Irish Times-April 25, 2020-By Fintan O’Toole:
THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over
more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide
range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and
hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that
has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However
bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel
sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016.
Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of
protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The
country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history
seemed so pitiful.
Will
American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went
into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of
warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical
and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a
military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the
world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself
the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As
the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the
Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus –
like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government
whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It
is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite
another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully,
malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as,
in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch
a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his
party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The
grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of
them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save
lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed
to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in
the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow
confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which
all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on
live TV.
If
the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US
would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the
idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped
the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other
than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now
looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do?
How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in
Detroit or Dallas?
It
is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the
conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the
broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from
doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has
exposed it in the most savage ways.
What
used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he
has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics
has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of
wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even
safety.
Thus,
even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to
order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In
Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey
finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In
Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people
with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept
the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for
spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions,
DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia
governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on
April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by
people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This
is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There
is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of
political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled
by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these
politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony)
from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It
draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science,
paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will
protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset
of the American right.
Trump
embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US
response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction
that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On
the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power.
On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion
that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The
contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the
pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the
other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between
authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
But
this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that
Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long
prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has
structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There
are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they
like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a
very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is
literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons
trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to
the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul,
Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually
when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the
comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all
stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the
bottle even harder.
And
the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the
drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that
the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has
stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That
is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that
Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but
that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live
on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is
not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of
Americans, it is reality.
And
this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight
more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked
“American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real
carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As
things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more
death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a
new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the
toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have
become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
