The best of times, the worst of times
US in the spring of the pandemic

Covid-19 brought economic chaos to the US, and with that a possibility for huge political policy changes. But if Joe Biden wins the presidential election, he’s promised nothing will change.

by Thomas Frank   June 2020

Musical diversion: Jodi Beder helps neighbours cope with lockdown in Mount Rainer, Maryland, March 2020 Andrew Caballero-Reynolds · AFP · Getty

It is the worst of times in America. The pandemic that disaster-preparation types have been warning about for decades is finally here, and of course we haven’t prepared very well. Our leviathan government, the subject of so much feigned rightwing terror in ordinary times, turned out to be unable to rise from its easy chair when the crisis came. Our president, the former TV star Donald Trump, has proved himself incompetent if not positively injurious to public health with his stupid rambling remarks, which, until recently, he addressed daily to the cameras. And now, almost the entire country is in quarantine lockdown. New York City, where the virus has had its deadliest run, was a few weeks ago burying stacks of coffins in mass graves dug by bulldozers.

Quarantine has meant deliberately smothering the economy, which just a few months ago was running at maximum capacity. In America we have no mechanism for putting the economy on hold — people just lose their jobs or close their doors — and overnight we went from one of the fastest-running economies of my lifetime to Great Depression II, skipping all the intermediate steps and going straight to massive unemployment and a vast extinction of businesses large and small.

Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse. Beloved family members are dying alone in some hospital; yesterday’s trendy restaurants are shuttered and forgotten, their ambitious young chefs filling out unemployment forms along with millions of others.
Here we are, suffering dire shortages of masks and testing equipment and even hand sanitiser, and our punditburo is unable to persuade our former trading partners to agree with us that the world is flat and they need to ship us the goods immediately

All this is happening during what might well be the best of times for America. Here in my little corner of the country we have been enjoying the most spectacularly beautiful springtime I have ever seen. For the comfortable, white-collar people around me, this pandemic has played out in a landscape that looks like a Fragonard painting: as the first fears came, the daffodils were blooming and then the tulips; the magnolia trees and the cherry blossoms; the azaleas and the rhododendrons; and now the dogwood blossoms arch pale overhead as I jog the peaceful, traffic-free roads of Bethesda, Maryland. That ironic contrast holds true everywhere you look.

Their beliefs confirmed

Just about everyone with a voice in America claims these days that the pandemic confirms their prior beliefs in some resounding way. Say the media types, this reinforces what we have been telling you all along about President Trump’s ignorance and folly. Say the conservatives, this proves what we have been telling you all along about soft-hearted liberals and their suicidal desire to let anyone into the country. For them the pandemic has been a carnival of smugness.

It is growing clear, however, that instead of reinforcing the cherished beliefs of the American consensus this episode has shattered them. For decades this country has offshored our manufacturing capacity because duh, that’s what everyone agreed the info-age called for. We were going to be a white-collar nation that made innovative things like prescription drugs and legal textbooks; things of the mind that weighed so very little. And now here we are, suffering dire shortages of masks and testing equipment and even hand sanitiser, and our plummy punditburo is unable to persuade our former trading partners to agree with us that the world is flat and they need to ship us the goods immediately. Death laughs in our stupid neoliberal faces.

The American system of healthcare-for-profit, constructed over the decades with the enthusiastic input of both political parties, has shown itself incapable of rising to the pandemic challenge. For a simple reason: it wasn’t built for purposes of public health. In my lifetime, the underlying assumption of that system has always been that healthcare is a privilege; you get access to it by being a successful and prosperous person. It is a meritocratic system in the way it rewards high-achieving doctors and innovative pharma scientists, and in the way it parcels out care. Poor people with lousy or no insurance who want their broken bones and organ failure healed are routinely bankrupted by astonishing medical bills (1). The suggestion that we should stop bankrupting such people and instead give them free tests or treatment for Covid-19 is so contrary to the consensus view of healthcare in this country that it is difficult to see how this necessary step is to be taken. The psychological breach with how we have always thought about healthcare will be wrenching.

Perhaps Covid-19’s most healthful effect is what it has done to our understanding of social class. A short while ago, all right-thinking Americans agreed that work that didn’t require a college degree was second-class work, heavy and blundering and polluting; the people who did it were often Trump voters whose way of life was crumbling because it deserved to. Only a few years back, billionaire Democratic politician Michael Bloomberg thrilled students at Oxford University with heady theories of how the information age prioritises ‘how to think and analyse’ over the simplistic skills of farmers and industrial workers (2).
Here in the land of the individual, the individual is utterly overwhelmed, swept anonymously along on the tides of disease and economic collapse

Today only those farmers and industrial workers stand between us and the abyss. Many of them are out there risking their lives in the virus-sphere every day. Others are being ordered back to work at their low-wage jobs regardless of their vulnerability to Covid-related death. They are falling ill in the grocery stores and the meat-packing plants while the white-collar, information-age types who order them to work sit safely at home, working by email and Internet conference, and enjoy a miraculously rising stock market, courtesy of Congress and the Federal Reserve.

If you guessed that this is a situation in which working people might decide they’ve had enough, you are correct. Although it’s hard to know for sure since local labour reporting is virtually dead in America, there are signs that worker militance might have revived itself. One of America’s most famous anti-union lobbyists recently warned his clients of the possibility of a ‘partial workforce rebellion’ (3), and there appear to be unauthorised wildcat strikes here and there (4).
Anything could happen

Each of these items points to the same thing: the sudden, vivid extinction of the comfortable worldview that American leaders adopted and forced on the world in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The situation in America is pregnant with possibility. Anything could happen.

Here, however, we come to the dark, pathological irony of American liberalism. The institution that ought to be moving us past the deathly old mode of thought is the Democratic party — indeed, it is just about the only institution that might conceivably do such a thing nowadays — and yet just a few weeks before the coronavirus exploded in America, that same Democratic party succeeded, with joyful public celebration, in stamping out any possibility that American political thinking would in fact change. Its leaders are determined that this crisis will go to waste.

Let me explain. For much of the last year, the Democratic party held debates among would-be candidates for the presidency. At first, in an accurate reflection of the thinking of the left, many of the Democrats on the national stage appeared to have broken decisively and even creatively with the shibboleths of the past.

But after the institutional favourite, former vice-president Joe Biden, won the South Carolina primary at the end of February, most of the remaining candidates abruptly quit and endorsed him. The one candidate who persisted, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the leading reformer of our era and a beloved figure of the young, held on a little longer but also eventually bowed to the overwhelming odds.

The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again.

Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-crushing trade agreements, the Iraq war, cruel bankruptcy legislation, mass incarceration, the infamous attack on civil liberties known as the Patriot Act. The man even boasts of having been chummy with segregationists back in the day.

There’s a good chance he will win. Despite his views, Biden is a familiar and well-liked politician in the classical tradition, while Donald Trump, in his pathological narcissism, oozes resentment and always finds new ways to make himself despicable. Plus, it’s hard to see how someone can bungle an economic and public health crisis as badly as Trump has with Covid-19 and be asked by voters to repeat the performance.

‘Nothing would fundamentally change’ if Biden becomes president, he told his wealthy donors (5). It’s a hell of a slogan for a moment like this.

My leftwing friends all tell me they are depressed. With their hero Bernie Sanders, who looked so strong in January, beaten, they find themselves locked indoors, watching people be rude to each other on Twitter.

I share the mood, but I think there’s more to it. The prospect of no positive reforms in the wake of this catastrophe is bad enough, but each day’s news informs us that the old order is not sitting still. Every day there is some new scheme for bailing out corporations, or a power-grab by Silicon Valley. The Democratic governor of New York Andrew Cuomo is taking the opportunity of quarantine to bring in tech billionaires to re-engineer the future (6).

The gnawing anger beneath the pandemic is that democracy itself is being rewired in our absence. The system has failed us, the system is guaranteed to go on failing us, but while we the people are out of the picture, others are making grand, world-altering decisions. The powerful are rewriting the social contract while we watch TV and console ourselves with booze and simple chores.


Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal, or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?, Metropolitan Books, 2016.

Original text in English

(1) See Kaiser Health News’s ‘Bill of the month’.

(2) ‘Bloomberg attacks farmers and industrial workers’, talk at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, 17 November 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aATHavwhosY/.

(3) Lee Fang and Nick Surgey, ‘Anti-union operative warns business of historic rise in labor activism’, The Intercept, 1 May 2020.

(4) ‘Covid-19 strike wave interactive map’.

(5) Jennifer Epstein, ‘Biden tells elite donors he doesn’t want to “demonize” the rich’, Bloomberg, 19 June 2019.

(6) Naomi Klein, ‘Screen New Deal: under cover of mass death, Andrew Cuomo calls in the billionaires to build a high-tech dystopia’, The Intercept, 8 May 2020.