2020: Prying the divide

Greg Sargent wrote a piece in the Washington Post the other day about why Trump is failing his white constituents. Sargent references Will Wilkerson, a recovering libertarian, who explains how that ideology has saturated the right and how the Covid crisis exposes just how unworkable it is. It’s the inflexibility that’s disables our capacity to deal with a problem that requires collective action that is causing distress among Trump, his backers and his base and causes them to fall back into reality distortion, denial and lying.

Sargent summarizes the problem:

As Will Wilkinson explains, there’s a genuine ideology underlying Trump’s approach, one that embodies a quasi-religious faith in the zeal of individuals to maximize commercial activity at all costs, including the malicious undermining of cooperative action for the benefit of all. It’s a motivation that just isn’t shared by the broader public.

In other words, the vast majority of Americans did not grow up in a world where the federal government that they were told was #1 and the best mankind had ever known was incapable of mobilizing in the face of something that we should have had a handle on. More and more of us are coming out of the Rip van Reagan 40 year slumber to wonder how it is that we are paying more and more in taxes to a federal government that won’t give us a workable health care plan, affordable universities, a stable pension plan, deal with a changing climate, or can fight a deadly pandemic.

Instead, our federal government has abandoned us just like it abandoned Puerto Rico 3 years ago. We are now Puerto Rico, completely dependent on the competence, ingenuity and fortitude of our governors. Those of us who live in states where the governors have embraced science and have banded together to form coalitions to handle Covid and its effects on the economy are much better off than those who live in states where laissez faire is the guiding principle.

But that’s not what we were lead to believe or expect all our lives. We expected the federal government to be the collective action we paid for to serve the public good. We expected that because there are some things we do that benefit from an economy of scale and dedicated civil servants with knowledge, experience and organization to handle on our behalf. It’s been a truth universally acknowledged since the Egyptians collected taxes to maintain the irrigation of crops along the Nile that some things can’t be accomplished completely on our own. That we get more done if we assign some tasks to a separate body that does stuff on our behalf.

The “election” of Donald Trump in 2016 has imposed a libertarian style capitalism above all, shrink wrapping our ability to serve the public good with our tax dollars. And Covid has exposed how unworkable that is.

Complying with science means you need to acknowledge that rugged individualism stops 6 ft from you. It means everyone needs to wear a mask not just to protect oneself and others but because the economy that we all depend on can benefit from a reduced number of infections.

But if the rugged libertarian acknowledges that these steps are necessary, then the mind may be pried open just a crack to let in a lot of other ideas like the public option in healthcare, expanded social security benefits and climate change initiatives that take tax dollars away from fossil fuels and put that money towards revolutionary new sustainable energy sources. Behind the push for individuation are industries with lobbyists that benefit from a promoting in Americans a lack of interest in the public good.

This country is not ever going to become a beacon of socialism. I think Americans recognize that our previous successes rely on our ability to innovate and work without too many restraints. But we are beginning to know that the ability to innovate and try new things is being squeezed by the terrifying recognition that doing so requires more than hard work and a good idea. It means you have to be born relatively well off or well connected to go to the best schools and hook into the right old boys network, something that is becoming harder and harder for most of us to attain. It requires the reassurance that doing so won’t rob you blind for the rest of your life. It means that those of us who never recovered from the last finance disaster will cling to whatever life preservers we can find and won’t be venturing out into entrepreneurial deep waters.

That would seem to be at odds with the goals of libertarian style capitalism. We succeeded in the mid 20th century by instituting the New Deal and lessening the distress and despair from the unfettered risk taking without a net that lead to 10 years of the Great Depression. Covid has made us realize that we could very easily end up back there because we couldn’t get our shit together to take action for the public good in order to keep Main Street open. Not only could we not get it together but there were actors who stood in the way and actively prevented us from saving ourselves.

Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Ron DeSantis, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell and Grover Norquist, even George Conway, were some of those actors. May they all pay for it dearly this Election Day.