarnished communication with the public.  (Attacks on a still-independent academia are part of this.)

Step 3 is to turn the government agency into an extraction pipeline that siphons public money into private pockets.  Mineral leases on federal and/or Native lands are one example; subsidies for fossil fuel but not renewable development are another.  The result of this structure in the pandemic is a war of all against all for masks, ventilators, and other basic equipment, like what you'd expect in a run-of-the-mill dictatorship.

Step 4 is Orwellian denial that the leadership has failed or manipuled reality-- as when the Department of Health and Human Services rewrote their webpage in the hours after "the president's ignorant son-in-law" falsely stated that the purpose of federal emergency stockpiles is not to help the states, to confirm his falsehood.

How did we get to this place--this place where the U.S. isn't operationally competent anymore? It's barely second rate in various measures of public health, disaster relief, housing, general education, and is worse than second-rate in other things like infrastructure. I can't imagine the U.S. increasing the number of intensive care beds by 50%  in 2 months, as Germany did. My hope a couple of weeks ago that UC medical centers would come to the rescue of California's infected people, offering lots of tests, tracing, beds in MASH-style hospitals, is sad to remember.

So there's the Republicans' phony non-state state in Ruthie Gilmore's term that hollows out government capacity to provide core human services--health, housing, and education--and to do this equitably, meaning without regard for ability to pay, as democracy theoretically demands.  But Republicans didn't take over the federal and most state governments at gunpoint--they were fairly elected (mostly). How'd they get there and stay there?

Some of it is dirty tricks and highly organized, intelligent strategy, plus excellent propaganda skills.  The roles of voter suppression and Fox News are well known.  But this doesn't change the fact that Republicans are there because white middle class voters keep them there.  Whites majorities still vote Republican even under Trump; he has lost many college whites but has kept non-college white middle class voters.  For decades, whites have voted overwhelmingly for conservative Republican policies on housing, health, education, taxes, voting, and civil rights.  Running through white flight, property tax revolts and opposition to busing, the paleomammalian cortex of the white middle-class decided to dismantle the common goods that created it rather than share them with people of color. 

This statement is pretty obvious to Black people: see, for example, this good explanation that historically-informed Black distrust of educated whites led them to support for Biden over Sanders in the South Carolina primary. There's also more awareness of this issue in the white middle-class than was the case ten or thirty years ago, but it hasn't changed anything--voting patterns haven't shifted enough to insure Trump's defeat in November.  It's this white expert discourse, even when officially anti-racist and enlightened.  Experts are as likely to tell people they have to go without things they want and need--like free college or public housing--than to form plans for social reconstruction.  Trump and Boris Johnson belong to parties that have openly sabotaged expert advice and expert institutions, so their failures to deliver affordable health care and higher ed are not mainly the experts' fault. And yet experts as a group, and their universities, neither offer big plans for nor systematically expose the anti-professional right as ruining the country.

In part because of professional class passivity, neither non-college whites nor people of color look to universities, professionals, or college degrees as reliable sources for progressive politics.  They aren't seen as institutions hellbent to build shared resources and infrastructure for all. This is one reason why even Dem support for college is more obligatory than passionate.  For example, one poll showed majorities of all groups, especially Latinx parents, saying that college is important for their children (p 15).  And yet they are far more likely, in California, to say public colleges are doing a "good" than an "excellent" job (p 10). "Good" and "not so good" together have close to 3/4ths of respondents.  I interpret this to mean that college isn't building a better world for people. It's mostly holding out the promise of a half-decent job.

The only solution is for experts and their white middle class base to map out the complete reversal of anti-government neoliberalism.  I say this although it is so entrenched, and the national opposition (Democrats) so compromised, that it is unlikely to happen without a political revolution.

Given its failure to reform its self-dealing neoliberalism, the white middle class will be one of this revolution's targets. The war on college-educated experts started long ago, and is now being waged enthusiastically by the Trumpian right.  The white middle class, since it turned on the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and fought busing and property taxes in the 1970s, has sided with the inflation of asset prices over equitable development, including living wages for the multi-racial working class on which it depends. It has voted for people whose explicit program has been to cut taxes on business and the wealthy, give public lands to extraction companies, suppress unions, wages, and worker influence in their workplace, purge reproductive rights, and massively increase economic inequality, but but what the hell--these Republicans won't raise property or income taxes, pass rent control, or integrate the schools, so we'll just ride asset inflation up the steep slope of inequality. 

And with Covid, the Republicans will allow tens of millions to lose their jobs instead of paying companies to keep them employed, because that policy, adopted even by Boris Johnson's Tories in Britain, wouldn't treat workers as disposable.  Facing the Great Depression 2.0, borne of the right's hollow state and hatred of mass security, the middle class can either side with the multiracial workers of the country it fake-helped through Clinton-Obamanomics while keeping its assets growing, and redeem expertise in the bargain.  Or it can chose its overpriced property economy, and be crushed by the sultanistic oligarchy the Trump Party yearns to deliver.

Dissociation in a Bad Decade

A few posts this week get close to the heart of the problem.  Fr. Frank's Sunday sermon provides the frame - "As we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade," we have to recognize the following:

The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far.

Fr. Frank replaces Time Man of the Year Ben Bernanke - "as big a schnook as every other magical thinker in Washington" with Tiger Woods, the age's typical con man who piles up tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth with a skill base prosthetically extended via an image fabricated by extremely expensive media machinery that is at complete odds with reality.

This blog's technical term for the state of mass suckerdom has been dumbness.  This is a word I also use for dissociation, the systematic though often unconscious concealment of intersubjective reality behind a screen image of the real.

The most effective means is obviously the mass media in general and its hyperdeveloped skill at producing idealized simulacra of reality - simulacra so perfectly cleansed of anomalies that they fit the definition of hysteria.  The source is often a trauma. Thinking of US history in general and of 9/11 in particular, I would say that dissociation is a response to a trauma that suppresses the subject's own role in having produced the trauma.

Everyday examples of dissociation can be found in Fr. Frank's descriptions of hero-worshipping of male sports stars and of faith in Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.  The other huge example that we're very much living with is the securities industry, in which values for securities that brokers made up were assigned through exchanges via mimetic thinking and mutually reinforcing professional networks.

Fr. F rightly starts the dismal decade with the Enron scandal rather than 9/11: 2001 was the year in which its "assets" came gradually to be seen as accounting fabrications.  He gets good play out of the accounting firm Accenture's use of Tiger Woods as its sole emblem of all things virile and triumphant, and then its attempt to scrub Tiger Woods from every piece of company material as though the relationship never existed.  Fr. Frank doesn't mention that "Accenture" was the name that emerged when accounting giant Arthur Andersen had to scrub itself out of existence as the disgraced accounting firm for Enron Inc.

There is an Orwellian aspect to these total reversals: we worship Tiger Woods; we look down on Tiger Woods.  Enron is America's most innovative company; Enron is America's most fraudulent company.  As an educator, I notice first and foremost the absence of learning.  We just go onto the next thing: from Enron's "special purpose entities" to Lehman's "structured investment vehicles," from day-trading in equities to zero-down real estate investing.  The pattern is reinforced by our leaders, who depend on it to maintain their own position.  A recent example was Obama's justification of the escalation in Afghanistan by trying to suffocate reflection with a thick blanket of primal innocence: "unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination."

In his amazing novel 2666, one of Roberto Bolano's main characters, a Spanish specialist in German literature and in particular the works of the elusive Archimboldi, returns to his hotel room in a Mexican border town, puts down

rugs on the bed he didn't sleep in, then . . . sat on his bed and for a fraction of a second the shadows retreated and he had a fleeting glimpse of reality.  He felt dizzy and he closed his eyes. Without knowing it he fell asleep.

Why are we still sleeping?

The effect of the Big Sleep appears in another great framing moment, Glenn Greenwald's continuation of his critique of the Obama administration on health care. He argues that Obama is systematically continuing Clinton's Third Way, which Greenwald defines as corporatism.

It's about more than just letting corporations do what they want.  It's about affirmatively harnessing government power in order to benefit and strengthen those corporate interests and even merging government and the private sector.  In the intelligence and surveillance realms, for instance, the line between government agencies and private corporations barely exists.  Military policy is carried out almost as much by private contractors as by our state's armed forces.  Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle between the public and private sectors so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded.  Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations.  At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable.

The health care bill is one of the most flagrant advancements of this corporatism yet, as it bizarrely forces millions of people to buy extremely inadequate products from the private health insurance industry -- regardless of whether they want it or, worse, whether they can afford it (even with some subsidies).

Greenwald is right about this "centrist" Democrat philosophy, and about its authoritarian overtones. It's also important to figure out where this corporatism comes from.  Part of it is the media simulacra, of course, providing all the comforts of Babyland for an infantile population.  The deeper harder part comes from systematic and self-protective dissociation from anything that conflicts with an airbrushed image of America that helps us all confront absolutely nothing the country or its leaders actually do - like "seeking world domination" around financial markets, military power, UN climate policy, and so on.

The area where the country's middle classes are being continuously damaged is finance itself.  The financial system created untold trillions of dollars of assets that its own participants determined in the summer and fall of 2008 to be worth little or nothing.  Collapse was averted because governments led by the US Treasury and the Fed stepped in to provide unconditional guarantees that these assets would be worth close to face value.  This was the importance of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's "giveaway" (also here, here and here) of 100 cents on the dollar to AIG's counterparties. Even if it wasn't a giveaway, it signaled Total Commitment to whatever fictions finance had been using to pile it high and deeper.  In other words, to avoid collapse, the feds supported dissociation.  This meant the rapid forgetting of what we had momentarily learned about the non-value of financial values through their real support with taxypayer-supplied direct payments, loans, and guarantees. The forgetting continues to this day, when it is hard to find any commentary on the problem assets that remain on everybody's books, because we are now dissociatively engaged in an economic recovery.

How do we make it stop? The old Left mechanism was the exposure of false consciousness through immiseration.  The lie of prosperity (for the large majority) would be exposed through the truth of suffering.

We have plenty of suffering in the dying states.  In the Left Business Observer, Doug Henwood writes,

According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, one in three U.S. households reports that a member lost a job over the past year. The effects: 90% report higher personal stress; 62%, anger; 58%, depression.  That translates into 83 million Americans experiencing stress; 58 million, anger; and 52 million, depression, as the result of recen job loss. Not quite four in ten of the job losers report having foudn a new job - and of those who do, half say it's for less pay.  For those unable to find a new job, the emotional effects are severe: 70% are depressed.

The obvious problem is that suffering that leads to depression doesn't lead to change.  Anger is more useful, but can easily be reversed into depression, particularly in a culture like that of the U.S. in which everyone is held personally responsible for failure and there are no structural problems really or exploitative ruling classes etc etc - except the ones you see when you are really angry, and then even your friends avoid you for being the loser you are.

The Left is not doing well right now in defining a new architecture for a egalitarian economy that develops the whole society. It also needs to do better at confronting the psychological blockage to imagining what that would be, starting with acknowledging our own role in getting us here.  I think the key to ending dissociation is ending the threat of being a loser by confronting the fact that in the current situation that is exactly what nearly all of us are.