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.
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.
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.
Progressives, shame, shame on you.
RogerG