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It's Not Hypocrisy: Mitch McConnell's Machinations Are Something Far More Degrading. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48566"><span class="small">Lili Loofbourow, Slate</span></a>
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Monday, 21 September 2020 12:44 |
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Loofbourow writes: "There shouldn't have been any mystery about what Mitch McConnell - of all people - would do when a Supreme Court vacancy opened up six weeks before Election Day of 2020."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks to members of the media on September 9, 2020 in Washington, DC. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
It's Not Hypocrisy: Mitch McConnell's Machinations Are Something Far More Degrading.
By Lili Loofbourow, Slate
21 September 20
Mitch McConnell’s machinations are something far more degrading.
 was watching the president of the United States suggest to a mostly maskless crowd that a Democratic congresswoman had married her brother when the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. The shock of her death sledgehammered a country teetering on an ugly and desperate edge. It came in waves. It wasn’t merely the loss to the country, or the sadness that a champion of equal rights had died. Nor was it the fact that an increasingly corrupt Republican Party is very close to forcing through the judicial supermajority it needs in order to lock in minority rule and overturn American women’s right to reproductive choice. (You will no doubt hear often in the coming weeks that, of the five conservative Supreme Court justices, four were nominated by presidents who had lost the popular vote.) There was a flashback to the contempt and grief Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing aroused in so many appalled onlookers. And then there was the dread of realizing that a citizenry breaking—financially, politically, even cognitively—under five different kinds of instability was going to have to endure more. We have been in a bad way for a long time, but this is the hurricane on top of the wildfire that follows the earthquake.
What’s enraging is that we shouldn’t be here. We have institutions and norms and precedents, so what should happen next is almost absurdly plain. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made his thinking on the subject quite clear back in 2016, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, nine months before the election. “The American people? should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” he said. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” There shouldn’t have been any mystery about what Mitch McConnell—of all people—would do when a Supreme Court vacancy opened up six weeks (rather than nine months) before Election Day of 2020.
And there wasn’t. Shortly after Ginsburg’s death was announced, McConnell declared his intentions: Trump’s nominee would receive a vote in the Senate, and though he left the timing slightly unclear, he has no intention of letting the will of the American people (who have already started voting) determine what should happen. He made quick work of the optimists on Twitter suggesting that he surely wouldn’t be so hellbent on total power that he’d risk destroying the country by breaking the precedent he himself had articulated. Wrong. He would. And anyone who took him at his word when he rejected Merrick Garland’s nomination was made a fool when he reversed himself on the question of whether (to quote the man himself) “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”
I want to pause here to note, humbly, that it is wounding to watch a public servant reduce those who take him at his word to fools. I mention that not because it “matters” in any sense McConnell would recognize but because it is simply true that this nation’s decline accelerates when the conventional wisdom becomes that believing what the Senate Majority Leader says is self-evidently foolish. The chestnut that politicians always lie is overstated—a society depends on some degree of mutual trust. One party has embraced nihilism, pilloried trust, and turned good faith into a sucker’s failing in a sucker’s game.
Many of us are coping with that lacerating redefinition by knowingly rolling our eyes. Ginsburg’s death hurts, but more than one strain of political grief is operative. This is why so many political reactions at present seem to orbit around the question of whether an unwanted outcome was unexpected. “And you’re surprised?” is a frequent response to some new instance of Trumpian corruption. This brand of cynicism has spread, quite understandably: It’s an outlook that provides some cognitive shelter in a situation that—having historically been at least somewhat rule-bound—has one side shredding the rules and cheering at how much they’re winning. Folks who at one point gave Republican declarations of principle the benefit of the doubt (I include myself) feel like chumps now. Conversely, the cynical prognosticators who used to seem crabbed and paranoid just keep getting proven right. Whatever the worst thing you imagine McConnell doing might be, he can usually trump it.
Just by way of example: A former White House official told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer for a piece in April that McConnell reassured donors that he would install a Supreme Court justice for Trump regardless of how close to the election Ginsburg’s death might be. He apparently referred to the prospect of replacing Ginsburg in the event of her death as “our October surprise.” In 2019, McConnell gleefully tweeted a photo of some tombstones, one of which had Merrick Garland’s name on it—hours after a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which 23 people died. He has said that stopping Garland’s nomination is the proudest moment of his career. It’s uniquely painful that this is the person architecting Ginsburg’s replacement in violation of his own contemptible theories.
I am not saying anything new here. But what I am interested in, because I think it must be understood, and because the stakes of it have never been higher, is what McConnellizing does, affectively, to so many American citizens. What it feels like, in other words. We are overdue for a real reckoning with what it means to be degraded by our own leadership. And make no mistake: It is degrading when people lie to you openly and obviously. Leaving the polity aside for a moment, it’s the kind of emotion we humans aren’t great at coping with. Sometimes we react by snorting at anyone who expects any better (that is again the “you’re surprised?” cynicism). But if you can’t cover it with cynicism, it simply hurts.
Shall we experience being degraded together? Here is the justification McConnell offered shortly after Ginsburg died for violating his own rule:
In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.
This last sentence—which you will recognize as the heart of McConnell’s argument—is a lie. But before I supply the dull fact proving that it is a lie, I’d like us to pause and notice the extent to which whatever I am about to say will not factor into how you feel reading the above. Whatever I say, it will not provide you relief for me to demonstrate that this tortured reasoning McConnell supplied is horseshit. You are already meant to understand it as horseshit. That’s the insult. That’s where one part of what I guess we could call patriotic pain comes from.
OK, now for the dull facts: What McConnell says in that statement is not true. In 1988 (an election year!), the Democratically controlled Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy—President Ronald Reagan’s nominee to the Supreme Court. McConnell tried to circumvent this reality by crafting his new rule to exclude any vacancy “that arose” in an election year (Lewis Powell retired in late 1987).
Does an exercise like this leave us anywhere? I think it might. I think we have a habit of misnaming political experiences in ways that help us metabolize loss. I think, for example, that we have a bad habit of calling McConnell’s double standard—which will be devastating to a country already struggling through various legitimacy crises—“hypocrisy.” And sure, step onto Twitter after Lindsey Graham also unabashedly went back on his own word and you’ll see many a person rolling their eyes at anyone pointing out that Republicans are hypocrites, as if it matters. One can sympathize with the eye-rollers—of course hypocrisy doesn’t matter. But that’s mostly because hypocrisy isn’t the word for what this is. Hypocrisy is a mild failing. It applies to parents smoking when they advise their kids not to for their own good; it does not apply to parents lighting the family home on fire for the insurance money while high-fiving each other over how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was true.
When Ginsburg died, those whose rights she championed were caught in a cruel double bind. Raging against the indecent replacement effort feels wrong, because raging before it happens can feel like implicitly conceding. Treating the matter dispassionately, on the other hand, sensibly pointing out that McConnell has stated clearly what should happen, means granting him a good-faith reading he does not deserve. Thanks to the swiftness with which he declared his intentions, we are no longer under any obligation to attempt the latter. All that remains is to let honest anger do what it must.
It will not help to call the leadership we have right now hypocrites; they will not care, and I doubt the charge will motivate the people who need to be motivated much. But insofar as our own reactions are concerned—and while we think about how to counter an obvious and ugly attempt to steal the Supreme Court seat of a feminist champion of equal rights even as Americans have already started voting—it may help to register the lies they tell you as the calculated insults to your intelligence and to your citizenship and to your country that they are. Fully witnessing and registering insults and degradation is more painful than sneering that you aren’t surprised. But I’ll be blunt: People are more willing to fight people who insult and degrade them than they are to fight mere “hypocrites.”
We deserve better than this. I confess I had no personal feelings about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing; my admiration and gratitude were purely professional and civic. But I found this quote—a response to Irin Carmon asking her how she’d like to be remembered—deeply moving: “Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has.”
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44 Years Ago Today, Chilean Socialist Orlando Letelier Was Assassinated on US Soil |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56316"><span class="small">Alan McPherson, Jacobin</span></a>
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Monday, 21 September 2020 12:44 |
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Excerpt: "On September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former minister in Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile who was forced into exile after the US-backed coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, was assassinated by a car bomb in the heart of Washington, DC."
Orlando Letelier was a Chilean ambassador to the United States and minister under Salvador Allende. He and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed in the US on September 21, 1976 by a car bomb. (photo: Jacobin)
44 Years Ago Today, Chilean Socialist Orlando Letelier Was Assassinated on US Soil
By Alan McPherson, Jacobin
21 September 20
On September 21, 1976, Orlando Letelier, a former minister in Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile who was forced into exile after the US-backed coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, was assassinated by a car bomb in the heart of Washington, DC.
The US-backed 1973 coup against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende resulted in Allende’s death and the torture and murder of thousands of leftists throughout the country. But the brutality of the new regime, headed by General Augusto Pinochet, didn’t stop with the coup.
In coordination with other right-wing dictatorships in South America such as Brazil and Argentina, Pinochet would soon launch Operation Condor, a hemisphere-wide campaign of political violence — backed by the United States — against leftists. Estimates of the exact number of deaths as a result of the operation range widely, but have been put as high as sixty thousand.
One of those deaths was that of Orlando Letelier. Letelier was a Chilean ambassador to the United States and minister under Allende who was jailed in Chile after the coup. He and his family were living in exile in the United States on September 21, 1976, when a bomb hidden in his car exploded as he drove through Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, killing Letelier along with his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt and injuring her husband Michael.
Historian Alan McPherson tells the story of the assassination, along with its lead-up and aftermath, in Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice.
The following is adapted from Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice by Alan McPherson.
 ong before September 21, 1976, far from home in Washington, DC, Orlando Letelier’s wife Isabel had experienced a political transformation. Through law school friends, some from Venezuela during its era of dictatorship from 1948 to 1958, “I got my political education,” Isabel Letelier recently recalled. “It was the first time I had ever really heard about dictatorship and torture, about corporations keeping more than their share, about nationalization of natural resources. Orlando himself was talking about copper belonging to the Chileans.?.?.?. That was an awakening.”
She told Orlando she considered herself on the “Christian left,” but she couldn’t find a party to join.
Letelier remembered his second year of university as his own awakening. “The truth is that, when I was young, politics mattered little to me, even less so socialism.” As he read more and had long discussions with Salvador Allende, then a senator, and others, he grew a social conscience and joined the Socialist Party. Early on in their relationship, he told Isabel that finding out about the extraction of copper, Chile’s primary export, by foreign corporations was “a blow to my heart.”
Allende lost the 1958 presidential election but kept running in the 1960s. Letelier’s connection to the Marxist, however, spelled personal disaster. Not only was he fired from the copper department where he worked, but also he was told, “Do not waste any time trying to find a job with this government. You are not going to find a job from north to south. You are being punished for being a traitor to your class. This is a lesson you should learn now when you are young.” The Leteliers were resourceful. Three months after Letelier lost his job, in late 1959, he and the family left for Venezuela, where his exiled friends were now back and in power and offered him a position with the Vollmer Group doing market studies. Soon after, the governments of the Americas created the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, and its first president happened to be Letelier’s former law professor, Felipe Herrera. He offered Orlando a job.
At 3 AM one day in late 1970, the whole clan at Chile Chico, the Leteliers’ cottage in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, was awakened by Isabel’s shouts: “Allende won!”
Their old Chilean friend, the physician, senator, and head of a leftist coalition called Popular Unity, had pulled off the feat of winning Chile’s presidency while openly Marxist.
Letelier, following the results from Washington, immediately drove out to the Shenandoah Valley, honking his horn as he approached the property. Isabel and he hugged.
“I’ve decided to resign my post at the IDB —”
Isabel cut him off: “— We’re going back to Chile!?”
Not quite. Orlando did fly back, and Isabel began to pack up the house. Upon his return to Washington, however, he announced a change of plans. “How great that you’ve got everything ready, but the trip will be a bit shorter than planned. Instead of changing countries, we’re changing states: from Maryland to Washington!”
Allende had named Orlando, among his most loyal followers, Chile’s new ambassador to the United States. In February 1971, the Leteliers moved from the suburb of Bethesda to the ambassador’s residence inside the District of Columbia, on Massachusetts Avenue, beginning three tumultuous years that mirrored those in Chile.
The Right Man for the Job
Allende’s Marxist agenda was on a collision course with Washington’s. His very victory showed a democratic path to socialism that challenged US interests. Once in office, he became friendly with Cuba and other communist regimes. Allende also planned to nationalize US-owned copper mines.
In retaliation, the Richard Nixon government, through its CIA and its national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, first tried to prevent Allende’s confirmation as president by plotting the kidnapping of the Chilean army commander in chief who oversaw it. Nixon also told his CIA to “make the economy scream.”
When the gambit failed and Allende ascended to the presidency’s La Moneda Palace, the Nixon team installed what Allende called “the invisible blockade” with the help of US corporations. The ruthless campaign of propaganda, diplomatic pressure, and economic sabotage, fueled by tens of millions of dollars in CIA funds, aimed to turn Chileans against their president and foment a military coup.
Letelier, as ambassador, advised his president to avoid confrontation with the United States, which provided half of Chile’s industrial supplies and nearly all its military equipment. He was the right man for the job, being, as the CIA assessed in 1971, “a reasonable, mature democrat with a profound belief that Allende would revolutionize the structure of Chile without interfering with fundamental liberties or traditions.”
Washington seemed to respond in kind. Nixon claimed to respect Chile’s self-determination. Kissinger labeled “nonsense” press reports that the White House sought to confront Chile. One US diplomat recalled that most Latin America experts in his shop “had very good opinions of Letelier.” Even Kissinger said of Letelier, “I knew him. I liked him personally.”
But the Nixon administration felt tremendous pressure from US businesses. It was also on the warpath against communism.
First, it delayed for several months accepting Letelier’s appointment as ambassador. In July 1971, Chile nationalized three US copper mines. In October, it announced it would offer no compensation because of “excess profits” over the years.
Retaliation was swift. In mid-August, the US Export-Import Bank president Henry Kearns called Letelier to his office. Kearns was smiling as he delivered chilling news: the bank would not finance $21 million worth of Boeing jet airliners so long as Chile did not compensate the copper companies. In 1972, another Letelier deal fell through, to reschedule $300 million in debt to US banks.
To make matters worse, secrets about US efforts to keep Allende from the presidency leaked, and the ambassador’s residence and chancery were broken into five times. Two of the burglars, apparently seeking sensitive documents, were also involved in Watergate. Letelier took to keeping documents in a bedroom closet because the CIA also bugged his embassy.
The Warnings Were Accurate
By September 1973, Orlando had become minister of defense, and the Leteliers were back in Chile. At 6:22 AM on September 11, the Leteliers’ phone woke Isabel. She answered and turned to Orlando: “It’s Salvador.” Her husband had only fallen asleep three hours earlier, worried about intelligence reports of a coup. The warnings were accurate.
“The navy has revolted,” announced Allende. “Six truckloads of navy troops are on the way to Santiago from Valparaíso. The Carabineros are the only units that respond. The other commanders in chief don’t answer the phone. Pinochet doesn’t answer. Find out what you can.”
A Ministry of Defense admiral reassured Letelier: “It’s some kind of a raid, nothing more.” Allende was skeptical. “Take control of the Defense Ministry if you can get there.”
Isabel walked with her husband to his car. His bodyguard had called in sick, but his driver was waiting. Isabel took the man by his lapels: “You take care that nothing happens to him.”
At 7:30 AM, Letelier arrived, unarmed, at his ministry across the street from the presidential palace. Troops surrounded his building, and officers and some armed civilians wore orange scarves, denoting coup plotters. A guard at the door would not let him pass, but a voice from inside shouted, “Let the minister in.” Upon entering, Orlando felt a sharp rifle butt poke his back ribs. His allegedly sick bodyguard held the rifle.
Isabel learned where Orlando ended up only weeks after the coup. “Dawson Island, it is a dreadful place. It is very cold, windy .?.?. and because of the cold current, the Humboldt Current.?.?. Nobody lives there.”
Orlando Letelier did, for eight months.
The concentration camp where Letelier and his fellow political prisoners were kept was fenced off by a double row of barbed wire and surrounded by guards armed with antiaircraft guns in watchtowers. Letelier lived in an eight-by-fifteen-foot room with seven other men. To lighten the mood, they christened it “El Sheraton.”
The United Nations Human Rights Commission called the treatment of the Dawson prisoners “barbaric sadism.” The decisive intermediary in freeing Letelier was Caracas governor Diego Arria. He was the right-hand man of Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez and longtime friend of Orlando.
Arria’s stature had risen to the point where, in 1974, Time featured him among a select group of world leaders. Still, it was unprecedented for a governor to take on a diplomatic mission. He flew to Santiago on September 10, 1974 and obtained an interview with Pinochet.
The Venezuelan first spoke of a cut-rate sale of his country’s oil to Chile. “This depends upon your freeing Orlando Letelier.”
One month after Letelier flew from Santiago to Caracas, Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington, DC, wrote to “Compañero Letelier.” Following up on a phone call from Saul Landau, he offered him an associate fellowship “to work with the Latin American work group and to develop ideas about hemispheric security.” Letelier accepted.
Letelier informed Barnet he would concentrate on Chilean affairs. He immediately regained his boundless energy for working — and networking. This, despite Pinochet’s henchmen warning him to stay quiet and reminding him that the dictator could mete out punishment “no matter where the violator lives.”
“I Never Learned What the Surprise Was”
“Isabel, I have a surprise for you. Have lunch with me.”
“Today will be difficult. I have work.”
“But you will love this surprise,” Orlando insisted. “Come and get me at 12:30 and leave your work for the afternoon.”
Isabel acceded. After all, her husband was a charmer. The couple, parents to four teenage boys, had recently reunited after a months-long separation sparked by Orlando’s infidelity. “A second honeymoon,” Isabel called it.
Besides, there was no time to argue. It was 9 AM on September 21, 1976, time for Orlando to go to work at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC’s Dupont Circle.
Two of Orlando’s colleagues happened to ride with him that day. Michael and Ronni Moffitt, both twenty-five and recently married, had had their car break down the day before. Having become friends with their mentor and his wife, they had enjoyed a late dinner at the Leteliers’ then driven home in Orlando’s car. They were back the following morning to pick him up.
The Moffitts waited while Letelier, ever tardy, showered and dressed, skipped breakfast, and rushed out the door. Isabel barely had time to kiss him goodbye. Michael offered to keep driving, but Orlando took the wheel of his 1975 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu Classic, an unusual muscle car for such a sophisticate. Out of gallantry, Michael opened the front passenger door for Ronni. He plopped himself on the back seat.
That morning was a drizzly, misty one in the nation’s capital. In less than an hour, Orlando and Ronni would be dead. Michael would be traumatized.
“I never learned what the surprise was,” Isabel recalled over forty years later.
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FOCUS: All Wars Are Forever |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Monday, 21 September 2020 12:11 |
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Pierce writes: "For all the talk of extricating ourselves from 'forever wars,' we will always leave things behind."
US Marines charge ashore on Guadalcanal Island in World War II. (photo: AP/Getty Images)
All Wars Are Forever
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
21 September 20
For all the talk of extricating ourselves from "forever wars," we will always leave things behind.
don't know why but, sometimes, a story pops that strikes me as profoundly sorrowful and prompts a kind of despair that makes me wonder if we ever stop paying for the sins we commit as one species among many. There is a lot of talk in the campaign about ending "forever wars." The president* loves to say that he has ended the "forever wars," which is a lie, of course, but whatever. In one way or another, all wars are forever. From the Guardian:
Australian Trent Lee and Briton Stephen “Luke” Atkinson died when an unexploded ordnance is believed to have detonated shortly after 7.30pm on Sunday. The blast, inside the men’s rented accommodation in Tasahe, in the west of the city, was felt more than five kilometres away: cries for help from inside brought rescuers and emergency services to the building...
The two men were employees of the NGO Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA), which maps unexploded ordnance across Solomon Islands, working alongside the police bomb disposal unit. Solomon Islands was a key second world war battleground and its islands remain littered with thousands of bombs and unexploded ordnance more than seven decades later. Workers are in the capital, on the island of Guadalcanal, clearing sites of bombs ahead of the 2023 Pacific Games.
I had no idea that there were people doing this incredibly dangerous work. (And, yes, it probably wasn't advisable to have brought this work home to a residential area.) I had some idea that there was still ordnance scattered around the South Pacific, but no idea that there were people dedicated to finding it and defusing it. (I also had no idea that they were planning to hold the Pacific Games on Guadalcanal.) This sounds of a piece with the fact that the defoliants and ordnance that we left behind in Southeast Asia during our most recent war in that part of the world are still killing people. There already are similar stories from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and a dozen other places because, as much as we hate to admit it, we are a violent species, and all our wars are forever wars.
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FOCUS: Two Hundred Thousand Americans Are Dead |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56151"><span class="small">Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Monday, 21 September 2020 10:31 |
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Excerpt: "What have we learned during the coronavirus pandemic - and what have we refused to learn?"
The novel coronavirus is about to claim its two-hundred-thousandth American life. (It may already have done so; statistics lag.) Less than eight months have passed since the start of the pandemic. (photo: Christopher Lee/NYT/Redux)
Two Hundred Thousand Americans Are Dead
By Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
21 September 20
What have we learned during the coronavirus pandemic—and what have we refused to learn?
 t some point in 1993, the two-hundred-thousandth American died of AIDS. By that time, a decade had passed since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first described the emergence of a mysterious new syndrome. Freddie Mercury and Arthur Ashe had died of the virus, and Magic Johnson had announced his retirement from the N.B.A. Tom Hanks was soon to win an Oscar for his role as an H.I.V.-positive gay man, in “Philadelphia.” Still, the tragic milestone passed without much notice. H.I.V. had become the leading cause of death among young American men, but researchers and activists were still fighting to raise awareness about the virus, and acceptance for the people who were suffering from it. Two years earlier, the hundred-thousandth American had died of AIDS. That death was announced in a short article on page eighteen of the Times, which dispassionately reviewed statistics and projections.
The novel coronavirus is about to claim its two-hundred-thousandth American life. (It may already have done so; statistics lag.) Less than eight months have passed since the start of the pandemic. There hasn’t been time to make a movie about it, and there’s been no need to raise awareness; the toll of the virus is tracked daily, even hourly, across the country and across the world. But that doesn’t make the extraordinary loss of life any easier to fathom. In less than a year, COVID-19 has killed four times as many Americans as died from the opioid crisis during its deadliest year. It has killed more Americans than those who perished in every armed conflict combined since the Second World War. Globally, it has killed nearly a million people.
Reckoning with such a number, we might try to imagine the dead as individuals. Though the virus is worse for those who are older, people of all ages have died, and of all races, backgrounds, trades, and political persuasions. Each life lost was embedded in a web of relations. According to one estimate, each person who dies of COVID-19 leaves behind an average of nine surviving family members. If this is right, then there are now at least 1.8 million Americans mourning the loss of kin—parents, husbands, wives, children, siblings, grandparents—and millions more who are mourning with them. Meanwhile, as a doctor, when I think of two hundred thousand lost lives, I think of the ones I wasn’t able to save while caring for patients in the early days of the outbreak in New York. I think of the couples transferred hand in hand to the hospice unit; of a parent comforting young children through FaceTime; of an elderly man worrying about using a ventilator that might be needed by someone younger.
Moments of national tragedy are usually met with elevating Presidential rhetoric. The country looks to its leaders to offer hope and give meaning to its collective suffering. Three days after the September 11th attacks, in a speech at Ground Zero, George W. Bush told the nation, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Later, at a prayer service, Bush said that “grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. But goodness, remembrance, and love have no end.” After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson called on the country to “put an end to the teaching and the preaching of hate and evil and violence”; he urged Americans to turn away from “the apostles of bitterness and bigotry.”
No such messages will be coming from this President. Donald Trump has abdicated both managerial and moral leadership. (“I don’t take responsibility at all,” he has said, and, “It is what it is.”) Instead of helping the nation heal, he uses his bully pulpit to sow confusion, division, and distrust. He freely admits to misleading the public about the lethality of the virus; he disrupts the efforts of public-health agencies, tarring them with his own brand of partisanship and misinformation; he argues that talk of the virus is designed to damage his reëlection prospects. Meanwhile, his surrogates describe the pandemic, which sickens or kills thousands more Americans each day, in the past tense.
There are those, including the President, who question the veracity of the U.S. coronavirus death estimates. That skepticism doesn’t cohere with reality. Across the United States, excess mortality—the difference in the total number of deaths, from any cause, compared with a historical average—far exceeds official tallies of COVID-19 fatalities. In all likelihood, there are more, not fewer, COVID-19 deaths than we have confirmed. And the pandemic, in addition to devastating the economy, has caused enormous collateral health damage. Thousands of Americans have had their medical care postponed or cancelled, or have chosen to avoid health care altogether for fear of contracting the virus. Many have died.
In the United States, peaks of panic have given way to plateaus of resignation. The country continues to record tens of thousands of new coronavirus cases each day but remains without a coherent plan to alter that trajectory. Because we never truly subdued the virus, we’re experiencing our newest waves on rising seas. In May, after strict lockdowns, the number of newly diagnosed cases levelled off at around twenty thousand per day. But September’s number is closer to forty thousand. We’re performing more tests, and that helps explain the higher number of new confirmed cases. But it’s also true that the virus is circulating in more places than before.
Early in the pandemic, it became clear that a coherent and unified national response would not be coming. States were left to procure supplies and equipment on their own. Individuals and families waded through mixed messages about how contagious and lethal the virus was—and about how they might keep themselves and their loved ones safe. At the end of February, Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General, tweeted that masks are “NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus,” and Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., said that there was “no role” in the pandemic for masks worn by ordinary Americans. Those messages may have been intended to preserve mask supplies for health-care workers, but they seriously damaged the public’s trust in the information that was being provided by the country’s top health officials. It wasn’t until early April—after New York had logged tens of thousands of cases, and after the virus had seeded every state in the country—that the C.D.C. advised the public to begin wearing masks. (Redfield has since said that “cloth face coverings are one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus.”)
It’s easy to focus on national numbers. But the story of the American pandemic is really that of a virus bobbing across the country, searching for oxygen as it’s tamped down in one region or another. A pandemic that began in dense metropolitan areas has now made its way to every part of the United States. In the Northeast, states that once stored dead bodies in refrigerated trucks are now among the safest in the country. Other states, including California and Ohio, took early and decisive action but have seen cases and deaths rise over time. At the beginning of June, new COVID-19 hot spots were more likely to be rural counties than urban ones. By then, the virus had crept into small towns and ski resorts, the Navajo Nation and the rural South, and into prisons, retirement communities, and meatpacking plants, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
By staying home and flattening the curve, Americans succeeded in buying time for many health-care systems to adjust. The likelihood of dying of COVID-19 has declined substantially since the pandemic began, in large part because we’ve gotten better at preparing for and treating the disease. A statistic called the case-fatality rate (C.F.R.) measures the percentage of people who go on to die after being diagnosed with a disease. States where the pandemic hit early—New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts—ended up with C.F.R.s above seven per cent; the national average is now about three per cent, thanks to lower death rates in states where the virus spread later. In recent months, therefore, the apocalyptic elements of the pandemic have receded from view. There are fewer places where endless streams of patients confront dwindling I.C.U. capacity; there are fewer bidding wars for ventilators and N95s. We’ve settled, instead, into a grinding battle, in which lives are lost incrementally but no less tragically. Six thousand dead in Georgia; two thousand in Minnesota; fifteen hundred in Nevada. It’s these small yet significant numbers, adding up month after month, that have gotten us to two hundred thousand.
The coronavirus has assailed America’s image of itself. How does one reconcile the deaths of two hundred thousand people—a fifth of all the COVID-19 deaths in the world—with the idea of an exceptional America, a compassionate America, a scientifically advanced America? The most piercing question has come to be whether we live in a just America. Inequalities in income, housing, employment, and medical care have resulted in Black and brown Americans dying of COVID-19 at higher rates than whites. The pandemic has especially hurt low-income Americans, many of whom are now out of work, but Congress remains locked in a stalemate over whether and how to deliver relief. Meanwhile, in some states, more than half of all COVID-19 deaths are linked to nursing homes, where many older Americans have died without being able to say goodbye to their loved ones. We tolerate these deaths because of a communal ageism. Our inability to protect the most vulnerable Americans has become both a public-health failure and a moral stain.
The U.S. holds the unhappy distinction of suffering the most coronavirus deaths in the world. Still, adjusted for population, it ranks ninth among countries with significant numbers of cases, landing between the United Kingdom and Italy—bad, but not the worst. The case-fatality rate in America as a whole—three per cent—is also substantially lower than in many other developed countries: the C.F.R. is fifteen in the U.K., and fourteen in Italy. C.F.R. is not a perfect statistic: it’s calculated using the number of confirmed cases, not total infections, and so it fluctuates depending on how much testing is done among different populations. (If you test mostly older, hospitalized patients, as the U.S. did at the start of the pandemic, then the C.F.R. will appear higher, because a relatively high proportion of them will go on to die.) One way to understand America’s lower C.F.R., therefore, is to look at its demography. Age remains the most important factor for predicting how deadly the coronavirus pandemic will be: Americans over the age of sixty-five account for nearly eighty per cent of the country’s COVID-19 deaths. Across the world, a country’s case-fatality rate is highly correlated with the age of its population. In Uganda, where the median age is sixteen, the C.F.R. is one per cent. The median age is forty-six in Italy, and is forty in the U.K. We might conclude that the U.S. is lucky to be a relatively young nation, with a median age of thirty-eight. (On the other hand, Japan—one of the world’s oldest countries, with a median age of forty-eight—has mounted an exemplary response to the pandemic and has a C.F.R. of only two per cent.)
The excess death toll is less likely to be skewed by confounding variables. It seems to be similar in the United States and Europe, once it’s been adjusted for size. There’s no question that the U.S. squandered valuable time early in the pandemic, and it’s clear that the country has since failed to develop the infrastructure necessary to effectively control the virus. But European countries, such as France and Spain, have also struggled, and are now seeing resurgent coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. The U.S. also isn’t the only country that’s been unable to protect its most vulnerable citizens. A high proportion of the COVID-19 deaths in Canada and Sweden have happened in nursing homes. In the U.K., Black people also die of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, even though its nationalized health system generally does a better job than ours at reducing inequities in access to medical care. As bad as Trump has been on masks, citizens of other Western democracies resist wearing them, too.
As troubling as our pandemic response has been, the largest gap may not be between our performance and that of other countries but between our pre-pandemic understanding of America and what we now see revealed. The United States spends more on scientific research than any other nation and, as recently as 2019, was ranked the world’s most prepared to handle a pandemic—and yet our response has been strictly mediocre, and unusually fractious, politicized, and confused. How much of America’s struggle is due to bungled leadership—Trump’s distraction and disinformation, governors who’ve been slow to embrace masks or restrict gatherings—and how much is the result of long-standing features of our political and public-health systems? Answering that question is more than an academic or partisan exercise, and it behooves us to answer it honestly; what we find will have implications for identifying what’s broken and figuring out how to fix it. In the meantime, a recent survey of people in thirteen high-income countries found that confidence in America has plummeted during the pandemic: it’s now as low as it’s been at any point in recent history.
It’s not all bad. Our doctors, scientists, and pharmaceutical companies have been world-class. Many American hospitals rapidly and dramatically transformed to accommodate the deluge of critically ill COVID-19 patients; many doctors found ways to provide care through telemedicine. Meanwhile, in less than a year, researchers have discovered an extraordinary amount about the biology, transmission, and treatment of a never-before-seen virus. Vaccine development is proceeding at unprecedented speed, aided by cutting-edge advances in biotechnology; enormous investments in clinical trials mean that dozens of drugs may soon be available to reduce the spread and deadliness of the virus. Much of this work builds on decades of biomedical research, a lot of which has been publicly funded. If the coronavirus had emerged just twenty or thirty years ago, we would have far less reason to be hopeful about better treatments or a cure. Now, even though our efforts to contain the virus have stumbled, researchers stand a good chance of helping ourselves and the world.
Step by step, we have developed a nuanced picture of how the virus spreads. In the beginning of the pandemic, we worried a lot about contaminated surfaces; now we know that they aren’t a major driver of transmission. (Wash your hands and avoid touching your face; but there’s probably no need to scrub your mail.) We understand that the virus travels primarily through respiratory droplets exhaled by infected people and through microscopic secretions known as aerosols. Droplets, which are relatively large, quickly fall to the floor, but aerosols can float in the air for minutes or hours, making poorly ventilated indoor spaces, such as movie theatres and campaign rallies, especially risky. It took time, and the collaborative efforts of scientists around the world, to come to grips with the aerosol threat. The World Health Organization maintained that aerosol spread was worrisome mainly during medical procedures, until July, when two hundred and thirty-nine scientists signed an open letter urging it to revise its assessment. At that point, the W.H.O. released a statement acknowledging that aerosol-based transmission in restaurants, gyms, and other crowded spaces “cannot be ruled out.” Many reopening plans were revised accordingly—favoring the outdoors over the indoors, and urging the opening of windows and the upgrading of ventilation systems when indoor activity was unavoidable.
Early in the pandemic, we didn’t fully grasp the challenges posed by asymptomatic transmission. We now know that people can start “shedding” the virus several days before they develop symptoms; in fact, viral loads seem to peak just when symptoms are starting to appear. A recent study, not yet peer-reviewed, found that three-quarters of coronavirus transmissions occur in the two to three days before or after people develop symptoms. Because asymptomatic carriers, who may account for as many as forty per cent of infections, can also transmit the virus, it’s clear that curtailing the spread requires everyone’s participation—even the participation of those who don’t think they are sick. (That recognition is one reason that recent C.D.C. guidance that asymptomatic people should not be tested was met with widespread criticism by scientists. The C.D.C. has since reversed its recommendation.)
Our understanding of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has also evolved. It’s become clear that, though it primarily affects the lungs, it can damage hearts, brains, blood vessels, and other organs. It can also linger, creating a growing cohort of “long-haulers” who continue to experience symptoms weeks, even months, after infection. One study of hospitalized patients found that nearly ninety per cent still experienced at least one symptom—most commonly fatigue or shortness of breath—two months after getting sick. Another study of non-hospitalized people who had tested positive for the coronavirus found that, weeks later, more than a third had not returned to their usual state of health. Among younger Americans without chronic medical problems, one in five continued to have symptoms.
In all of these ways, we’ve taken a more accurate measure of our foe. But there are still many unanswered questions—among them, how long immunity lasts. SARS-CoV-2 has not turned out to be a champion mutator in the vein of influenza or H.I.V. Still, we don’t know whether immunity to the virus will wane with time, allowing previously infected people to become susceptible to it again. The answer has huge implications for individual behavior, public policy, and vaccine efficacy. So far, less than a year into the pandemic, there’s no evidence of widespread repeat infections. But infections of most respiratory viruses, including other coronaviruses, do not confer lifelong immunity—and it’s too early to tell with SARS-CoV-2.
Even as we continue to learn about the virus, there’s a sense in which we already know what we need to know—and have known for some time. For months, we’ve known the essential steps to containing the virus: testing, tracing, masks, and distance. We also know that, as bad as things have been, it’s possible for them to get worse. In many parts of the country, winter will soon close off opportunities to dine and gather outdoors, forcing us inside, where the virus is more likely to spread. One widely cited model has the American COVID-19 death toll doubling to four hundred thousand by January, 2021. That outcome is far from inevitable, but escaping it will require a more thorough and united approach to the pandemic than we’ve managed to date. It will require us to act more effectively on what we know.
Moments of tragedy are also moments of possibility. We search for meaning in grief, hoping to find some purpose in our suffering, or at least some reassurance that we will emerge stronger and more prepared in the future. In the past, catastrophes, both natural and man-made, have led to new ideas, laws, and cultural and political paradigms. Social Security, food stamps, and a more robust safety net emerged from the Great Depression. In mid-century America, people hoping to report an emergency had to find and dial a local phone number or ask for an operator, leading to delays, confusion, and needless tragedy; the gruesome murder of Kitty Genovese—which, at the time, was said to have been witnessed by thirty-eight people, none of whom called the police—was partly responsible for the invention of the 911 system we use today. In the nineteen-sixties, the U.S. recorded about twice as many car-crash fatalities per person as it does now (in some years, more than fifty-two thousand people died); then came seat belts, airbags, and the enforcement of drunk-driving laws.
Viktor Frankl, the famed psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, once said that “everybody in the midst of suffering is given a chance to bear testimony of the human potential at its best, which is to turn a personal tragedy into a human triumph.” The monumental loss of life during the coronavirus pandemic so far could push us toward a better future. It could help restore a belief in independent science and competent government. It may help us value the essential work performed by society’s most marginalized people. And it could lead us to create a public-health infrastructure that spares future generations of Americans a similar fate in the inevitable pandemics to come.
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he British courts will soon be deciding the fate of the Australian journalist Julian Assange, a man who has been unjustly