The United States is a Second Rate Power—And That’s the Good
News The bad news would be if we fail to fix it.
Food aid is distributed to needy residents in Apopka, Florida. (Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/Sipa via AP Images)
First Response
I try to tune out the latest Trump outrage but the latest one apparently involves reopening the schools in the fall. Someone obviously told Trump that no in-person schools means
no way for parents to go back to the office, and a breakdown in the economy, and we can’t have such things. So he’s demanded that the CDC change their guidelines (they won’t) and threatened to cut off funding for schools that don’t reopen, even though he has no mechanism for doing that but it hasn’t stopped him before.
If nothing else—and nothing else—Trump at least started a debate over schools, which is depressingly focused on how parents can get the little rugrats out of their hair than the impact of lost schooling on the entire lives of the children. But this seems like the ultimate first-world problem right now, and we are not a first-world country.
Other countries reopened schools without threatening further outbreaks because they suppressed the virus. We’ve done no such thing. Cases are at a new record high. Deaths continue to be well below levels from April and essentially flat week over week,
but more people are dying at home in Houston; as I’ve said consistently that the numbers are at best suggestive.
Hospitals in surge areas are nearing capacity, and even triage levels. My home county, Los Angeles, is scaling back testing to only those showing symptoms, meaning we will know less about infections soon. And we’re talking about reopening the schools? We should be hermetically sealed at home and have all necessities delivered by drones through chimneys or open
windows!
We don’t get to talk about schools opening. We don’t get to talk about sports coming back either.
"Sports are like the reward of a functioning society," said Washington Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle. "We just opened back up for Memorial Day. We decided we’re done with it."
These things are not going to happen because we live in a second-rate power. We have a complete idiot running the executive branch like a mob capo, we have nobody of conviction around him and precious few in positions of authority. Half the country is in a death cult that sees any imposition on their essential
selfishness as something to take up arms against.
As a result we’re going to flip the odometer on deaths to "hundreds of thousands" rather than "hundred thousand," and those are just the ones we’re willing to concede to. The economy will suffer far more from the stops and starts than from taking the time to actually suppress the virus. First-time unemployment claims were never above 1 million in history and now they’ve been for 16 straight weeks. The Household Pulse survey, which David Silberman described for us at the Prospect as a true measure of family strain, is flashing red. We’re going to have 1 million-plus jobs lost in next month’s report. We’re about to prematurely stop the unemployment insurance boost that the economy is
subsisting on, and the eviction moratorium keeping people from sleeping in their cars.
The one thing America had on the world was a university infrastructure that attracted foreign talent and kept our knowledge base high. So of course we’re engaging in a xenophobic action to kick foreign students out of the country and permanently end that one piece of comparative advantage. We produce nothing and know we won’t think of things to produce, either.
We are second-rate. This is our second system failure in twelve years. We came into this crisis as a Potemkin village, a series of movie backdrops pretending to stand in for a society. And the virus just pushed them over like a mild wind, revealing all the cracks, all the faults that we preferred not to see while tuning into game shows and superhero reboots. But this is the
good news, actually. These faults are exposed, and everyone sees them. The political leadership is on track to be wiped out in the elections in the most humiliating way possible. And nobody can deny the level of catastrophic failure.
Read through the Unity Task Force Recommendations between the Biden and Sanders campaigns. Pick a page,
and read it. Focus on the problems it describes in clear language: the burning planet, the economic deprivation for the broad middle and below, the affordable housing crisis, the childcare crisis, the mass incarceration crisis, the racism crisis, the social mobility crisis, the corporate power crisis, the worker’s rights crisis, the infrastructure crisis. We aren’t exceptional and we now know it. And once that’s internalized, work can be done to fix it. That’s the promise of another wave that has the desire for real change behind it.
The only peril would be to squander the opportunity. Joe Biden is giving a speech on the economy today which will apparently counsel a go-slow approach. (on criminal justice, even the aspirational task force report is muted.) That would be a terrible mistake. The pillars of the plan—manufacturing, clean energy, care work, and racial equity—aren’t even that bad. It’s the fetish of moderation, of incrementalism, against the backdrop of severe need, that’s completely misplaced.
Abdul El-Sayed was right
yesterday about progress over regress. But you don’t get many moments as a second-rate power to elevate. We have to make this one count.
