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.
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.
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?
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.
RogerG