Modesty, humility, and courage are ancient virtues. They are also universal and timeless ones. The supreme mitigating factor in all that we do is the law of unintended consequences. In other words, crap happens. Humility and modesty should restrain blustery confidence. Courage is a necessity to counter an inane conventional wisdom. Trying times, like the present pandemic, put all of us to the test. Inanity surrounds.
Inane conventional wisdom #1 is the blind acceptance of saving lives at any cost – literally, any cost. Sure, save lives, but you can’t throw caution and limits to the wind as you do it. The law of unintended consequences kicks in. Take for example economic ruination and all that it portends. If past is prologue, the well-trodden path of hyper-inflation is littered with well-intentioned public policy. Shelter-in-place is destroying associations of every kind, up to and including businesses. We must gird ourselves for the very real possibility of inflation-run-amok. Price inflation from product shortages will be accelerated by monetary inflation from our political chiefs’ insistence on a national shutdown. Get ready for a double whammy, and all that comes with a wrecking of the national wealth.
Inane conventional wisdom #2 is a mindless worship of anything “data-driven”. What data? Have you ever questioned those numbers? How are they arrived at? Throwing numbers at a problem goes hand-in-glove with throwing paper money at it.
Cases and deaths flow into graphs and charts to stampede the public into accepting what are the equivalent of imperial decrees. I’m reminded of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth: numbers are playthings to create new “realities”. In the hands of today’s Democratic Party and the Squad, the “new reality” is a universe of socialism.
At root are pressures to assign a digit to the most politically useful category. Cause of death is too easily accredited to the favorite of the moment, COVID-19. During a normal flu season, the low-hanging fruit for a disease are people suffering from multiple and chronic health threats. Did they die of the flu or was it their preexistent weakened bodies? In the hospital, the coin flip for cause of death will always come up tails, tails being the flu. Ditto for COVID-19.
The “cases” number is also playdough. Here, the choice of the COVID-19 category for a patient is on firmer ground with tests to identify the presence of the bug. As I’ve written before, though, the total is an ever-moving goalpost. Power-hungry politicos shout in blood-curdling tones of a death rate of 7% and millions in the morgue. The omnibus total, however, is a product of an incomplete denominator because of the lack of sufficient antibody testing and an unacknowledged ignorance of when the bug entered the US. However, today, everywhere you look, the number of cases is swelling. People had it, didn’t know they had it, recovered, and went on with their lives. Thus, early and many later prognostications were a sham. But shams can be politically useful.
John Hurt as Winston Smith, in the Ministry of Truth, from the movie “1984”.
Do we really know what we are doing? I’m beginning to doubt it. We over-confidently proclaim our omniscience, scorn unintended consequences, and blindly march into catastrophe. We are proving that science and fact are as easily manipulated as Winston Smith discovered in Orwell’s 1984.
President Xi Jinping of Red China and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. What do they have in common? Answer: authoritarian power. Xi’s power naturally comes to him because he’s a communist. Whitmer’s comes from her habit – the same one belonging to all progressives – of never letting a crisis go to waste.
Progressives are always on the lookout for a “moral equivalent of war”. It’s in their philosophical DNA. They can’t help themselves. The reason is simple. They need to invent or manipulate a crisis to shock the public into accepting a transfer of immense power to them to remake society according to their lights. It’s not Constitutional; it’s dangerously extra-constitutional.
The coronavirus presents the perfect opportunity for them to seize the golden apple of power. I suspect that the belief is at the root of the early and grossly misleading casualty prognostications and Pelosi and Schumer’s obstructionism. The Great American Shutdown is really another example of the Great American Hijack of a crisis — or a recurring primer on how to expand the power of the state to control and direct the population.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi during the impeachment-palooza.
At nearly every opportunity, the progressives’ drive to expand state power shows in their budget proposals, their choice of interest group allies – totalitarian environmentalists, public sector unions, college faculties, the plaintiff’s bar, the misnamed civil rights lobby, etc. – and in their nonstop endeavors to obstruct Trump and Republicans. The progressives’ earlier grand design for our life, before they had the coronavirus, was the Green New Deal. Now they have a pandemic to play with.
William James in 1906 coined the phrase “moral equivalent of war” as a rallying cry for progressives to use to gain power. Ocasio-Cortez is the latest progressive/socialist political barker to embrace the tactic.Ocasio-Cortez drumming up support for her Green New Deal version of the “moral equivalent of war”.
The scheme is becoming clearer now that we have more information about the disease and its spread. Gloom and doom were leveraged for a power grab. The seizure of power to kill an economy was publicly justified because of predictions of 2 million deaths in the US. Others in the field of epidemiology blew the whistle. Dr. Eran Bendavid and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford brought to light the key flaw in the Cassandras’ cries (Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, Washington Examiner). The exaggerated estimates were a product of good algebra and BAD numbers. Known deaths were compared to the number of known cases. But we don’t know the ACTUAL number of cases. We can’t know because we don’t even know when the virus entered the US and haven’t performed enough antibody tests to give us a clue.
The first known case of COVID-19 in the US has been pushed back to Feb. 6 as based on recent antibody tests in Santa Clara County, which probably means that the virus was circulating in California as early as January given the virus’s 2-week gestation rate (LA Times). That is the state of play now. Who knows how much earlier as more antibody tests are conducted? The trajectory is earlier, not later.
Point: Known cases of infection is an ever-expanding number as we uncover more subjects with the antibody, which profoundly alters the morbidity rate downward. So, 4% becomes .5% and then becomes ..?.. The progressives’ dream of a shock-and-awe campaign to drive the public into their utopia is disintegrating as the morbidity rate plummets.
So, what of the validity of the Great American Shutdown? I can’t blame any public official for acting on the information at hand. Still, more caution should have been evident till a better picture takes shape, especially if rendering unconscious a nation’s economy is contemplated. Many of us will come out of the Shutdown only to face foreclosure, bankruptcy, and unemployment. Broad despair at Great Depression levels is hardly justified to curb a health threat that nobody could honestly describe … except those who are eager to be dishonest in order to socially engineer their vision of the better world.
Chinese experts fighting the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at the front line meet the press via a video press conference, introducing treatment of the COVID-19, in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, March 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)
Not long ago, I learned of a person who was recently berated by an older acquaintance for his parents not practicing the dictats of shelter-in-place and the wearing of masks. The story is believable in the context of citations and/or arrests of a dad teaching his daughter to throw a baseball in a “closed” park or a surfer trying to catch a wave off a “closed” public beach. The pundit Kevin D. Williamson says that this is “ratfink” America at work. Today, America seems to be experiencing a major rat infestation. Why so many rats? The problem can be laid at the feet of the cult of the “expert”. Let me explain.
I’ve written of this before. America has acceded to the rule of “experts”, and the defenestration of popular sovereignty. Cop, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are united in the person of a civil service employee or political appointee wrapped in protection from popular accountability. We as citizens are increasingly out of the picture. We are left to the election of the participants in an increasingly meaningless debating society called Congress. We are habituated to the situation by the unceasing pounding of all things progressive in public schools’ curriculums and teacher training. The same weltanschauung permeates the popular culture.
A flow chart of the Progressive administrative state.
The “expert” is at the root of the scheme. The “expert” is degreed, preferably with a PhD. How did the master climb the mountain of high status? First, he or she jumped through the hoops of college general ed courses heavily burdened with victimology. Speaking of a pathogen, the matriculant was inculcated with the ideology by exposure to entire academic departments that are infected with it. Some owe their existence to the ideology: the Rainbow Coalition departments (Women’s Studies, etc.). They aren’t “studies” as much as they are ideology platforms. The Humanities and Social Sciences are particularly fetid. Remember this the next time you are treated by a doctor (MD that is) younger than you.
For instance, History – a subject I am most familiar – is often treated as a Progressivism apology tour. Nothing good happened till Eugene Debs, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the beatification of environmentalism in the sixties.
There you have it for the typical college student before they devote the rest of their university sojourn – the majority of it – to their area of expertise, now that the corrupted general ed stuff is out of the way. That other stuff (general ed) is in the rear view mirror as they motor to their graduation and post-graduate destinations. The degree will certify their place in the pantheon of “experts”.
The word “expert” is an interesting one in today’s world. Really, in essence, an “expert” is a specialist. They have to be; the human mind is capable of absorbing only so much. For example, the explosion of knowledge in Biology has led to sub-categories, with sub-sub-categories, broken into sub-sub-sub-categories. Ditto for Computer Science and every other department in the college catalogue. The longer one stays in college to get that souped-up graduate degree, the more specialized the subject gets.
The intelligent design folks – much despised by died-in-the-wool Darwinists – have popularized the concept of irreducible complexity: a cell retains its complexity as we go deeper into its structure, thus drawing into question the necessary small adaptions for traditional Darwinian evolution to function. But the subject’s complexity also leads to a profusion of specialties. More true today than ever, experts are specialists!
Dr. Michael Behe of intelligent design and irreducible complexity fame vs. Darwin.
Soon we get the denizen of the administrative state whose forte is commonly limited to a very narrow slice of life. Yet, they have exaggerated importance in policy making that effects all aspects of a people’s existence. During this period of pandemic, naturally, experts whose bias is oriented toward epidemiology and medicine – and some things ideological as well – dictate policy that can destroy the economic and social parts of life. That’s the danger posed by specialists.
Ergo, the Great American Shutdown. For the expert, it’s an essential response. For everyone else facing their dictats, it’s a ravaged existence. A degreed, salaried, high-income person with substantial financial assets can afford to ride out the storm. It isn’t true for anyone whose kids, mortgage, and car payment requires a regular paycheck. These folks are ruined.
The specialized expert defines the parameters of risk when a situation falls within their wheelhouse. As one would expect, their explication of risk conforms to the sole regard of medical health. Their definition is much less considerate of different levels of risk due to circumstance. People who ride bikes run a higher risk of getting mauled by a 2-ton car than an aged pedestrian on his evening constitutional. An independent plumber comes into contact with more pathogens than a Google coder. Some are more willing to accept risk because their livelihoods require it. But the plumber doesn’t have the ear of Trump, Pelosi, McConnell, or Schumer as much as Anthony Fouci and the faculty of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Understandable? Yes, but the stew of policy demands other ingredients. Without the other additives, you might get poison.
What does the exalted role of expert get us? We all too often get a dose of scientific fact with a large smattering of personal bias. The hyper-charged politics of crafting policy brings out the worst in everybody, including our “experts”. Confirmation bias runs wild among media mavens who are on the lookout for experts to help them wield their ideological axes. So, if you are a writer with homeschoolers in his or her crosshairs, there’s no shortage of ed and psyche types with PhD’s attached to their names who are nothing but activists masquerading as experts.
If you are looking for an egregious example of same, look no further than Harvard Magazine, May-June 2020, “The Risks of Homeschooling”, by Erin O’Donnell (thanks Kevin D. Williamson for the heads up). The whole thing is a tome for ripping children from their parents and home and placing their upbringing in the hands of the government’s employees and schools. Stalin, Mao, and the rest of the 20th-century’s walk of shame would be proud.
Fact: Human beings with PhD’s after their names are still human beings. Plus, their specialties come with blinders. An epidemic should place public health experts at the head of the table. Just make sure that the other seats are filled with people of more well-rounded perspectives. If done right, we might come to conclude that the Great American Shutdown was a huge mistake.
I wish that we could delist California Conservative from the list of endangered species but their numbers keep falling. While listening to National Review’s Radio Free California podcast with Will Swaim, (President of California Policy Center, a center/right think tank and legal organization in Tustin, Ca.) and John Eastman (former Dean of Chapman University School of Law and Founding Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence in Ca.), I learned that Eastman flew the Southern California coop for Santa Fe, New Mexico. Furthermore, in a prior podcast, in a quick off-handed remark between Swaim and co-host David Bahnsen (Managing Director of the Bahnsen Group), both admitted to the fact that they didn’t know of anyone who didn’t have a plan to leave the state.
Speaking of caravans, Eastman has apparently joined the 4-decade-long crowd of middle-class refugees who have fled to points beyond the reach of Sacramento.
It’s more than a footnote in the sorry tale of the decline of the once-Golden State. The state increasingly resembles a feudal rat’s nest of masses of the poor and the super-rich protected behind the walls of their gated enclaves, as all of it sits atop a decaying infrastructure.
For many decades now, the majority of the people of the state have politically chosen rot … and the creation of millions wishing to escape. Sounds like Venezuela.
Visitors to the New York Department of Labor are turned away at the door by personnel due to closures over coronavirus concerns on Wednesday. (photo: John Minchillo/AP Photo)
Turn on the tv, go online, or listen to the radio and the drumbeat is the same: “We are up against the wall with this virus and must do all that we can to defeat it.” Left out of the harangue is the presence of another wall. It is just as real. It is the societal one containing 99% of life. We are about to crash headlong into it as we avoid the illness and any accompanying deaths.
Is it wise to put the social and economic part of life – our society – in an induced coma for a prolonged period, till the utopian near-zero infection rate is attained? The goal, like the communist one of a classless society, is a destructive impossibility; one fraught with social and economic collapse. In a real coma, muscles and body systems atrophy. Bans on funerals, weddings, prayer services and communion, Little League, outings to the park, everything that makes us fully human, will leave a scar. Zoom is no substitute for flesh and blood interaction, as some of us may grow too accustomed to the social isolation. Will social isolation become the new normal for more of us?
In addition, a months-long timeout from work is a headlong dash into an economic wall. Skills and the work ethic atrophy. Businesses close, many forever. Many of us will be thrown into a long period of unemployment. The single-minded avoidance of a disease will mean the defeat of the illness at the cost of the livelihoods of millions. What are the health effects of wrecking the personal lives of millions? Imagine it.
Looking to the federal government to paper over the growing hole in production (the stuff of business) with, literally, make-believe money is an excursion into the mind of a child. You can’t divorce the growth of the money supply from the growth in the production of wealth. Dumping truckloads of money to fill a hole in production will only make the money worthless, if it doesn’t break the financial back of future generations. We replace the virus monster with two other monsters: a gargantuan national debt and Venezuelan inflation. Now that’s another real, unavoidable wall for you.
German children build a pyramid with stacks of inflated currency in 1923.
Even the economic guru of the Democratic Party, John Maynard Keynes, counseled against what Democrats, and the collective wisdom (?) of DC, habitually do: spend, spend, spend. Keynes advised governments to save in good times and spend in bad. We don’t save; it’s spend, spend, spend regardless. We’ve got the back end of his advice down pat, and pretend he didn’t say anything else.
The situation has taken on the characteristics of totalitarianism. My wife and her sister were returning a couple of days ago from California (for a very good reason, trust me) and confronted a sign on the door of a gas-‘n-shop in a lonely quarter of the California desert near the border with Nevada. It read, “Anybody shopping without wearing a mask will be arrested.” Stopping the coronavirus means complimenting the Communist Party of China with the adoption of their approach to governance.
Paramilitary officers wearing face masks to contain the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus walk along a street in Beijing, China, March 18, 2020. (photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)
The wall of illness and death isn’t the only one that we face. Crashing into the wall of our social life and economic realities is just as real. Those economic cinder blocks, in particular, can’t be made to magically disappear in the same manner as the first half of Keynes’s advice. Apparently, I was wrong in thinking that the belief in magic was on its way out with the Scientific Revolution.
On a 2 ½ hour trip to Missoula (Mt.) to pickup a gun that I ordered – oh how that might send some cosmopolitan types to the safe space of their prejudices – I was listening to Fox News on XM Radio. It was wall-to-wall coverage of the coronavirus … and how many different ways to spin dread. No matter where you go, CNN or MSNBC or the legacy networks, it’s the same ridiculously excessive treatment. Is there any serious audit of the proof to justify either the over-the-top monopoly of airtime or the extraordinary step of shutting down American society? From where I sit, I haven’t heard much questioning of the base reasons. So, I slashed my watching and listening to news channels and turned to entertainment offerings. I’m happier.
What do you get for all the coverage? You get a Freddy Krueger script from dusk to dusk. Mind you, The Nightmare on Elm Street was fiction, but so might be much of the newsroom chatter that makes its way to our tv screens. Horror is manufactured with numbers from a process similar to the one at Bingo Night at the senior center and plugged into predictions of a resurgence of the 14th-century Black Death, only later within the blink of an eye having to ratchet down the apocalypse from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1. The whipsaw has become so routine that a person is left in a constant state of bewilderment. I’m skeptical about anyone claiming to know the state of play.
The possibility that much of the coverage could be facetious might be due to the distortions from geographic isolation by our top-drawer media organizations. Many of their denizens look outside their New York City, or Acela corridor, offices and see coronavirus hell. No doubt, the situation has developed as an urban – more than that, cosmopolitan – phenomena. Yet, it is through these highly susceptible locations for pandemics that we receive our window to the world.
Conversely, people in the rest of the country look around and see restaurants shuttered, workers at home without work, their hospitals not teeming with the sick and dying but veritable ghost towns, people who venture out wearing N95 masks or looking like bank robbers, and eerily empty streets. Everyone is made to be spooked by a view of the world from New York. Should, though, everyone be scared to that degree in that manner? I am beginning to doubt it. To borrow from a Las Vegas ad, what happens in New York should stay in New York.
A health worker carries a dead body of a COVID-19 victim to container morgues in Brooklyn, New York.(TAYFUN COSKUN/ANADOLU AGENCY)
These purveyors in the concentrated epicenters of the epidemic have at their disposal the new bane of rational thought: statistical modeling. Not that statistical modeling isn’t useful. The problem lies in the raw data that’s shoved into them and the conclusions without profound qualifications that will accompany them. Back in 1979, I took a data processing class – yes, such a thing existed in 1979 – and was introduced to the acronym GIGO, garbage in and garbage out. Models are formulas put in lines of computer code. Sometimes the models are cracked, but more times than not it’s the numbers that are fed into them. Math doesn’t have a mind. It just does what we tell it do, and if we ask it to crunch bad numbers, it will do it. Models don’t peer into the mind of God. They are a reflection of our imperfect mind.
Mental garbage (in and out) is driving our public conversations. The embroidering that surrounds the talk on climate change is fed by the rubbish. The mangled logic goes forward in time as well as backwards. Either the barkers are captives of recent and present temp readings to put future global temperatures on an exponential rocket trajectory, or they’re soothsayers reading the entrails of ice cores, tree rings, or rock strata going back millennia to defend their preconceived future rocket trajectory. Probably both. Models don’t correct for the flaw; they exacerbate it. It’s done all the time now that we are powered by “Intel inside”. It’s still the same though: garbage goes into the chip and garbage comes out. The pronouncements are accepted by the mathematically illiterate as God speaking through the burning bush.
The virus from China breeds quickly in particular conditions, and so does loosey-goosey modeling during pandemics. In the case of the current illness, we have cases and deaths. What qualifies as a “case” and “death” varies from place to place. It varies according to the honesty in official places and the availability of honest-to-God and modern clinics in every village. Do you think both exist in adequate quantities everywhere on the globe? We shouldn’t take to heart any “global” numbers.
We shouldn’t take to heart Germany’s, Italy’s, especially China’s, and many numbers coming out of the US. Disaggregating the cause of death from a patient with multiple life-threatening conditions can be as complicated as unraveling the Gordian Knot. I don’t know if all nations even conduct a COVID-19 test upon death. I suspect many don’t. Some nations might be just plain promiscuous in assigning deaths to the virus. Some places test more people as others assess only those who walk into the hospital; therefore, morbidity rates bounce around like flubber (“The Absent-Minded Professor”, 1961). Then, the “experts” average the flubber and plug it into the “model”. Out of the formula comes the ski slope on graph paper at press conferences. And we have a shutdown of world society and an end to respect for the concept of livelihoods.
The professionals in white smocks then tell us that livelihoods must take a back seat to an all-out effort to prevent us from getting sick, as if nothing else matters. It’s another sign of the myopia of the professional. The “expert” may be a great doctor of medicine but understandably more limited in passing judgment in the social and economic realms. Doc may be great at treating your fever but don’t ask him or her about advice on adjusting your investment portfolio. Nonetheless, for the medical master, it’s a siren call to stop the virus at all costs, with one of those costs being our livelihoods.
The professional has a mental reflex to ignore the recognition of different levels of risk that accrue to people according to their varying personal circumstances. The self-employed plumber needs to generate income each week and is willing to take more risk. No, he mustn’t be allowed, the medical pro tells us. A single all-encompassing risk of zero is imposed on everyone, everywhere. Of course, the salaried, the whizzes with degrees, and jet-set crowd are much more financially secure and occupationally situated to handle zero-risk at little loss. Not true of anyone else. Yet, it’s the blinkered and biased view of the medical poohbah that counts.
Okay, okay, a health crisis demands the centrality of the medical professional. It’s not the importance of the doctor in a situation like this in question here. It’s the tendency not to temper their counsel with other voices. An epidemic has many implications and their acknowledgement should also have a role in the sausage-making of a government response. We should balance the concern about the spread of the disease with the quality of life after it. Yeah, we will have our life after the contagion, but will it be a life worth admiring?
Is this a scene we want to repeat after the pandemic?
Should an epidemic – one in which we don’t have an accurate picture of its extent and severity – be an excuse to destroy your job, your ability to make your way in the world? Is everything reduced to a risk level compatible to a person comfortable with zero, and with the outsized influence to impose it? Is it proper to stampede the populace with erroneous numbers, models, and projections, only to destroy occupations that made life worth living for millions? Surely, the pile of lost livelihoods will mightily surpass the body count the longer the Great American Shutdown persists. There are alternatives.
What should be done? Open up American life now, with caveats. Implement the measures of testing, masks, social distancing where practical, while recognizing locational differences. Start by loosening the shackles in geographical areas less affected and in critical industries. From there, phase in the opening of society as the severity warrants. The goal should be a resumption of life, sooner rather than later, even as we acknowledge that doing so involves risk. “Bending the curve” should apply to livelihoods as well as the infected.
Risk is part of life. Zero risk is utopian, and “utopia” is translated from the Greek to mean “no-place”. In other words, zero risk in unattainable. And when it is pursued, catastrophe is the result. Keep this in mind as you watch the parade of color commentators of the medical profession in the wall-to-wall coverage on COVID-19.
The Duomo di Milano (Cathedral of Milan) before the pandemic and after. (Business Insider)
Most of the pundits in my universe seem to be predicting an end to the virus shutdown in most places by the end of summer at the earliest. I don’t know. For many of those heavily populated blue states with big balance sheets and paper-thin operating margins, the shutdown would be hard to survive past three weeks. They are in a tug-of-war between bloated spending and deflating revenues on the one hand and an epidemic on the other. They may be stuck in a conundrum of bankruptcy or deaths.
Looking past the peril of fiscal calamity facing blue states, what started in Wuhan, China, ought to begin a rethink about life after the pandemic. Here’s my list of what “ought” to be under consideration – not what will be considered – as we look past the Great American Shutdown.
First, the social ramifications. Living in cities has always carried the risks – to go along with all the positives – of crime, family disruption, many vices, and pollution. We are experiencing the lightning spread of a communicable disease as another of them. A teeming critical mass of people is a breeding ground for disease. Recently, the big cities have experienced a renaissance of popularity at the expense of small towns and rural areas. Well, 20-somethings, you might want to reconsider. A cheek-by-jowl existence in a densely packed area radiates infectious diseases at the speed of a tidal wave.
Visually compare a US map of H1N1 infections with a map of coronavirus infections. Infections concentrate in metropolitan and coastal areas.
H1N1 of 2009
The coronavirus of 2020.
Furthermore, our cities are meccas for immigration – jobs being the powerful magnet. A diverse and globalized population is one with the most interactions with large swaths of the outside world. Many conduits exist for the entry of pathogens into these crowded places of people with many foreign relations. If we are to have large-scale immigration, it must come with large-scale screening. If we lack the means to screen the influx, we ought to reduce the number to a manageable level.
A large caravan of migrants from Central America, trying to reach the U.S., walks along a road Oct. 21, 2018, in Tapachula, Mexico. (CNS photo/Reuters/Ueslei Marclino)
Second, the economic ramifications. Free trade, with modifications, is too good a deal to pass up. We need it to discipline our unions (public and private sector), rent seeking, and crony capitalists. But free trade with a totalitarian regime that recognizes no private sphere of life comes close to being a non sequitur. Free trade becomes impossible, unless you are committed to a prostrate position before Chinese Communist imperial ambitions. Our free trade orthodoxy should make more allowance for national security and economic viability. The virus should remind us of the CCP’s nature and our past complicity in boosting them. End the complicity, boost the skepticism.
In this vein, “decoupling” is the talk of the town. Some economic distancing from the CCP is warranted if for no reason than our wish to not run out of Advil.
Reducing our economic interactions with the CCP also means the construction of a strategic cordon of nations around them. Strategic alliances often begin as commercial ones. Draw to us the nations most at risk of being swallowed up in a Chinese version of Japan’s Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1930’s and 40’s. The TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), far from Trump’s claim to be one of the “worst trade deals ever”, was an essential step in the pivot to Asia to counter Red Chinese hegemony. However Trump wishes to pursue it, he needs to stop the barroom philosophy and resurrect the concept with a vengeance. Our experience with the China’s virus, and the CCP’s secretive response to it, demands a rethink of our relationship.
Third, the political ramifications. Low-and-behold, federalism works. Top-down control from DC, covering America’s 3.8 million square miles, is a farce. Democrats love the idea especially when they sit atop the 3 branches in DC, even though it’s insane for a country that stretches across a continent and ocean. This isn’t France (7% of the land area of the US) or the Isle of Britain (2%).
In our system, this is recognized in the parceling of the country into sovereign states. Yes, they are “sovereign”, meaning that they have constitutionally established powers. An important one in this moment is the “police powers”. When most of us think of crime, I’ll bet that 90% of the time we are thinking of the kind passing through our local PD’s, DA’s, and local/state courts without realizing it. Charles Manson and his sick and murderous “family” experienced the justice of the state of California, not the kind issued from federal headquarters in DC. Get the point?
Charles Manson is escorted to court for preliminary hearing on December 3, 1969 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by John Malmin/Los Angeles Times)
Three Manson Family murderers: Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. 1971.
The dispersal of power in our federalism system reaffirms Tip O’Neill’s (D, Mass., Speaker of the House in the 70’s and 80’s) “all politics is local”. Not every state wants a looney-bin government as in California. That thing was chosen by the sovereign residents of that sovereign state — and maybe some foreign nationals as well. Other states have chosen to be less inclined to flout the 2nd Amendment, be so tax-happy, and be so bewitched by the science fiction of apocalyptic global warming. States can adjust to their circumstances … and craziness. Thus, a near-quarantine in New York shouldn’t be copied in Kansas, a state with few coronavirus cases.
Crises are thought to be prime opportunities for the centralization of power. Well, maybe that is more empty legend than anything else. Right now, people are seeing their governors taking action and sharing equal time with Trump’s daily briefing. It’s a visual reminder of the Civics education that many didn’t get in high school for many reasons having little to do with the classroom (lack of parental oversight being one). It’s an excellent counterpoint to the adolescent elevation of the president to demigod status.
The president doesn’t rule by divine right. He’s constrained by separation of powers as everyone is – or should be – in the federal Leviathan. The public got another Civics lesson when Congress was debating the virus relief bill, which the Democrats tried to change from “relief” to their favorite of “social engineering”. In addition, they got a huge dose of the sloppy sausage-making that is natural to any gathering of people who don’t agree. A White House Caesar has to wait for the butchers to deliver the sausage – i.e., money. His powers to throw money at the problem are quite limited. The power of the purse, after decades of progressive/socialist erosion, still has a heartbeat.
As for the Democrats in DC (the hypothetical “loyal opposition”), the word for their state of mind is not so much “cooperation” as “revolution”. The crisis has smoked them out as revolutionary opportunists. They seem to be following the historical precedent of Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Lenin wanted the War (WWI) to continue to go badly for Russia to create anarchy and more misery. Sound familiar? The House Dems tried to jam down the throats of the American public elements of the Green New Deal, many gambits of rabid wokeness, and slush funds for lefty sacred cows (PBS and NPR, etc.). I have doubts regarding the appetizing nature of this sausage to a broader audience.
In fact, the metaphor of sausage is very apropos when thinking about our whole polity from Anchorage to Miami. It’s an affront to the neat, tidy, and sterile designs of people like Woodrow Wilson, our first PhD social scientist president. For him, efficiency in government meant corralling our elected representatives into a corner in order to carve out more power for a clerisy of “experts” who are ensconced in the executive branch and courts. The scheme only makes sense to a progressive if they are in charge, something not completely true today. Still, ever since, every so-called “progressive” is wrapped in the same mental straitjacket all the way down to Obama and Pelosi and company. It won’t work, and oughtn’t work.
The virus should be a wake-up call. The free market sausage should contain more than meat. The immigration policy sausage should recognize that too much isn’t good for you. The city sausage might profit from shorter dimensions, and more production of the rural and town kind. The federal sausage could benefit from a dispersal of manufacturing from DC to the hinterland. In these ways, we can avoid a singular and all-encompassing sausage supply chain infecting all of us with contaminated meat, there being no alternatives after the attainment of Wilson’s dream.
New York’s Gov. Cuomo – a self-proclaimed “progressive” – is misleading when he says that the country after the pandemic will experience a “new normal”. The “new normal” ought not be so much a new outlook on life as the realization of the bankruptcy of his ideology and its policy proscriptions.
