newrepublic--2020-03-26--The Ethical Failures of Modern Architecture

Even if you haven ’ t heard of Bjarke Ingels , you ’ ve probably seen his work .
The Danish designer is perhaps the world ’ s most successful living architect .
He has designed parks , apartment buildings , four Google campuses , and a power plant hidden beneath an artificial ski slope .
He has also pioneered a ubiquitous brand of bland modernism that features sleek finishes and complex , blocky forms .
At only 45 , Ingels is far younger than most starchitects , and he wears his boyishness proudly .
He has assiduously cultivated the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ obsessed with Instagram , Scandinavian electronica , and , presumably , his hair , which juts out , like one of his spiky designs , from his forehead .
Over the years , Ingels has made much of his commitment to the environment ; in TED talks , he describes his philosophy as “ hedonistic sustainability ” ( according to Ingels , you don ’ t need to sacrifice comfort to live a sustainable lifestyle ) .
And in January , on a trip to Brazil , he met with President Jair Bolsonaro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sustainable tourism in the country .
When critics pointed out that Bolsonaro is responsible for letting agriculture companies slash and burn swaths of the Amazon rain forest , pushing the ecosystem to its brink and displacing hundreds of indigenous people in the progress , Ingels called their concerns “ an oversimplification , ” “ superficial clickbait , ” and sheer “ ignorance.
” Architects , he said , have to “ engage and embrace our differences if we want to dare to imagine a different future.
” Ingels is hardly the first architect @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Italian Giuseppe Terragni designed the Casa del Fascio for Mussolini .
Albert Speer laid out neoclassical buildings for the Third Reich .
Even respected modernists , such as the German Peter Behrens and the midcentury American architect Philip Johnson , tried to ingratiate themselves with the Nazis .
Through their work , they gave a distinct aesthetic and cultural legitimacy to these regimes , while lining their own pockets with what was essentially blood money .

Today, it’s far more difficult to decide what makes a project unethical. We can probably agree that it’s wrong to build prototypes for Donald Trump’s border wall. But what about new rail stations for the suppressive Saudi regime? Or one of the new stadiums Qatar has commissioned for the next World Cup? There, thousands of migrant workers are toiling in inhuman conditions to build designs such as Zaha Hadid’s; according to The Guardian, hundreds have died. There are even deeper shades of gray. No one will die constructing, say, a new headquarters for the fossil fuel industry or Big Tobacco. But plenty could die from the products made and marketed from within those buildings. Should the firms Pickard Chilton and Gensler, which designed and constructed ExxonMobil’s new headquarters in 2014, have turned that contract down? Or, to give a more contemporary example, what about the architect who chooses to work with tech companies such as Google or Facebook, whose products are used to actively undermine democracy and spy on ordinary citizens? Where do we draw the line between uncomfortable and unethical?
Architects have justified their work by saying they’re “just doing business” or “if I don’t take the project, someone worse will.” Such arguments suggest that they can somehow wipe their hands clean of the consequences of their designs, be they horrifying labor conditions or gentrification. And yet, at the same time, architects like Ingels often claim that design alone can solve what are essentially political problems. I have a favorite line in The Art of Inequality: “No building … creates inequality as such. Assuming so would be to grossly overestimate architecture’s power.” The inverse is also true: No building creates equality, as such, either. But if architects believe in making the world a better, more beautiful place, it’s time for them to join the resistance.


newrepublic--2020-03-25--Give Me Capitalism or Give Me Death

Give Me Capitalism or Give Me Death

Why is this something that America needs to be asking itself ?
If you adhere to Friedman ’ s reasoning , one of the answers is that many laid-off workers have been cut off from health insurance and until they return to work , they ’ ll likely skip the prohibitively expensive medical visits that could help the nation stem this virus .
But again , the same question appears : Why ?
Why is this the desired status quo ?
Why , in the face of a pandemic that has ruthlessly exposed the American safety net for the sham @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anyone want to get back to that kind of normalcy ?
As Friedman accidentally demonstrated in his sprawling ode to social and literal Darwinism , the crisis is Covid-19 , but the actual disease we ’ re confronting is capitalism .
On one of the many family phone calls I ’ ve been on in the past two weeks , I was asked a question I haven ’ t been able to shake yet : How are we supposed to feel significant in all of this ?
Like anything we say or do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ question that is unique to the situation the coronavirus has thrust the United States into , because none of this is new , really .
Disaster profiteering is an American tradition .
Consultants and warmongers lined their pockets in the wake of 9/11 while emergency workers were left with medical bills .
After the 2008 recession , it was the banks and the auto companies that were valued and saved by Congress , not the victimized working class .
Now it will be the cruise and airline companies—even though a plurality of Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ control over the companies they ’ re bailing out .
While wealth can ’ t totally insulate you from the virus , it ’ s clear that there ’ s a stunning gap between our political leadership and regular people when it comes to the “ normal ” we need to return to .
The Dow matters little to the majority of people , because 84 percent of the market is controlled by 10 percent of wealthy Americans .
But it has nonetheless come to symbolize the single metric by which the health @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what point in this current crisis will those at the top finally realize that Americans , and people more generally , are sick not just of this virus , but of the repeated sacrifice of our well-being for a system that views us as only numbers on a spreadsheet ?

On one of the many family phone calls I’ve been on in the past two weeks, I was asked a question I haven’t been able to shake yet: How are we supposed to feel significant in all of this? Like anything we say or do matters?
It’s not a question that is unique to the situation the coronavirus has thrust the United States into, because none of this is new, really. Disaster profiteering is an American tradition. Consultants and warmongers lined their pockets in the wake of 9/11 while emergency workers were left with medical bills. After the 2008 recession, it was the banks and the auto companies that were valued and saved by Congress, not the victimized working class. Now it will be the cruise and airline companies—even though a plurality of Americans believe the time has come to seize control over the companies they’re bailing out.
While wealth can’t totally insulate you from the virus, it’s clear that there’s a stunning gap between our political leadership and regular people when it comes to the “normal” we need to return to. The Dow matters little to the majority of people, because 84 percent of the market is controlled by 10 percent of wealthy Americans. But it has nonetheless come to symbolize the single metric by which the health of our country is judged. At what point in this current crisis will those at the top finally realize that Americans, and people more generally, are sick not just of this virus, but of the repeated sacrifice of our well-being for a system that views us as only numbers on a spreadsheet?


newrepublic--2020-03-25--The Cult of the Shining City Embraces the Plague

President Donald Trump answered questions Tuesday afternoon for a Fox News virtual town hall surrounded by a frame of graphics .
In the lower right-hand corner , a box documented the market ’ s delirious approval of Trump ’ s bizarre recent push to ease the state of emergency around the coronavirus pandemic to aid the economy .
Another on-screen graphic ticked away the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths .
Coincidentally , those numbers were rising as well .
“ I would love to have the country opened up and raring to go by Easter , ” Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Fox News , adding that he ’ d like to see “ packed churches all over the country ” in just 19 days .
Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer beamed and remarked , “ That would be a great American resurrection.
” Nearly two hundred miles away , another resurrection was underway in Lynchburg , Virginia , as Jerry Falwell Jr. ordered Liberty University ’ s reopening despite the advice of experts and Governor Ralph Northam ’ s having ordered nonessential businesses shuttered and public schools closed for the remainder of the year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ father Jerry Falwell ’ s evangelical empire and a loyal Trump ally—who recently suggested the coronavirus might be a biological weapon produced by North Korea or China—echoed the president ’ s baffling call to a return to normalcy , saying , “ Let ’ s get them back as soon as we can.
” It is easy to be confused by both of these developments and their seeming contradictions : Two very public figures treating the pandemic like it was under control as both the numbers and personal experiences show otherwise .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ favorite news channel actively working to turn the holiest of holidays into a secular , nationalist triumph .
The president of a religious university , named after one of the most famously espoused principles of America ’ s founding , continually playing politics .
But the truth is that these events , like so many others that seem irreconcilable based on our current understanding of politics , history , and American religion , fit into the same puzzle that was fused together from nationalism and capitalism decades earlier .

Remembrances of Reagan now paint him as a devout Christian because of his continued cooperation with the religious right, but the truth is that Reagan was less religious than he was spiritual, and he trafficked in New Age concepts like astrology and occultism. In the White House, Reagan and his wife, Nancy, consulted with their astrologist on virtually every matter, including meetings, the timing of announcements, and, according to Chief of Staff Donald Regan, “Every major move and decision … was cleared with a woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make sure the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.” Some critics even alleged that the Reagans violated federal law by relaying state secrets and national security details to their astrologer.
But Reagan’s embrace of the religious right made up for his dalliances with the occult. He was considered a truly Christian president for his open statements of support and for his relentlessly Christian vision of the country as “the Shining City on the Hill,” the trademark piece of rhetoric that has come to define his presidency and the modern mythology of the United States of America. That vision was, in part, laid out in Reagan’s first speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1974, when he addressed the faithful and said, “You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed by an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.”
This idea, and the concept of the Shining City on the Hill that has come to define America rhetorically, was inspired by a man Reagan referred to as an “avid student of history.” That man was Manley P. Hall, a noted and influential occultist who toured California for decades, giving lectures on “ancient symbols” and the “secret history” of human civilization. Hall’s book The Secret History of America was of particular influence on Reagan and told a story of the U.S. in which several centuries of secret societies and generations’ worth of philosophers had worked in concert to ready mankind for an empire of knowledge and liberty that would eventually become America. Among the many tales that Hall circulated as proof of the divine and powerful nature of America was a story that an angel had appeared at the signing of the Declaration of Independence as the founders waffled over affixing their signatures and inspired them with God’s word to birth America into the world.


newrepublic--2020-03-25--What Climate Grief Taught Me About the Coronavirus

As hard as it is , as painful as it is , we have to accept the reality of our crisis .
Denial , often a critical step in the grieving process , is not an option .
There will be no return to the “ normal.
” That was always an illusion anyway .
Now , in the face of a highly contagious virus , returning to our regular lives with work commutes and gym visits and large gatherings is a death sentence for many .
I believe that we have it in us to face the great unknown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this collective trauma .
But only if we allow ourselves to mourn our losses—be they temporary or permanent .
If you ’ re putting pressure on yourself to hold it together , that very well may be what breaks you apart .
If I ’ ve learned anything working on climate , it ’ s that broken hearts , much like broken bones , don ’ t mend until you tend them .
I ’ ve learned that broken people don ’ t fix things , they break them beyond repair .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t create a new world until you ’ ve mourned the old one .
I ’ ve learned that you have to heal your own wounds before you can heal anyone , or anything else .
No matter what comes next , we will need each other to face it .
That means that even though we have to hold each other at a distance right now , we have to hold each other nonetheless .
This loss of intimacy can not mean a loss of empathy .
That is our most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , we need to cultivate it as if our lives depend on it .
Because they do .
If the world falls apart , it will be up to us to hold each other together , to hold each other up .
Both the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis reveal that our world is inextricably interconnected , and it ’ s as strong or as fragile as those connections .
We have to strengthen those connections .
It is our only choice .
The sun is going to rise again .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you .
It may not feel like it , but whether we are miles apart or just six feet , we are all in this together .

Not to mention that there are real and deadly health risks related to staying indoors indefinitely. Think of the people who were barely holding on before this, who were already feeling isolated and alone and who depended on that one interaction at the gym or the coffee shop to get them through the day. Think of the people with mental health challenges and addictions who desperately needed their routines to keep them afloat. Human beings are, after all, social animals. Asking people to socially isolate themselves is effectively asking them to abandon not just their freedom, but their humanity. Even if it is for the best, even if it is necessary, the least we could do is adopt a more humane bedside manner.
The parallels between the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis have their limits. For one thing, while personal actions are important in the fight against climate change, they are not, by any means, the only option. Collective action will be much more effective in accomplishing the big, systemic change we truly need. But when it comes to the coronavirus, personal actions are all we have. For fear of spreading the disease, we quite literally cannot come together for collective action. Sure, we can and should call our representatives, but we must do that from the isolation of our own homes.
Perhaps the most difficult and dizzying discrepancy is time. It took me about four years to fully process my climate grief (as much as one can), whereas my coronavirus grief has had to adhere to a cruelly compressed timescale of just a few weeks. Also, my climate grief was so difficult to process because not everyone saw what I saw. I felt like I could see the near future, so close I could touch it—but to the people around me it remained invisible. They saw a world that was still safe, still stable. Try as I might, I couldn’t pull the scales from their eyes. That’s not the case with the coronavirus, at least not anymore. Everybody sees it.


newrepublic--2020-03-25--Right-Wing Ghouls With Graduate Degrees Take on the Pandemic

The power of a pithy phrase to sway the ignorant is not to be underestimated .
This is one of the less-urgent lessons of President Trump ’ s recent reversal on whether the coronavirus pandemic is really worth fighting if it means continued economic trouble , exemplified by the president ’ s Sunday night tweet : “ WE CAN NOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.
” A trenchant point , Sir : What if the cure was—get this—worse than the illness ?
Now our national conversation can be defined by the stupid parameters of this little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wants to contend , “ Yes !
I prefer the cure to be worse than the illness ; that is good , to me , ” do they ?
Well then , you must agree that allowing a pandemic to rage unchecked in service of Stocks Go Up Again is good and correct .
This little bit of verbal trickery masks a number of salient facts , such as that it is pretty wild to assert that millions of Americans dying of a painful disease , unable to see their loved ones one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fluid , would be a preferable alternative to anything .
It ignores that the downsides of the “ cure ” could be mitigated with massive government spending , to replace lost demand in the economy .
It forgets that it seems unlikely the economy would look so great if the health care system were totally overwhelmed with disease and death , as it would and likely will be if we reverse our late turn toward social distancing .
Finally , the contention that the cure is worse than the ailment does not contain @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rather , it is about the rich , some of whom made out suspiciously well before the rest of the country was caught up in the pandemic .
Many of Trump ’ s most craven allies have embraced the idea of consigning a few million Americans to death in order to rescue the economy .
As ever with Trump , it seems likely he picked the idea up from one of his brigade of psychopaths , amplified it , and thus ensured that every other goblin in Trumpworld would toe this line .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ hosts like Jesse Kelly tweeting little bits of meaningless faux-patriotic bravado : “ If given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression , I ’ d happily die.
” But beyond this grimy passel of hucksters and third-rate Hannity knockoffs , there has been a small number of conservative experts and thinkers—that is , people with graduate degrees—who have dutifully trotted out ersatz intellectual defenses of “ reopening America.
” The conservative Hoover Institution has been a locus for much of this work .
In a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Victor Davis Hanson lamented that “ those who advise caution out of fears of an economic meltdown will never be able to quantify the greater number of fatalities from a depression than from an infection , ” and that these poor folks are “ more likely to be damned as putting money over lives , even if they are more worried about lives than money in the event that a severe recession follows .
”

The web platform Medium has been the source of skeptical posts about the pandemic, including one shared by a number of Fox News figures that was taken down by whoever it is that makes the site’s belated editorial decisions. (The blog ZeroHedge reposted it in full, noting that the author, Aaron Ginn, is “a former 2012 Romney digital campaign staffer with no background in medicine or infectious disease.”) Another Hoover thought leader also used the site to make his own “cure is worse than the illness” argument. Timothy Kane, a fellow in Immigration Studies at Hoover, wrote a post on Medium that put the range of policy options from 0 to 10, from doing nothing at zero to an unspecified most severe option at 10, and argued that “zero mitigation is a dangerous policy, and my main argument is that 10 is probably worse. Economic Armageddon will kill more than 1 percent of the population, I promise you.” It’s sure hard to say that it won’t when you don’t say what the most severe option actually is.
Kane also noted that “even the most extreme measures will only slow it down, or flatten the curve,” which has been the heavily stressed argument of epidemiologists all along. The point of flattening the curve is not just to reduce the number of cases overall but to lessen strain on the health care system by reducing the number of simultaneous cases. More people will die, including of diseases other than the coronavirus, if the health care system is heavily overburdened at any one point. Again: Kane is an economist who studies immigration, not an epidemiologist.
This is one of the categorical problems of knowing who to trust in analyzing the pandemic: Economists aren’t epidemiologists, and epidemiologists are not economists. The people most qualified to talk about the virus’s spread and its death rates are not knowledgeable about the economy, and the people most qualified to analyze unemployment rates and fiscal stimulus have no training in analyzing disease vectors. What we know about economics as a profession should give you clues as to which category you would be better off listening to during this crisis. Unfortunately, epidemiologists just aren’t doing enough to reassure conservatives who want to believe that all this will blow over soon (and that the liberals who don’t want you to be able to go to damn Applebee’s with your wife’s large sons are not only wrong, but unpatriotic, for sacrificing liberty on the satanic altar of Not Dying).


newrepublic--2020-03-25--Toward an Economic Democracy

Toward an Economic Democracy

The most fundamental tragedy of the coronavirus crisis is human .
It is lives being lost .
Somewhere close behind is the feeling of desperation shared by working people .
In an economy where it is estimated that 50 percent of the labor force survives from paycheck to paycheck , we are facing an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions that exposes a fundamental flaw in our widely accepted idea of the relationship between working people and their places of work .
That fundamental flaw is a long-standing acceptance across the ideological spectrum of a division between wage earners and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of businesses are able to fall back on accumulated wealth and assets in a crisis , it has become abundantly clear that a majority of workers are prisoners of wage income .
As long as that divide persists , the threat of economic breakdown will loom both in the coming months and into the next crisis .
That divide is the heart of economic inequality .
Near-term measures that maintain or increase wage income should be implemented .
But it is time to think more deeply about the causes of inequality , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ serve as conditions for the provision of federal government assistance .
As Mark Cuban , owner of the NBA ’ s Dallas Mavericks , has wisely counseled , no governmental interventions now being considered should be entered into without consideration of how that intervention will address inequality .
A prominent test case—the airline industry—can help lead the way .
Any federal funds loaned to the airlines should be repaid in two steps .
The first dollar repaid should be directed to newly established Employee Stock Ownership Plans , or ESOPs , at each @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 500,000 airline workers , from luggage handlers and flight attendants to mechanics and pilots .
The second dollar repaid should return directly to the federal government .
Using that formula , over a short period of time , employees will accrue a substantial stake in these companies .
They or their selected professional representatives should serve prominently on company boards of directors to give voice to the employees that make the business work .

A second mechanism to use with the airlines and with any other private-sector company receiving governmental support can also speed up the process toward greater wealth participation by ordinary working people. Business taxes should be rethought. They should be paid in full if they perpetuate status quo arrangements that keep workers on the outside of ownership. A necessary reform would simplify existing rules by crediting a company’s tax payments dollar for dollar against its federal tax obligations. Payments that would ordinarily be directed to the federal government should instead be directed to purchase company stock that would be held by trusts for company employees. Over time, working people would become substantial owners of the companies they work for and enjoy a voice and a share in the wealth they have helped create.
The idea of restructuring our economy so that capital is a resource that works for labor and not just for itself is not a new one. Workers didn’t always work solely for wages. They used to work in small shops and on farms. In the middle of the nineteenth century, as industrialization was taking hold, some labor leaders warned that an employer-employee relationship where the first group owned and the second group was expected to survive on wages was a trap that would result in dependence and servility. They argued for employee ownership of the newly emerging industrial economy as an alternative where labor should work for both wages and capital ownership.
Strangely enough, so did a smattering of legendary industrialists, including Robert Brookings, Leland Stanford, and, early in the twentieth century, the chairman of the General Electric Corporation, Owen D. Young. On July 4, 1927, Young took the podium on the newly installed granite steps of the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School. He was the guest speaker for the opening of that grand building, and he had a surprise vision to share with the audience. He asked his audience to consider whether American capitalism, then barely a century old in its industrial form, had been launched on the right foot.


newrepublic--2020-03-25--The Rural Coronavirus Crisis to Come

The Rural Coronavirus Crisis to Come

The news that Berea College was closing sent a wave of confusion and fear through the campus .
“ Some of my friends were in their dorms , and they just heard people screaming when they found out , ” Lily , a freshman from Fayette County , West Virginia , told me the day after the announcement , which came the second week of March .
“ It ’ s a lot to take in very suddenly , especially because the day before we ’ re getting emails like , Wash your hands !
Everything will be fine !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Madison County , Kentucky , were anxious about how friends who didn ’ t have cars would get home , about returning to unsafe family lives , about graduation and coursework , about money .
A little over a week later , students at Eastern Kentucky University , just up the road from Berea in my hometown of Richmond , were told to be out of their dorms by April 1 .
Dr. Ginny Whitehouse , a media professor at EKU , told me she was impressed by how quickly the school had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ loaner laptops—but still worried about what students were going home to .
“ I don ’ t know what some students are going to do when it comes to internet service , ” she said .
“ I just don ’ t know.
” Since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis , images of urban spaces turned hauntingly empty have helped tell the story of the pandemic : the freeway in Los Angeles at rush hour without bumper-to-bumper traffic ; tourist attractions like Austin ’ s Sixth Street boarded up , a near-empty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But rural communities are also seeing a rising number of cases , and the threat they face is just as serious : One in five people over the age of 65—one of the most vulnerable populations at risk for serious complications from Covid-19—live in rural areas ; accessing medical care for rural patients facing a pandemic will remain logistically difficult , costly , and travel-intensive ; and altogether 53 percent of rural Americans lack access to high-speed broadband , making remote work and learning impossible in many households .
In less than a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fragility of daily life for millions of people in rural America .
Now they ’ re bracing for the crisis to come .
Berea College is a unique institution nationally : It ’ s a tuition-free college , with 70 percent of its student body coming from Appalachia or Kentucky .
More than 90 percent of students receive federal Pell Grants , and the mean family income of a first-year student is $ 30,000 .
Students work on campus in a variety of capacities—from janitorial work to serving food in the cafeteria—as part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ program ” to help offset other enrollment costs .
And while Berea has offered help to students navigating the stress and logistics of returning home—offering travel assistance to some students who need it ; continuing to pay work-study money to students despite their not being on campus—it still might not be enough .
Anywhere between 20 to 25 percent of Berea College ’ s student body doesn ’ t have reliable internet access at home , making keeping up with remote coursework decidedly more difficult .
“ Each one of the faculty members @ @ @ @ @ @ @ individual classes and students to see what they can do within the student ’ s capability , ” Tim Jordan , a member of the media team at the college , told me .
“ Berea is a residential campus ; we ’ re not licensed to do online courses .
That ’ s not something we ’ re really set up to do.
” But students say the rollout of remote work has felt disjointed .
“ One professor is making us turn our final paper in via email , and if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it out and send it through the mail .
That ’ s still not really accommodating if you don ’ t have Wi-Fi access ; it would be easier for me to drive to a McDonald ’ s or something to get free Wi-Fi than to find someone to print papers , which I ’ m sure is the case for many students , ” Kati Hurd , a junior from Rodgersville , Tennessee , told me through Twitter .
Keeping up with classes might be difficult , too , as other responsibilities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to get a job when I go home in order to support myself on top of all this .
The college is still paying us for labor even if we ’ re not on campus , which I appreciate , but it ’ s not enough to afford to go back home when my mother can hardly make ends meet just for herself , ” Hurd wrote .
Students may also be walking into radically different circumstances once they drop their bags inside the door of their family home .
In addition to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be home from school or daycare , making older siblings their de facto caretakers and teachers while parents are still at work .
Students might have to pick up extra work to help the family , like Hurd , or take care of an ailing older relative—maybe virus-related , maybe not .
And then there ’ s the students ’ own health .
Where they might have had easy access to counselors , doctors , and health care providers on campus , that ’ s often not the case at home .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a private [ counseling ] practice in an area that ’ s already pretty sparse , it takes a really brave soul to set that up and get it off the ground .
There ’ s not a lot of money in it , so it takes someone who ’ s really passionate about it , ” Dr. Michael McClellan , a professor of psychology at Eastern Kentucky University who specializes in rural mental health , told me .
“ The things that I ’ ve been hearing from these therapists [ around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to treatment [ during Covid-19 ] .
They ’ ve relied on a transportation service that had been set up to take people to medical appointments , and in one of the communities where I ’ m working with a therapist , that ’ s shut down now even for medical appointments .
”

Berea College is a unique institution nationally: It’s a tuition-free college, with 70 percent of its student body coming from Appalachia or Kentucky. More than 90 percent of students receive federal Pell Grants, and the mean family income of a first-year student is $30,000. Students work on campus in a variety of capacities—from janitorial work to serving food in the cafeteria—as part of the school’s “labor program” to help offset other enrollment costs.
And while Berea has offered help to students navigating the stress and logistics of returning home—offering travel assistance to some students who need it; continuing to pay work-study money to students despite their not being on campus—it still might not be enough. Anywhere between 20 to 25 percent of Berea College’s student body doesn’t have reliable internet access at home, making keeping up with remote coursework decidedly more difficult.
“Each one of the faculty members has been asked to work with their individual classes and students to see what they can do within the student’s capability,” Tim Jordan, a member of the media team at the college, told me. “Berea is a residential campus; we’re not licensed to do online courses. That’s not something we’re really set up to do.”
But students say the rollout of remote work has felt disjointed. “One professor is making us turn our final paper in via email, and if we can’t, then print it out and send it through the mail. That’s still not really accommodating if you don’t have Wi-Fi access; it would be easier for me to drive to a McDonald’s or something to get free Wi-Fi than to find someone to print papers, which I’m sure is the case for many students,” Kati Hurd, a junior from Rodgersville, Tennessee, told me through Twitter.
Keeping up with classes might be difficult, too, as other responsibilities arise. “I’ll have to get a job when I go home in order to support myself on top of all this. The college is still paying us for labor even if we’re not on campus, which I appreciate, but it’s not enough to afford to go back home when my mother can hardly make ends meet just for herself,” Hurd wrote.
Students may also be walking into radically different circumstances once they drop their bags inside the door of their family home. In addition to basic connectivity issues, younger children might be home from school or daycare, making older siblings their de facto caretakers and teachers while parents are still at work. Students might have to pick up extra work to help the family, like Hurd, or take care of an ailing older relative—maybe virus-related, maybe not. And then there’s the students’ own health. Where they might have had easy access to counselors, doctors, and health care providers on campus, that’s often not the case at home.
“If you think about trying to support a private [counseling] practice in an area that’s already pretty sparse, it takes a really brave soul to set that up and get it off the ground. There’s not a lot of money in it, so it takes someone who’s really passionate about it,” Dr. Michael McClellan, a professor of psychology at Eastern Kentucky University who specializes in rural mental health, told me. “The things that I’ve been hearing from these therapists [around Kentucky] are mostly about getting people to treatment [during Covid-19]. They’ve relied on a transportation service that had been set up to take people to medical appointments, and in one of the communities where I’m working with a therapist, that’s shut down now even for medical appointments.”
Since being home, Hurd has found that her transition to online classes has gone more smoothly than expected. Still, the long-term uncertainty that’s come with the current public health crisis looms large. She managed to get a job delivering pizzas but is worried about her mom losing her own restaurant gig as more places close down. Her friends at home are largely in the same boat. “I know a few are working at Kroger and Walmart,” Hurd wrote. “In general, I’m just worried about how I’m going to make ends meet.”


newrepublic--2020-03-25--Trumpworld Embraces the Death Wish Economy

The coronavirus pandemic is a nightmare , and the worst is still to come .
It is also a moment of clarity about our world .
In recent days , President Donald Trump and his allies began laying the groundwork to abandon public health measures to slow the virus ’ s spread .
They have concluded that the loss of human life is acceptable and the decline in corporate earnings is not .
“ The whole concept of death is terrible , ” Trump told reporters on Monday when discussing mortality rates .
“ But there ’ s a tremendous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 5 percent.
” Some welcomed the prospect of sacrificing lives , even their own , for the economy ’ s sake .
One of them was Dan Patrick , the lieutenant governor of Texas and a 69-year-old grandfather .
“ No one reached out to me and said , ‘ As a senior citizen , are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren ?
’ And if that ’ s the exchange , I ’ m @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Fox News interview on Monday night .
“ And that doesn ’ t make me noble or brave or anything like that.
” If Patrick wants to sign an advance medical directive to turn down a ventilator if he gets Covid-19 , that ’ s his decision .
But his policy stance risks killing countless people who did not choose to die a horrible , lonely death .
Public health experts have repeatedly warned that the virus could overwhelm hospitals , exhaust medical resources and personnel , and cause hundreds of thousands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ States alone .
This is not a hypothetical scenario : Look no further than Italy , where hundreds of people die each day in a modern health care system stretched beyond the breaking point .
New York may be days away from a similar crisis .
Condemning scores of American elders to a painful death should be unthinkable for any reason .
( It ’ s also worth noting that while the virus disproportionately kills older patients , it does not spare younger ones . )
Trumpworld ’ s desire to sacrifice them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ however , is particularly macabre .
It ’ s also built on a false understanding of how this country operates .
“ The economy , ” as a concept , is not measured in corporate earnings or stock indices .
It very specifically refers to people—people who will suffer and die if Trump ’ s nihilistic vision of crisis management prevails .

The real economy—the one that most Americans live in—is people.
The economy is far more than just Boeing’s balance sheets, though. The real economy—the one that most Americans live in—is people. It’s the Seattle engineers who build their airplanes, the pilots and flight attendants who operate them, and the commercial travelers who buy tickets to get somewhere with them. If public health measures are eased prematurely, those workers might be forced to return to their jobs so their labor can be turned into higher corporate earnings. They might even patronize small businesses and restaurants more frequently. But they will also risk infection, hospitalization, and worse along the way. So too will everyone with whom they come in contact.
The good news is that Trump’s power is somewhat limited. He doesn’t have the power to overturn shelter-in-place orders issued by governors or mayors. In the weeks ahead, perhaps an originalist legal scholar or two will divine the framers’ will to argue that such measures are unconstitutional, and perhaps Trump will direct the Justice Department to challenge them in federal court. Until then, he can only urge working Americans to risk their lives so that the second-quarter decline in gross domestic product will stay in the high single digits.
The problem is that many of these workers are actually suffering as American commerce grinds to a halt. Restaurants, bars, and hotels across the country are also shedding hundreds of thousands of employees, and other economic sectors may soon follow. Accordingly, Trump and his allies have argued that the country must choose between “flattening the curve” and sending millions of Americans into financial ruin. “If given the choice between dying and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die,” The Federalist’s Jesse Kelly wrote on Twitter on Monday.


Seeing No Evil

When the dust settles on the 2020 Democratic primary season , it may well serve as a guide for deciphering the limits and rigidity of mainstream gender discourse .
We saw , in Barack Obama ’ s 2008 fight for the Democratic presidential nomination , a similar test of permissible utterances from a Black candidate on racial controversies—most notably in Obama ’ s Philadelphia speech distancing himself from what he described as Jeremiah Wright ’ s “ profoundly distorted view of this country.
” In the 2020 cycle , we ’ ve seen the steady retreat of a once-crowded field @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Warren and Amy Klobuchar were the last two viable women standing .
And in a fraught dispute over the electability of a woman presidential hopeful that broke out between Warren and Bernie Sanders just prior to the Iowa caucus , we got an edifying glimpse of the broader fatalist worldview that has rapidly overtaken the Democratic Party ’ s discursive mainstream on the crucial question of gender equality .
To grasp the basic structure of this latest foray into elite-level debate paralysis , it ’ s first necessary to revisit the short , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ days of the Obama age .
Post-racialism was a hipper variant of the longstanding conservative doctrine of racial color blindness .
And like that earlier effort to evade substantive questions of racial justice and reparation with anodyne rhetoric , post-racial discourse grew mostly out of a species of magical thinking that soon became conventional wisdom within a white-dominated punditocracy .
Like the color-blind thesis on the right , the liberal romance with post-racialism doubled as a self-administered sort of historical amnesia .
Under its ahistorical sway , breathless political observers were able to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other critics of a racialized social order as simply misguided .
At long last , America had rapidly outgrown the horrific legacies of white supremacy and the faintly embarrassing politics of Black protest .

Instead, we witnessed a steady barrage of non sequitur defenses from the extremely online Sanders camp. Bernie supporters tirelessly reposted a video from 1988 showing him confidently predicting the rise of a woman candidate to the presidency. Here, the clear implication went, was smoking-gun proof that Sanders was telling the truth, and Warren was lying. In reality, of course, one could simultaneously hold both positions—Bernie circa 1988 and Bernie circa 2018—at the same time. Women clearly can smash the Oval Office glass ceiling at some point, without the cycle in which Trump seeks reelection being the most propitious moment to test the hypothesis (particularly since said hypothesis was tested in 2016, with disastrous results). What’s more, any commentator would have to be utterly disconnected from today’s deranged and diminished political climate not to realize that what seemed possible at the time of Sanders’s interview appears to be much further out of reach in 2020.
None of these complexities or qualifications entered into the reams of analysis obsessively parsing the Sanders-Warren dustup. We were instead marshaled in one fell swoop onto the pundit-friendly terrain of the he-said, she-said chronicle. The public evidently needed to know only whether Sanders expressed this skepticism at all, as opposed to the far more consequential matter of why it would be distasteful if he did.
This unsightly stampede toward a post-gendered consensus disarmed thoughtful commentary in much the fashion that disbelieving Black Americans saw the farcical post-racial discourse overtake any other left-leaning position on race more than a decade ago. In both the post-racial delusion of the early Obama years and the abortive gender-and-the-presidency battle that took place in early 2020, the same rules of engagement held: Anyone who acknowledges a problem by definition perpetuates it. By these lights, to see gender is to be sexist.


newrepublic--2020-03-25--History Won’t
Save Us

History Won’t
Save Us

History will judge Donald Trump harshly .
That , at any rate , is what many of his critics predict .
No less harsh , in this prediction , will be history ’ s judgment of those who abetted Trump ’ s evils , who failed to stand up to him , who didn ’ t support impeachment and removal , even citizens who didn ’ t sufficiently resist .
According to some believers , if House Democrats hadn ’ t chosen to impeach , they , too , would have been tossed into the outer darkness by the mighty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in history is everywhere .
Before the House voted to impeach Trump in December , the New York Times editorial board urged Democrats and Republicans alike to heed “ the call of history.
” “ Trump : The Judgment of History ” was the title of a New Yorker Festival panel of eminent historians and journalists .
Representative Adam Schiff , the Democrats ’ lead impeachment manager , addressing the Senate during the trial in February , employed both the stick ( “ If you find that the House has proved its case @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history ” ) and a carrot , plucked not from history , exactly , but from a patch nearby ( “ If you find the courage to stand up to him … your place will be among the Davids who took on Goliath ” ) .
I feel the pull .
Maybe you do , too .
The present isn ’ t going well , so it ’ s nice to imagine a future in which people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ At least we don ’ t do that kind of thing anymore.
” The verdict we imagine history rendering is always that we were right , so it ’ s not only embattled liberals who subscribe to the faith .
“ History is often an unforgiving critic , ” warned Hans von Spakovsky of the conservative Daily Signal , on what he saw as Democrats ’ abuse of the impeachment process .
Kenneth Starr , speaking on behalf of Trump in the Senate trial , trolled liberals about as hard and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the famous phrase associated with Martin Luther King Jr. , regarding history ’ s moral arc bending toward justice .
There is something comforting in the idea that history casts an objective , permanent judgment on the past , but that doesn ’ t seem to be how it works .
One reason for skepticism is the contingency precept , important to the modern study of history , which tells us that while it may be hard for us to imagine what the present would be like if great historical events and trends @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the past happened inevitably .
A great variety of contingencies are always in play .
What did happen is only a hair ’ s breadth away from a dizzying multitude of things that might have happened and didn ’ t .

Many well-informed citizens have taken it as given that history judges the American experiment, with some reservations, as fundamentally good.
In Hamilton’s reading, the ironclad judgment rendered by history is that people who hope to become dictators court and flatter the popular will. They excite the wild passions of the many in order to cause chaos, to overturn the legislator class elected by the propertied to exercise sober government, and to triumph by providing a new order. The view was widely accepted by politicians, even banal, in the eighteenth century. But its anti-democratic bias, in which ordinary people are by definition irrational and have no minds of their own, is by no means a position that Nadler, Schiff, The New Yorker, or the historians who signed the statement would want to embrace when criticizing Trump.
The evolution of our views on the democratic experiment involves another judgment rendered by history in the second half of the twentieth century. In the first half, mainstream historians known for taking what was called the progressive view looked on the American founding as largely an effort by upper-class white men to gain and sustain personal advantage, first resisting British restriction of their commercial endeavors even to the point of independence, then repressing populist efforts by forming a national government under the Constitution. One implication of those historians’ views was that progress toward genuine American democracy was achieved by superseding the constitutional framers’ most anti-democratic impulses. At the other end of that era’s spectrum of interpretation on the founding generation were studies so conservative that they treated the British government as well justified in imposing and enforcing the taxes that sparked the American rebellion.
All of that was challenged after World War II. The U.S. emerged from the war as freedom’s triumphant defender, just as the Cold War with the Soviet Union was beginning. Scholarship of American history likewise underwent a quick, decisive upheaval. In keeping with new narratives of the U.S. as a global beacon for liberal democracy, American history was retooled to serve as a source of legitimacy for modern foreign policy efforts. The connection between government policy and historical scholarship was a direct one: During the war, the Harvard history professor William Leonard Langer had served as chief of Research and Analysis for the Office of Strategic Services, which carried out covert intelligence and other operations and recruited his graduate students. Yale, especially, had many connections to OSS’s postwar successor, the Central Intelligence Agency. In the 1950s, alumni and allies of those agencies at universities promoted what became known as “area studies,” including the expansion of American studies. The next generation of leaders would be trained in an American history defining the United States as a great civilization with foundational commitments to liberty and justice for all.


newrepublic--2020-03-24--The Republican Plot to Save the Rich

The Republican Plot to Save the Rich

The first confirmed case of a coronavirus infection in the United States was announced on January 21 .
Two days later , with the World Health Organization recording 581 confirmed cases worldwide , the Chinese government locked down Wuhan and ordered a travel ban .
On January 24 , the WHO reported 846 cases and warned that the virus was spreading from human to human outside China .
In its daily situation report , it wrote , “ WHO assesses the risk of this event to be very high in China , high at the regional level and high at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , U.S. senators were invited to a Health Committee briefing on the “ novel coronavirus outbreak ” from administration officials , including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci , the most knowledgeable and experienced member of the president ’ s public health team .
Not long after that briefing , at least a few senators sprang into action .
Senator Kelly Loeffler , for example , immediately began dumping stock , making 29 transactions over the following weeks , with the first happening that day .
While she engaged @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in private , in public , she did and said nothing to prepare her constituents or the country at large for the potential threat of a global pandemic .
Throughout February , her staff pushed out press releases with titles like “ Loeffler Cosponsors Legislation to Repeal the Death Tax ” and promoted local news appearances like one headlined “ Fox 5 Atlanta : Sen. Loeffler Supports Withholding Funds to States Over Drivers ’ Licenses.
” Senator Richard Burr also acted decisively , dumping , according to reporting from ProPublica , “ between @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions.
” Burr is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee , which receives daily briefings on the threat of the coronavirus .
In January , he had attended the White House briefing with Senator Loeffler .
And although Burr was slightly more active about communicating the details of the pandemic than Loeffler was , he , too , did and said nothing that served anyone but himself .
On February 7 , he ( along with Senator Lamar Alexander ) published an opinion piece @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was prepared for the threat .
“ The CDC has developed a diagnostic test that detects coronavirus infections and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is prepared to expedite its review , ” they wrote .
As The Washington Post would later report , the WHO had by that point shipped 250,000 tests to labs around the world ; the CDC had only shipped 160,000 to U.S. labs .
Most of those would soon be “ deemed unusable , ” and “ only about 200 of those tests sent to labs would be @ @ @

Part of this is simply a failure to understand how to respond to a real crisis. McConnell has never had to legislate. He has only ever had to obstruct one president’s agenda and confirm another’s judges. His record on passing large bills basically starts and ends with passing a tax cut and failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Following that burst of activity early in Trump’s term, McConnell has not even attempted to propose anything more ambitious. He doesn’t know how to draft, let alone pass, a bipartisan bill that would do anything but help the investor class. And after his original deal fell apart over the weekend, McConnell took the floor to whine petulantly about the futures market. Democrats, he warned, were “playing Russian Roulette with the markets.”
Other countries’ governments are doing what they can to guarantee their citizens’ future employment, understanding that mass unemployment and business closures are the true economic threat posed by this crisis. The Nordic social democracies have offered to pay most of the cost of employee salaries so long as companies do not lay them off. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government even plans to adopt the scheme, with the government of the United Kingdom promising to support 80 percent of worker salaries, up to nearly $3,000 a month, as long as firms keep them on the payroll. Our own conservatives seem to consider such proposals to be immoral interference in the natural order.
From the perspective of the American right, a massive government influx of cash to ensure that the cruise industry continues to exist in more or less its present form is an understandable emergency intervention. But to condition any such rescue on protecting the people who work for bailed-out corporations sets a dangerous precedent. The right to lay people off is sacrosanct in America, even if it leads to mass economic immiseration. The economics matter far less than the principle: The boss does what he wants, and the workers carry all the risks.


newrepublic--2020-03-24--Joe Biden Pivots to Video

Joe Biden Pivots to Video

His presentation , delivered from a lectern in Biden ’ s home against a backdrop of bookshelves , was a substantive but stiff reiteration of all he has already said about the crisis so far .
He continued to criticize conflicting messaging from the White House and Trump ’ s early efforts to downplay the severity of the crisis , urged Trump again to utilize his authority under the Defense Production Act to boost production of medical supplies , and condemned Senate Republicans ’ efforts to include a $ 500 billion bailout fund controlled by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Trump administration ’ s continued legal effort against the Affordable Care Act , which just turned 10 years old .
While none of this meaningfully shifted attention away from the White House , two standout moments traveled well on social media .
At one point during the speech , Biden ’ s teleprompter evidently malfunctioned , and he gestured for notes .
At another , he referred to Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker as “ Charlie Parker.
” Gaffes aside , the Biden campaign seems to be strategically adrift .
His backers have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a consequence of technical difficulties imposed by the measures Biden is taking to stay quarantined .
An ABC report Sunday , for instance , quoted one source who said that the campaign has been hard at work “ dealing with the realities of Biden ’ s Wilmington home , like the fact that there aren ’ t particularly high ceilings , which can make lighting a challenge.
” They should consider asking the Sanders campaign for pointers : The Vermont senator has live-streamed multiple events and speeches throughout the primary , including a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ month .
In any case , Biden is pressing forward with a pivot to video and other media .
On Saturday , Politico ’ s Marc Caputo reported that the Biden campaign is considering not only a “ virtual rope-line ” for one-on-one time between Biden and his supporters after online events but also a podcast and an aggressive video push on social media aimed at giving “ followers and viewers a sense of Biden as if he were a character in a reality show.
” One of the leads behind this effort @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s digital director and the former digital director for Beto O ’ Rourke ’ s infamously candid campaign—although Biden , Caputo noted not quite reassuringly , “ won ’ t be livestreaming from the dentist office chair or skateboarding in a Whataburger parking lot.
” This , incredibly , is the plan : In the middle of a national crisis without recent precedent , as the president appears before the public with all the trappings of his office on a daily basis , the campaign of the last vice president wants to give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the candidate .
If Biden loses in November , he ’ ll undoubtedly have enough footage to follow Mitt and Hillary with the next great postmortem campaign documentary .
But given the moment , Biden should be leaning as aggressively as possible into the stature and experience that have been the primary case for his candidacy in the first place .
Monday ’ s speech , the first of a regular series of statements on the coronavirus crisis according to the campaign , was conceptually a step in the right direction , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ iffy .

Gaffes aside, the Biden campaign seems to be strategically adrift. His backers have been eager to spin his absence as a consequence of technical difficulties imposed by the measures Biden is taking to stay quarantined. An ABC report Sunday, for instance, quoted one source who said that the campaign has been hard at work “dealing with the realities of Biden’s Wilmington home, like the fact that there aren’t particularly high ceilings, which can make lighting a challenge.” They should consider asking the Sanders campaign for pointers: The Vermont senator has live-streamed multiple events and speeches throughout the primary, including a fireside chat from his home earlier this month.
In any case, Biden is pressing forward with a pivot to video and other media. On Saturday, Politico’s Marc Caputo reported that the Biden campaign is considering not only a “virtual rope-line” for one-on-one time between Biden and his supporters after online events but also a podcast and an aggressive video push on social media aimed at giving “followers and viewers a sense of Biden as if he were a character in a reality show.” One of the leads behind this effort will be Rob Flaherty, Biden’s digital director and the former digital director for Beto O’Rourke’s infamously candid campaign—although Biden, Caputo noted not quite reassuringly, “won’t be livestreaming from the dentist office chair or skateboarding in a Whataburger parking lot.”
This, incredibly, is the plan: In the middle of a national crisis without recent precedent, as the president appears before the public with all the trappings of his office on a daily basis, the campaign of the last vice president wants to give us something like an MTV Cribs look at the candidate. If Biden loses in November, he’ll undoubtedly have enough footage to follow Mitt and Hillary with the next great postmortem campaign documentary. But given the moment, Biden should be leaning as aggressively as possible into the stature and experience that have been the primary case for his candidacy in the first place. Monday’s speech, the first of a regular series of statements on the coronavirus crisis according to the campaign, was conceptually a step in the right direction, even if the execution was a bit iffy.


newrepublic--2020-03-24--We Can Save Lives and the Economy at the Same Time

With the mayor of America ’ s largest city desperately warning the new coronavirus pandemic is on the verge of overwhelming the local hospital system , leading to deaths from untreated illness , you might expect the federal government to be focused on slowing the spread of the disease and boosting the United States ’ capacity to treat it .
Protecting the lives of citizens is , after all , the most basic responsibility of democratic government in the Anglo-American tradition , enshrined in multiple state constitutions that predate the republic itself .
Politicos at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saving lives doesn ’ t seem to be their primary concern .
Instead , the main focus of America ’ s national political discourse these past few weeks has been how best to contain the economic fallout of the coronavirus-related shutdowns , an approach to economic policymaking as backward and self-defeating as it is morally repugnant .
Democrats may think that they have no power to force Trump to utilize the federal government to provide understocked medical supplies to hospitals in New York and other hot spots , but in fact they can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ performance as a weapon against him .
No sooner had Congress appropriated $ 8 billion—approximately 0.2 percent of the annual federal budget of $ 3.8 trillion—for fighting the coronavirus on March 6 , than it turned its attention to what many members , and certainly the president , seemed far more concerned about : stemming the illness ’ s economic fallout .
Last week , while negotiations over how to spend at least $ 1 trillion on an economic stimulus bill were ongoing , President Donald Trump signed a separate $ 100 billion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to combat the pandemic , such as making testing for it more widely available and expanding access to paid sick leave , along with some funds to ease economic hardships , such as emergency food aid and expanded unemployment insurance .
But the bill also carved out enormous exceptions to paid leave , essentially incentivizing sick workers to come in and infect their colleagues and customers .
And even as that bill was being voted on , the White House and Congress were already negotiating on the far bigger economic aid package .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ not addressed is the terrifying shortage of ventilators , respirator masks , surgical masks , and hospital or intensive-care beds—all of which currently have doctors panicking .
Right now , as reported by The Washington Post , ventilator manufacturers say they could ramp up production but haven ’ t received orders from hospitals because the government hasn ’ t stepped in to pay for the expensive machines .
Instead , treating the health care system ’ s limit capacity as an immutable fact of life , the federal government has left it up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going outside , in the hopes of slowing the flow of the severely ill to a manageable level .
President Trump has encouraged governors to find medical supplies on their own .

Under the Republican proposal that was voted down twice in recent days, hardly anything would go toward reducing the impact of the coronavirus, whether medical or economic, on the front end. One hundred billion dollars, or one-eighteenth of the total, is set aside for aid to hospitals, but much of that is for bailing out hospitals financially because the coronavirus is forcing them to forgo more profitable courses of treatment such as elective surgery. Even counting all of that and all of the previous two bills as health spending, adding up to $208 billion, that’s substantially less than the $350 billion in aid to small businesses and up to $500 billion to large corporations contained in the new package.
Infusing cash into any economy tanking under the weight of mandatory epidemic-related closures is wholly appropriate, of course. But the way Washington has thought about its coronavirus response indicates its misplaced priorities: Almost the entire debate about the forthcoming spending bill, from the halls of Congress to the op-ed pages, has focused on what would most efficiently prop up consumer spending—or related questions such as whether, as Trump contends, the cruise industry merits a bailout. (Spoiler: It does not. The U.S. will survive without its massive carbon footprint.)
At the very same moment that the federal government could have been ramping up production of necessary medical supplies under the Defense Production Act, Congress and the pundit class were already fully absorbed in debating how to buoy the Dow Jones Industrial Average. A group of House Democrats sent a little-noticed letter to Trump asking him to use this power to produce medical supplies, which he ignored, and Democrats from hard-hit areas, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Chuck Schumer, are still lobbying him in vain. (Technically, Trump has invoked the act but declined to use it thus far because, as The New York Times noted, “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the heads of major corporations have lobbied the [Trump] administration against using the act.”)


newrepublic--2020-03-24--The Pandemic Economy in American Prisons

On Sunday afternoon , 45 people incarcerated at Rikers Island released a statement declaring that they would not be leaving their rooms for work or meals due to the jail ’ s inadequate response to the coronavirus outbreak in New York .
The reasons given for the strike included a lack of personal cleaning supplies , preexisting overcrowded living conditions , and the disconnection of the facility ’ s phones on Sunday morning .
Their demands were simple and reasonable : All people over the age of 50 with at-risk conditions , or with less than a year ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It ’ s two days later now , and nothing has meaningfully changed .
The Rikers strike stands as the latest effort taken by incarcerated people to bring attention to the conditions faced during the pandemic by America ’ s prison population , currently clocking in around 2.3 million .
In New Jersey , people being held at the Essex County Jail , Hudson County Jail , and privately operated Elizabeth Detention Center went on a hunger strike starting last Wednesday , calling out Immigration and Customs Enforcement for needlessly detaining people during @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the jails .
“ We should at least have some hand sanitizer , some wipes , some type of spray , and we rarely get any of that , ” a person detained by ICE at the Hudson County Jail told The New Republic last week .
“ There ’ s barely soap , there ’ s barely toilet tissue .
And they ’ ve got this new system in the bathroom where you ’ re only allowed to flush the toilet twice per hour.
” America is seeing in real time how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ produces and tolerates .
And while many local and state officials have decided to release at-risk people to thin the crowds inside our jails and prisons , there are millions of people who are still locked away in facilities ripe for an outbreak .
And many of them are working through the pandemic .
While nearly every jail and prison in the nation moved swiftly to ban family visitations in an apparent effort to limit community spread , prison work shifts across the country have carried on uninterrupted .
New York Governor Andrew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ production of hand sanitizer “ made conveniently by the state of New York.
” The sanitizer was in fact being made by incarcerated people who were started at $ 0.16 per hour .
As we ’ ve seen before , incarcerated people were turned into emergency service workers—their task no different or less necessary than grocery workers ’ or delivery drivers ’ —yet their health concerns have seldom been considered by an industry that makes $ 50 million off their labor .

But the Marshall Project has reported that Tyson is continuing to bus in incarcerated workers from the Wilkes Correctional Center to keep the floors active. As of Thursday last week, the workers were not having their temperatures taken to ensure they had not contracted the virus, though Tyson said in a statement to The New Republic that it has now instituted temperature checks and other controls on entering the facility. (For context, Tyson has a long history of bringing in workers from prisons and rehab centers to keep its profit margins nice and fat.)
Lauding the work as “an important transitional step for many low-risk inmates,” Tyson Foods wrote in a statement to the Marshall Project that, “The production of food during this time has been designated as critical to America’s infrastructure.” Staying on-message, a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Safety said that “the Division of Prisons is sensitive to the business needs of participating employers while balancing the medical issues at hand.” All this coincided with the Food and Drug Administration announcing last Wednesday that it would be pausing routine surveillance inspections of food manufacturers and handlers.
There are few signs that any of this is going to change in the immediate future. In discussing his upcoming legislative goals in New York State, Cuomo was noncommittal when a reporter asked him about prison reform. At a federal level, Politico reported on Saturday that U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr is considering measures that would allow chief judges to hold people indefinitely without trial. Where conversations of mass release should exist, instead stands a Monopoly Man character rubbing his hands together, wondering how he’ll profit off those with no options.


newrepublic--2020-03-24--The Imitation Games That Authoritarians Play

In their book The Light That Failed , Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes tell a story that they attribute to Gleb Pavlovsky .
He is a Russian “ political technologist ” who aided both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin in achieving and holding on to political power .
Pavlovsky recounts interviewing voters in the period leading up to the 1996 elections in Russia .
One woman told him that she supported Gennady Zyuganov , the Communist Party candidate , but she was going to vote for Yeltsin .
When Pavlovsky asked why , she replied , “ When Zyuganov is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Krastev and Holmes conclude from this that , in Russia , “ popularity ” of the kind Vladimir Putin enjoys “ is a consequence , not a cause , of the power one wields , ” and that elections there , “ instead of representing people ’ s interests , ” simply “ register the willingness of voters to submit to incumbents.
” Of course , it could be argued that this tendency is not unique to Russia .
Incumbents in many countries start with an advantage .
But the advantages of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is exercising power are especially great in Russia because of the country ’ s recent history .
Until the collapse of its empire in Eastern Europe in 1989 , followed two years later by the collapse of the Soviet Union itself and its division into some 15 countries , it was one of the world ’ s two superpowers .
Today , Russia ranks far behind China as a power in every respect except in the quantity of nuclear weapons that it possesses .
Its economy is only a little larger than that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Italy .
Yet Vladimir Putin has put up a very good show of exercising power .
He has intervened militarily in such countries as Georgia , Ukraine , and Syria , in the latter case with decisive and disastrous effect .
He has also intervened in the electoral affairs of a number of countries , including the United States .
Whether he was actually able to influence the outcome of any of these elections remains an open question .
For many Russians , however , who were dismayed during Yeltsin ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of territory , population , status , and power , and by their president ’ s sometimes-clownish behavior , Vladimir Putin has seemed a savior .
He may not have significantly improved the lives of large numbers of them .
But he has restored their sense of being citizens of a powerful country that plays a major part in world affairs .
Many welcome his bare-chested macho exploits , which contribute to the impression that he has restored the country ’ s standing .
Russia ’ s political development since the end of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Holmes ’ s insightful and important book , which examines the rise of authoritarianism and the decline of liberal democracy .
Krastev , a Bulgarian political scientist , and Holmes , a professor of law at New York University , recall the widespread hope and expectation three decades ago that the fall of communism would lead to the global spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism .
At that moment , the outlook for Russia , Hungary , and Poland seemed particularly promising .
Yet today , they observe , those countries @ @ @ @ @ @ @ populist nationalism , largely eliminating the independence of the judiciary and undermining freedom of the press .
What went wrong ?

In the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire, the authors argue, the losers in the Cold War struggle have attempted to imitate the victors in that conflict. They wished to share in the material prosperity of the West and, at the outset, imagined that such prosperity would accompany a show of liberal democracy. Yet imitation has not produced a replica of the West. Far from it. As the authors point out, most Russians “found faking democracy perfectly natural since they had been faking communism for at least two decades before 1991.” Moreover, imitation was not always a benign exercise. At a certain point, it acquired an antagonistic aspect. It became, as they describe it, “imitation as retaliation.” Vladimir Putin is a leading practitioner of this form of imitation. He seems to see it as a means of exposing what he considers the hypocrisy of his Western antagonists.
It is often the case that the losers in a struggle subsequently attempt to imitate those who have vanquished them. The 1999 book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by historian John Dower is an account of the way that Japanese society was transformed after the war by the defeated country’s adoption of many of the institutions and the cultural practices of the victorious power that overcame it. Japan’s imitation of the United States seems especially remarkable in light of the extreme cruelty and bitterness with which the war in Asia was conducted, in which both countries demonized each other in explicitly racist terms. A significant portion of Japan’s population was wiped out during the war, including great numbers of civilians, through the firebombing of Tokyo and many other Japanese cities, and through the virtual obliteration of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by atomic bombs. Neither was a major military center. They were destroyed in America’s effort to end the war without expending the lives of large numbers of its own troops, who would have died if Japan’s surrender had to be secured through an invasion.
In the Japanese case, the defeated power that imitated its American conqueror has become one of the staunchest allies of the United States in the three-quarters of a century since the end of World War II. One might point to important shortcomings in Japan’s development, such as the hostility to immigration that has been a factor in the country’s decline in population in recent years and the weakening of its economy; and its failure to acknowledge many of the crimes committed by Japanese forces during World War II that particularly victimized some of its Asian neighbors. Even so, it is appropriate for Americans to regard Japan as a friendly power and ally that is a crucial supporter of a peaceful world order; and one with a distinctive cultural heritage that greatly enriches global society. That heritage has not disappeared as a consequence of imitation, which has been a benign phenomenon.


newrepublic--2020-03-24--Scenes From an American Pandemic

Scenes From an American Pandemic

Things change quickly in a pandemic .
I started interviewing people for this piece a little more than a week ago as a way to capture this moment for people on both sides of our health care crisis—a medical resident struggling to find protective gear for himself and other emergency room workers , a woman in federal prison with very little access to medical care , an unhoused street medic in an encampment , and a nursing student being sent home by her hospital .
Each has their own fears and concerns about what it means to be vulnerable right @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what they ’ re seeing but feel they can ’ t say publicly themselves .
Some are working in places where getting official answers is impossible .
These , by necessity , are incomplete scenes from the first weeks of an American pandemic .
An emergency room resident in a New England hospital It was a shift earlier this month that really sent me over the top .
The guidelines about personal protective equipment and testing had just been released—including N95 masks for any patient with flulike symptoms or who came in with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stored in a locked area .
That ’ s because of the shortages we ’ re facing , but in an emergency room context , which is the one I work in , there ’ s no time to tell a patient , Hang on a second while I go find this personal protective gear .
So knowing that , I asked for some face masks in advance , and the people with the nursing administration just looked at me and said they didn ’ t really know where any of that stuff @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the attending faculty , and they didn ’ t have a good answer , either .
It sort of threw me for a loop .
Even more so because , you know , we had meetings between our hospital administrators for a week prior to this , and it was clear they had not considered the boots on the ground—residents and nurses—and their personal protection .
I didn ’ t have options .
I couldn ’ t go home .
I couldn ’ t say , I ’ m not working here @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which is a provisionally licensed physician .
Things can ’ t run without our labor , but the hospital also views us as cheap—cheaper than attendings .
When we first started considering what was going to happen , it became clear that if this came to America , residents could get pretty sick .
My first question was : If I was exposed and had to go into quarantine , would I be paid ?
Would I have to take vacation time ?
Would it be unpaid ?
Would I have to extend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ answers to those questions , and it seemed entirely at the discretion of my program director .
That seemed really scary to me , the idea that my job means I may come into contact with a potentially lethal virus and that any recovery or isolation I may need as a result of that could be unpaid and unprotected .

Things change quickly in a pandemic. I started interviewing people for this piece a little more than a week ago as a way to capture this moment for people on both sides of our health care crisis—a medical resident struggling to find protective gear for himself and other emergency room workers, a woman in federal prison with very little access to medical care, an unhoused street medic in an encampment, and a nursing student being sent home by her hospital. Each has their own fears and concerns about what it means to be vulnerable right now. Some anonymously shared with me what they’re seeing but feel they can’t say publicly themselves. Some are working in places where getting official answers is impossible. These, by necessity, are incomplete scenes from the first weeks of an American pandemic.
An emergency room resident in a New England hospital
It was a shift earlier this month that really sent me over the top. The guidelines about personal protective equipment and testing had just been released—including N95 masks for any patient with flulike symptoms or who came in with respiratory distress—but that equipment was still being stored in a locked area. That’s because of the shortages we’re facing, but in an emergency room context, which is the one I work in, there’s no time to tell a patient, Hang on a second while I go find this personal protective gear. So knowing that, I asked for some face masks in advance, and the people with the nursing administration just looked at me and said they didn’t really know where any of that stuff was. Then I raised the issue with the attending faculty, and they didn’t have a good answer, either. It sort of threw me for a loop.


newrepublic--2020-03-24--Could Trump Spark a New Balkan Ethnic War?

One of the obvious answers centers on the kind of swamp Trump pledged to drain—but which , under this most corrupt of presidents , has instead flooded Washington .
“ We ’ ve seen the very alarming deterioration in quality of American foreign policy , and the very obvious concerns that it ’ s been deeply personalized by the Trump family , which has really in a big way become a pay-to-play machine , ” Jasmin Mujanović , an assistant political science professor at Elon University and author of a recent book examining political dynamics in the Western Balkans , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end of things , there were a number of political actors in the region who were really excited by Trump ’ s election—maybe no one more than Belgrade and its proxies.
” Indeed , few groups have insinuated themselves as closely with the Trump lobbying machine over the past two years as Serbia and its allies .
In 2018 , Trump ’ s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski unexpectedly popped up in Belgrade , where he reportedly tried to set up lobbying links with Vučić—an anti-democratic leader who has cemented his role as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ come .
According to the agenda for Lewandowski ’ s meeting in Belgrade , another former Trump aide , George Gigicos , also joined him .
( The lobbying firm linked to Lewandowski , Turnberry Solutions LLC , conveniently shared its name with one of Trump ’ s Scottish golf courses . )
Also in 2018 , pro-Serb separatists in Republika Srpska , a majority-Serb ethnic region in Bosnia and Herzegovina , picked up a pair of Trump campaign officials to assist in efforts to crack up the country and glom onto Serbia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that multiple Republika Srpska officials had already been sanctioned by the U.S. for corruption and efforts to splinter the Bosnian state .
One of those former Trump campaign operatives turned lobbyists , Mike Rubino , even completed the pay-to-play circle last year , after the White House got him hired at the Department of Health and Human Services .
( He quit four months later , accusing his boss of being a “ never Trumper ” ; last October , news broke that Rubino had attended a springtime lunch with representatives of Ukrainian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hotel in Washington , shortly before the phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy that snowballed into a presidential impeachment . )
The lobbying contacts also help make sense of Grenell ’ s appointment last October as the official U.S. envoy for Serbian-Kosovar relations .
Though he had already been U.S. ambassador to Germany for more than a year , Grenell had no Balkan experience before Trump gave him the second hat to wear .
Grenell does , however , have significant experience in spinning massively corrupt post-Soviet political figures for American audiences—so much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Department of Justice ’ s Foreign Agents Registration Act while acting as an unregistered foreign agent .

One of the obvious answers centers on the kind of swamp Trump pledged to drain—but which, under this most corrupt of presidents, has instead flooded Washington. “We’ve seen the very alarming deterioration in quality of American foreign policy, and the very obvious concerns that it’s been deeply personalized by the Trump family, which has really in a big way become a pay-to-play machine,” Jasmin Mujanović, an assistant political science professor at Elon University and author of a recent book examining political dynamics in the Western Balkans, told me. “From the Balkan end of things, there were a number of political actors in the region who were really excited by Trump’s election—maybe no one more than Belgrade and its proxies.”
Indeed, few groups have insinuated themselves as closely with the Trump lobbying machine over the past two years as Serbia and its allies. In 2018, Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski unexpectedly popped up in Belgrade, where he reportedly tried to set up lobbying links with Vučić—an anti-democratic leader who has cemented his role as Serbia’s autocrat for years to come. According to the agenda for Lewandowski’s meeting in Belgrade, another former Trump aide, George Gigicos, also joined him. (The lobbying firm linked to Lewandowski, Turnberry Solutions LLC, conveniently shared its name with one of Trump’s Scottish golf courses.)
Also in 2018, pro-Serb separatists in Republika Srpska, a majority-Serb ethnic region in Bosnia and Herzegovina, picked up a pair of Trump campaign officials to assist in efforts to crack up the country and glom onto Serbia proper. It didn’t matter that multiple Republika Srpska officials had already been sanctioned by the U.S. for corruption and efforts to splinter the Bosnian state. One of those former Trump campaign operatives turned lobbyists, Mike Rubino, even completed the pay-to-play circle last year, after the White House got him hired at the Department of Health and Human Services. (He quit four months later, accusing his boss of being a “never Trumper”; last October, news broke that Rubino had attended a springtime lunch with representatives of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, shortly before the phone call between Trump and Zelenskiy that snowballed into a presidential impeachment.)


newrepublic--2020-03-24--Tucker Carlson Is Leading the White House’s Coronavirus Response

As the coronavirus spread across the world , Fox News became the epicenter of disinformation about the crisis .
Jeanine Pirro dismissed the virus as less deadly than the flu .
Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham accused Democrats of being “ panic pushers ” and of fomenting “ mass hysteria ” to further their partisan agenda .
Fox Business anchor Trish Regan said it was “ yet another attempt to impeach the president.
” The message from Fox was clear : The disease was all hype .
Americans had little to fear .
There was one exception , however .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ warning about the dangers of the coronavirus .
The following month , while his fellow anchors were laughing off the growing global pandemic , he returned again and again to the threat—and China ’ s responsibility for it .
Until recently , he was a lone voice on Fox News , castigating , though never naming , the president for not acting .
On March 7 , he met with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and reportedly implored him to take the threat more seriously .
That meeting marked the turning point in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus—and in Fox News ’ s coverage .
Since then , both the president and Fox News have begun to sound more like Carlson , particularly when it comes to attacking China .
Mike Pence may be technically heading the administration ’ s coronavirus response , but the president is taking many of his cues from Carlson .
And Carlson is taking advantage of the opportunity to push his own agenda .
Carlson initially started covering the coronavirus for two reasons .
The first was that he was bored with impeachment and its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ irresponsible , ” he told The Los Angeles Times over the weekend , “ to spend all of your time covering something that you can explain in two minutes and yet the other channels were absolutely wall to wall on this.
” The other was that it was a genuinely huge and frightening story , and Carlson is not quite so brainwashed that he failed to see that .
He told Vanity Fair that a conversation with a government official convinced him that the “ Chinese are lying about the extent of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health inspectors in .
They ’ re blocking WHO and this could infect millions of people , a high percentage of them.
” He stressed that this was a nonpolitical story : an existential threat to the world that transcended the partisan squabbling that has defined media coverage of the Trump administration .

For all of Carlson’s talk about it being a nonpartisan issue, the coronavirus is tailor-made for his brand of demagoguery: a literal manifestation of the threat of open borders and diversity, an invisible enemy that has now crept into the country to decimate it. Carlson has spent the past four years criticizing China, which he blames for everything from income inequality to the opioid crisis.
The two-step he has done in defense of Trump’s decision to call the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” exemplifies his approach. Carlson has tried to intellectualize the term, arguing that it is justified because China “hid the truth about the disease and continues to do so.” Trump, of course, is doing something slightly different, stoking divisions along racial and cultural lines while attempting to divert blame for his own missteps. Carlson then seized on the backlash as further proof that the left and the media’s priorities are out of whack. “That’s what the media is talking about in the middle of a life-threatening pandemic: The Chinese know this,” he said. “They know that wokeness is our Achilles’ heel, and they know they can control us with it.”
Carlson has gained the most attention during this crisis for targeting Republicans, however. Many Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, applauded him on Thursday night, when he demanded that Senator Richard Burr resign and be prosecuted for selling off millions of dollars in stocks following a classified briefing about the threat of the coronavirus. “He had inside information about what could happen to our country, which is now happening, but he didn’t warn the public,” Carlson said. “Instead, he dumped his shares in hotel stocks so he wouldn’t lose money. There is no greater moral crime than betraying your country in a time of crisis.”


America’s Diseased Politics

Last Wednesday , with a pandemic spiking and the economy plummeting , Senator Charles Schumer finally lost his cool and dispensed with syntactic best practices in the name of urgency .
In outlining the Senate Democrats ’ response to a steepening crisis , the Senate minority leader demonstrated that some bold action was in the offing by abjuring the words “ Here is ” at the beginning of three successive serious tweets .
“ What we ’ re proposing , ” Schumer began , straight-talkishly , before treating himself to a line break and delivering a robust helping of dense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re a working parent and suddenly have to worry about finding a safe place for your kids to stay during the day , ” Schumer thundered , “ we would provide emergency funding to safely ramp up child care services for heavily impacted parts of the country.
” It went on like this , climaxing with this rousing promise : “ If you ’ re a small business owner suddenly facing cash flow problems , we would allow you to apply for low-interest loans and other forms of financial assistance that can offer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pegs his policy positions to appeal to a fictitious Long Island family that almost certainly would have voted for Trump , was by no means the only national Democrat to respond to broad upheaval with this kind of meticulously hedged and carefully tranched language : If you fit into social unit x , then you will be eligible in some circumstances to receive benefit y .
When the House was debating a bill that would have provided immediate cash payments to Americans harmed by the indefinite shuttering of much of the economy , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Her aim was not so much to ensure that the maximum aid would reach the greatest number of people but to guard against the prospect that too much federal support might reach insufficiently vulnerable people with untoward quickness .
“ The Speaker believes we should look at refundable tax credits , expanded [ unemployment insurance ] and direct payments , ” Pelosi ’ s deputy chief of staff tweeted , “ but MUST be targeted.
” When Pelosi introduced her plan on Monday afternoon , the benefits were immediate , but also tiered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emergency cash disbursement .
With the usual exceptions—Senator Bernie Sanders in a series of live-streamed online addresses , Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on social media , Representatives Maxine Waters and Rashida Tlaib in actual proposed legislation—every Democratic voice raised during a maddeningly unproductive week seemed to caution against trying too hard , while attaching a PowerPoint slide to the cautionary message for good measure .
Senator Kamala Harris , whose dud presidential campaign has lately become a slightly more plausible vice presidential one , took the opportunity to reheat her LIFT Act , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ narrow subset of Americans who were neither too rich nor , not a little nauseatingly , too poor .
( Harris later deleted those tweets . )
When the front-runner for the party ’ s presidential nomination finally weighed in on the ongoing negotiations over the scale and targeted reach of a bailout at week ’ s end , it was to ask that the nation ’ s reigning plutocrats be mindful in processing the bailouts they were about to receive .
“ I am calling on every CEO in America to publicly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ company ’ s stock over the course of the next year , ” Joe Biden ’ s team tweeted on Friday morning .
“ As workers face the physical and economic consequences of the coronavirus , our corporate leaders can not cede responsibility for their employees.
” On Sunday afternoon , after a cheerful Weekend at Bernie ’ s–style emoji cameo on a popular D.J.
’ s Instagram feed the day before , Biden reappeared on Twitter to ask that Social Security payments be bumped up by $ 200 a month .
All @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republicans do—sought to direct whopping no-strings-attached funds to powerful interests while effectively removing all nonwealthy people from the equation , pausing at regular intervals to laud the integrity and handsomeness that their forgetful and vinegary president had brought to duffing every single aspect of the governmental response to the virus .
The Democrats , in response , did what they generally do .
They made clear that they were disappointed in the Republicans ; they advocated for something vague and qualified and means-tested that might benefit some people in a clever double-banked fashion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not arrive too soon , or too generously .
It would allow newly precarious workers and small business owners to apply for low-interest loans , where applicable .
They maneuvered and then aimed to let the game come to them .
“ Biden aides and allies … are projecting an aura of calm , ” Politico reported , “ saying Trump ’ s false claims and reinvented history about the virus will haunt him on their own as the economy craters .
”

It has always been clear that Trump’s singular and obliterating narcissism opened some uniquely dark avenues of possibility. But it is one thing to know that Trump would do anything to avoid responsibility and maintain power and quite another to confront the outer boundaries of that possibility. A pandemic that threatens to unmake what is left of American civil society and cause massive suffering and death is real to him mostly as a series of numbers that he wants to see move in various directions; the disease is the thing that has soured his television-watching experience, and if it weren’t on TV, it’s safe to say that he would neither know nor care about it. When his administration could have begun preparing for the pandemic, Trump mostly didn’t know about it; it was a thing that was happening in China, on television. When it arrived in earnest and began killing Americans, Trump told weird lies and reeled off yards of oafish spin and generally wrote various whopping rhetorical checks against a badly overdrawn account. The problem was on TV by then, but he believed that he could manage it, also on television, with bluff and bluster. He still does.
It’s not just that Trump has failed to muster an effective governmental defense against a pandemic that is already putting overwhelming pressure on every spot where society is weak, although he has, of course, failed at that. Trump fundamentally resents having to do any of the work or shoulder any of the responsibility of being president, which he clearly believed was a job more akin to being the grand marshal of a parade; now that a real existential crisis has descended on the parade grounds, he’s not even really trying to do any of that. What he has done instead, and will continue to do, is bring his few blunt tools—unflagging shamelessness and aggression, a knack for pushing on bruises and shoving others into traffic, and a wild and blank antipathy for other people—to bear against a literal virus, and hope that it results in compelling enough television to keep him in power.
Metaphors fail daily: Trump really would sooner risk the lives of a million strangers than do his job, and his party is quite willing to go along with it. In the absence of an opposition party willing and able to point any of that out or call it what it is, the nation is more or less left to take him at his word. Where and when the media takes up the challenge of doing the basic civic work that Democrats can’t or won’t, it lets Trump spin a once-in-a-generation crisis as Another Media Thing. And that renders the whole episode as just another argument to have on television.