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