Plagued by Trumpism

[Celerity]

For 40 years, US Republicans have been insisting that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’. The bankruptcy of this has been laid bare.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/plagued-by-trumpism

As an educator, I’m always looking for ‘teachable moments’—current events that illustrate and reinforce the principles on which I’ve been lecturing. And there is nothing like a pandemic to focus attention on what really matters. The COVID-19 crisis is rich in lessons, especially for the United States. One takeaway is that viruses do not carry passports; in fact, they don’t observe national borders—or nationalist rhetoric—at all. In our closely integrated world, a contagious disease originating in one country can and will go global.

Co-operative response

The spread of diseases is one negative side-effect of globalisation. Whenever such cross-border crises emerge, they demand a global, co-operative response, as in the case of climate change. Like viruses, greenhouse-gas emissions are wreaking havoc and imposing massive costs on countries around the world through the damage caused by global warming and the associated extreme weather events. No US presidential administration has done more to undermine global co-operation and the role of government than that of Donald Trump. And yet, when we face a crisis like an epidemic or a hurricane, we turn to government, because we know that such events demand collective action. We cannot go it alone, nor can we rely on the private sector. All too often, profit-maximising firms will see crises as opportunities for price-gouging, as is already evident in the rising prices of face masks.

Unfortunately, since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the mantra in the US has been that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’. Taking that nostrum seriously is a dead-end road, but Trump has travelled further down it than any other US political leader in memory. At the centre of the US response to the COVID-19 crisis is one of the country’s most venerable scientific institutions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has traditionally been staffed with committed, knowledgeable, highly trained professionals. To Trump, the ultimate know-nothing politician, such experts pose a serious problem, because they will contradict him whenever he tries to make up facts to serve his own interests.

Scientific knowledge

Faith may help us cope with the deaths caused by an epidemic, but it is no substitute for medical and scientific knowledge. Willpower and prayers were useless in containing the Black Death in the Middle Ages. Fortunately, humanity has made remarkable scientific advances since then. When the COVID-19 strain appeared, scientists were quickly able to analyse it, test for it, trace its mutations and begin work on a vaccine. While there is still much more to learn about the new coronavirus and its effects on humans, without science we would be completely at its mercy, and panic would have already ensued. Scientific research requires resources. But most of the biggest scientific advances in recent years have cost peanuts compared with the largesse bestowed on the richest US corporations by Trump and congressional Republicans’ 2017 tax cuts. Indeed, US investments in science also pale in comparison with the latest epidemic’s likely costs to the economy, not to mention lost stock-market value.

snip