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The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis Is Here |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53933"><span class="small">Matt Taibbi, Matt Taibbi's Substack</span></a>
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Saturday, 02 May 2020 08:29 |
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Taibbi writes: "Earlier this week, Atlantic magazine - fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type - ran an in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to American society in the coronavirus era."
'Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle.' (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis Is Here
By Matt Taibbi, Matt Taibbi's Substack
02 May 20
As the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internet
 arlier this week, Atlantic magazine – fast becoming the favored media outlet for self-styled intellectual elites of the Aspen Institute type – ran an in-depth article of the problems free speech pose to American society in the coronavirus era. The headline:
Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal
In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.
Authored by a pair of law professors from Harvard and the University of Arizona, Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods, the piece argued that the American and Chinese approaches to monitoring the Internet were already not that dissimilar:
Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices… But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
They went on to list all the reasons that, given that we’re already on an “inexorable” path to censorship, a Chinese-style system of speech control may not be such a bad thing. In fact, they argued, a benefit of the coronavirus was that it was waking us up to “how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good.”
Perhaps, they posited, Americans could be moved to reconsider their “understanding” of the First and Fourth Amendments, as “the harms from digital speech” continue to grow, and “the social costs of a relatively open Internet multiply.”
This interesting take on the First Amendment was the latest in a line of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” pieces that began sprouting up in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like “Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, i.e. “Brexit.”
A consistent lament in these pieces was the widespread decline in respect for “experts” among the ignorant masses, better known as the people Trump was talking about when he gushed in February 2016, “I love the poorly educated!”
The Atlantic was at the forefront of the argument that The People is a Great Beast, that cannot be trusted to play responsibly with the toys of freedom. A 2016 piece called “American politics has gone insane” pushed a return of the “smoke-filled room” to help save voters from themselves. Author Jonathan Rauch employed a metaphor that is striking in retrospect, describing America’s oft-vilified intellectual and political elite as society’s immune system:
Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.
The new piece by Goldsmith and Woods says we’re there, made literally sick by our refusal to accept the wisdom of experts. The time for asking the (again, literally) unwashed to listen harder to their betters is over. The Chinese system offers a way out. When it comes to speech, don’t ask: tell.
As the Atlantic lawyers were making their case, YouTube took down a widely-circulated video about coronavirus, citing a violation of “community guidelines.”
The offenders were Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massahi, co-owners of an “Urgent Care” clinic in Bakersfield, California. They’d held a presentation in which they argued that widespread lockdowns were perhaps not necessary, according to data they were collecting and analyzing.
“Millions of cases, small amounts of deaths,” said Erickson, a vigorous, cheery-looking Norwegian-American who argued the numbers showed Covid-19 was similar to flu in mortality rate. “Does [that] necessitate shutdown, loss of jobs, destruction of oil companies, furloughing doctors…? I think the answer is going to be increasingly clear.”
The reaction of the medical community was severe. It was pointed out that the two men owned a clinic that was losing business thanks to the lockdown. The message boards of real E.R. doctors lit up with angry comments, scoffing at the doctors’ dubious data collection methods and even their somewhat dramatic choice to dress in scrubs for their video presentation.
The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) and American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) scrambled to issue a joint statement to “emphatically condemn” the two doctors, who “do not speak for medical society” and had released “biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests.”
As is now almost automatically the case in the media treatment of any controversy, the story was immediately packaged for “left” and “right” audiences by TV networks. Tucker Carlson on Fox backed up the doctors’ claims, saying “these are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades,” and YouTube and Google have “officially banned dissent.”
Meanwhile, over on Carlson’s opposite-number channel, MSNBC, anchor Chris Hayes of the All In program reacted with fury to Carlson’s monologue:
There’s a concerted effort on the part of influential people at the network that we at All In call Trump TV right now to peddle dangerous misinformation about the coronavirus… Call it coronavirus trutherism.
Hayes, an old acquaintance of mine, seethed at what he characterized as the gross indifference of Trump Republicans to the dangers of coronavirus. “At the beginning of this horrible period, the president, along with his lackeys, and propagandists, they all minimized what was coming,” he said, sneering. “They said it was just like a cold or the flu.”
He angrily demanded that if Fox acolytes like Carlson believed so strongly that society should be reopened, they should go work in a meat processing plant. “Get in there if you think it’s that bad. Go chop up some pork.”
The tone of the many media reactions to Erickson, Carlson, Trump, Georgia governor Brian Kemp, and others who’ve suggested lockdowns and strict shelter-in-place laws are either unnecessary or do more harm than good, fits with what writer Thomas Frank describes as a new “Utopia of Scolding”:
Who needs to win elections when you can personally reestablish the social order every day on Twitter and Facebook? When you can scold, and scold, and scold. That’s their future, and it’s a satisfying one: a finger wagging in some vulgar proletarian’s face, forever.
In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.
Because this Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned with the Only Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer any legitimate excuse for disagreeing with its takes on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment, Ukraine, the use of the word “treason,” the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, or whatever else happened to be the #Resistance fixation of the day.
When the Covid-19 crisis struck, the scolding utopia was no longer abstraction. The dream was reality! Pure communism had arrived! Failure to take elite advice was no longer just a deplorable faux pas. Not heeding experts was now murder. It could not be tolerated. Media coverage quickly became a single, floridly-written tirade against “expertise-deniers.” For instance, the Atlantic headline on Kemp’s decision to end some shutdowns was, “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice.”
At the outset of the crisis, America’s biggest internet platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Reddit – took an unprecedented step to combat “fraud and misinformation” by promising extensive cooperation in elevating “authoritative” news over less reputable sources.
H.L. Mencken once said that in America, “the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.”
We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.
The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.
Journalists are professional test-crammers. Our job is to get an assignment on Monday morning and by Tuesday evening act like we’re authorities on intellectual piracy, the civil war in Yemen, Iowa caucus procedure, the coronavirus, whatever. We actually know jack: we speed-read, make a few phone calls, and in a snap people are inviting us on television to tell millions of people what to think about the complex issues of the world.
When we come to a subject cold, the job is about consulting as many people who really know their stuff as quickly as possible and sussing out – often based on nothing more than hunches or impressions of the personalities involved – which set of explanations is most believable. Sportswriters who covered the Deflategate football scandal had to do this in order to explain the Ideal Gas Law, I had to do it to cover the subprime mortgage scandal, and reporters this past January and February had to do it when assigned to assess the coming coronavirus threat.
It does not take that much work to go back and find that a significant portion of the medical and epidemiological establishment called this disaster wrong when they were polled by reporters back in the beginning of the year. Right-wingers are having a blast collecting the headlines, and they should, given the chest-pounding at places like MSNBC about others who “minimized the risk.” Here’s a brief sample:
Get a Grippe, America: The flu is a much bigger threat than coronavirus, for now: Washington Post
Coronavirus is scary, but the flu is deadlier, more widespread : USA Today
Want to Protect Yourself From Coronavirus? Do the Same Things You Do Every Winter : Time
Here’s my personal favorite, from Wired on January 29:
We should de-escalate the war on coronavirus
There are dozens of these stories and they nearly all contain the same elements, including an inevitable quote or series of quotes from experts telling us to calm the hell down. This is from the Time piece:
“Good hand-washing helps. Staying healthy and eating healthy will also help,” says Dr. Sharon Nachman, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at New York’s Stony Brook Children’s Hospital. “The things we take for granted actually do work. It doesn’t matter what the virus is. The routine things work.”
There’s a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods in any field. It’s particularly in the nature of insular communities of subject matter experts to coalesce around orthodoxies that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most knowledgeable.
“Experts” get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they’ve all been taught the same incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have a financial or professional interest in denying the truth).
On the less nefarious side, the entire community of pollsters in 2016 denounced as infamous the idea that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination, let alone the general election. They believed that because they weren’t paying attention to voters (their ostensible jobs), but also because they’d never seen anything similar. In a more suspicious example, if you asked a hundred Wall Street analysts in September 2008 what caused the financial crisis, probably no more than a handful would have mentioned fraud or malfeasance.
Both of the above examples point out a central problem with trying to automate the fact-checking process the way the Internet platforms have of late, with their emphasis on “authoritative” opinions.
“Authorities” by their nature are untrustworthy. Sometimes they have an interest in denying truths, and sometimes they actually try to define truth as being whatever they say it is. “Elevating authoritative content” over independent or less well-known sources is an algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been slowly destroying our business for decades.
The WMD fiasco happened because journalists listened to people with military ranks and titles instead of demanding evidence and listening to their own instincts. The same thing happened with Russiagate, a story fueled by intelligence “experts” with grand titles who are now proven to have been wrong to a spectacular degree, if not actually criminally liable in pushing a fraud.
We’ve become incapable of talking calmly about possible solutions because we’ve lost the ability to decouple scientific or policy discussions, or simple issues of fact, from a political argument. Reporting on the Covid-19 crisis has become the latest in a line of moral manias with Donald Trump in the middle.
Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous. Or we’re politicizing the framing of stories in a way that signals to readers what their take should be before they even digest the material. “Conservative Americans see coronavirus hope in Progressive Sweden,” reads a Politico headline, as if only conservatives should feel optimism in the possibility that a non-lockdown approach might have merit! Are we rooting for such an approach to not work?
From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not the best sources. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.
Turning ourselves into China for any reason is the definition of a cure being worse than the disease. The scolders who are being seduced by such thinking have to wake up, before we end up adding another disaster on top of the terrible one we’re already facing.
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Bernie Lost Because America Doesn't Have a Strong Labor Movement |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53341"><span class="small">Hamilton Nolan, In These Times</span></a>
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Saturday, 02 May 2020 08:23 |
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Nolan writes: "I was in Las Vegas for the Nevada caucus in late February (ah, a different and simpler time!) and the reporters on the ground - including me - believed Bernie Sanders was poised to go forth and win the Democratic nomination. A few short weeks later, it was clear it was not to be."
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Antonella Crescimbeni)
Bernie Lost Because America Doesn't Have a Strong Labor Movement
By Hamilton Nolan, In These Times
02 May 20
 was in Las Vegas for the Nevada caucus in late February (ah, a different and simpler time!) and the reporters on the ground—including me—believed Bernie Sanders was poised to go forth and win the Democratic nomination. A few short weeks later, it was clear it was not to be.
Bernie had money and name recognition and a villain to run against. Yet he also had, it turns out, a ceiling of about a third of the electorate.
Growing that base into a majority is the central task of left-wing electoral politics. Most campaign postmortems focus on tactics or strategy: messaging that could have been tweaked, personnel changes that could have been made, gaffes that could have been avoided. Less often do they look at the nature of the electorate itself. The simplest version of the Bernie Sanders theory of winning could be expressed as, “A true left-wing candidate and campaign will attract support and drive new voter turnout because the policies are actually what’s necessary to fix our most pressing problems.” That made sense to me, but did not turn out to be true. It was completely predictable that the Democratic establishment would unite to try to stop Bernie. Had his theory been true, though, the establishment would have failed in the face of a massive upswell of voter support. Instead, when all of the smoke cleared, Bernie’s share of the vote in key primary states never rose much above a third.
The political Left does not need to be forever frustrated by the process of using campaign speeches to drag a skeptical or disinterested 18% of the public into enlightenment every four years. Elections are not the time to magically instill mass class consciousness; that has to be done between elections. And it will not be done by politicians, no matter how good they are. It can only be done by giving millions of people the firsthand experience of class consciousness in their own lives.
The only institution that can do that is the labor movement.
I have witnessed countless people who considered themselves fairly apolitical participate in a union drive at their workplace and emerge as fire-breathing advocates of equality and worker power. They were transformed not by reading a book nor by watching MSNBC, but by personally experiencing the reality of the class war that Bernie and his allies talk about. Coming together with your coworkers and organizing and fighting the boss for a raise and better treatment is a tool for radicalization more powerful than a million tweets. In a union drive, it does not matter if someone is young or old or black or white or Democrat or Republican; they practice solidarity, they fight and they win—often while a richer person with a bigger job title uses lies and threats to try and stop them. It is a demonstration of the truth of what the Left is always saying, without having to hear it from a media personality or politician they might despise. Participation in the labor movement earns people a union, a raise and a political awakening all at once.
Frustration at the existing power structure is bred by a lack of opportunity. The question at hand, then, is how to channel that frustration. If many more Americans had the chance to experience the magic of organizing at work, they would tend toward leftism and justice more than hatred and fascism. Because they would have a model of socialism working in their own lives.
As it stands, only one in 10 working people are in unions. It’s not enough. The Democratic Party has neglected the labor movement (to its own detriment, since the party feeds on union money), so it remains up to the Left to galvanize new organizing campaigns.
Build the labor movement and watch the electorate change. That’s when the left will find its power. Water the grassroots. We don’t need to constantly fret about changing tactics; we need to change people.
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Chile's Six Months of Struggle |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54203"><span class="small">Pierina Ferretti, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 02 May 2020 08:20 |
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Ferretti writes: "The feminist movement in Chile is one of the strongest in the world, last month bringing millions of women into the streets for International Women's Day."
Women with masks shout slogans during protests as part of International Women's Day on March 8, 2020, in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Claudio Santana/Getty Images)
Chile's Six Months of Struggle
By Pierina Ferretti, Jacobin
02 May 20
The feminist movement in Chile is one of the strongest in the world, last month bringing millions of women into the streets for International Women’s Day. Building on the mass protests that erupted in October, their movement is only growing bolder, and articulating meaningful alternatives to the country’s neoliberal order.
 he last six months in Chile have been momentous. In October of last year, the country experienced the largest popular uprisings in its recent history; now the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic is, as elsewhere, causing economic havoc and widespread fear. In addition to these two landmarks, and taking place in between them, March 8 in Chile saw huge demonstrations to mark International Women’s Day. In Santiago alone, 2 million women and their allies took to the streets, just days before the pandemic suddenly came to dominate the political agenda.
Despite the recommendations of health professionals — which are, for the most part, supported by the public — and the example of neighboring countries, Sebastián Piñera’s right-wing government is refusing to order a general lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus. The billionaire businessman has rejected all social protection measures, among them rent moratoria, the freezing of debt and mortgage payments, price controls, and the temporary nationalization of private hospitals. The government has not even made free testing available. In Chile, as in the United States, health care is a very lucrative business, and all the more so in an emergency.
The government has not missed the opportunity to take advantage of the situation, instituting a curfew that is advertised as preventing the spread of infections, but in reality only lends itself to further police powers. This is in a country that, since the uprising last October, has seen more than thirty deaths by law enforcement, over four hundred eye injuries, hundreds of complaints of torture and sexual abuse, and thousands of political prisoners that, to this day, in a full-blown health emergency, are still in jail.
As days go by without meaningful action, tension, uncertainty, and unease continue to mount. It’s unclear what the near future holds for Chile, though many are conscious that a similar social discontent triggered the revolts last October. Where until just a few months ago, Chile was upheld as the exemplary model of neoliberalism in Latin America, its legitimacy has now been radically undermined.
The People in Revolt, the Left in Quarantine
The growing exhaustion with Chile’s neoliberalism has generated some social conflict over the course of the last two decades. Mapuche resistance against the dispossession of their territories, student struggles for the right to free education, the fight for pensions, and the rise of the current feminist movement have all emerged from the ongoing struggle against neoliberalism.
The uprising last year, however, marked a turning point in this cycle, not only due to its magnitude, but also because it announced the emergence of a new social actor: a people, suffering under more than forty years of rapacious neoliberalism, joining together to say “basta” [enough]. In October, the people took to the streets spontaneously, largely bypassing the social and political organizations that historically represented the interests of the subordinate classes: trade unions and the traditional parties of the Left, like the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.
The revolt has left its mark on the present, and in the current health emergency, many Chileans are refusing to be submissive in the face of government inaction. Workers have been banging pans inside shopping malls, demanding the closure of shops to the cry of “Nuestras vidas valen más que sus ganancias” (“Our lives are worth more than your profits”); neighbors have erected barricades on access roads to coastal towns, so as to prevent the arrival of wealthy vacationers; domestic workers have confronted their employers; and health workers have denounced their precarious and unsafe conditions. Mayors — even those on the Right — have disobeyed central government and implemented their own protection measures, while the scientific community — including the Chilean Medical College — has been challenging the Ministry of Health. In this context, women have added their voices loudly, warning of the increased gender violence resulting from confinement and building support network to combat the crisis. These are signs of a restless people no longer willing to submit to abuse.
Despite these acts of resistance, the business community has had little trouble imposing its interests. In the midst of neoliberalism’s legitimacy crisis — with a social majority taking to the streets and government approval at a historic low — the interests of capital still prevail.
The old social and political instruments that once channeled the struggles of the subordinate classes are obviously no longer functioning. The old systems have been weakened by decades of abuse: the Chilean dictatorship physically destroyed a generation of dissidents and severely decimated their organizations, and the neoliberal transformation has further undermined the mass organization of workers, even disfiguring some social-democratic projects to make them indistinguishable from neoliberalism.
Here, the numbers speak for themselves: barely 20 percent of the workforce in Chile is unionized; 63 percent of the population declares having no political position; and only 14 percent identify with the Left. Not even the formation of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), a new Left force uniting figures from student struggles with a promise of renewing national politics, has managed to reverse this picture.
With weak unionism and a disjointed Left, the slogan “Que la crisis la paguen los ricos” (“Let the rich pay for the crisis”) is not much more than that: a slogan circulated among activist networks lacking the ability to force their point. The fundamental problem in Chile today is the ongoing political vacuum. As Chilean sociologist Carlos Ruiz likes to say, there is a Left without a people and a people without a Left. The question is which group will step into that vacuum.
Feminist Uprising
Before the coronavirus grabbed headlines, all eyes in Chile were on the scheduled demonstrations for March 8 (8M), International Women’s Day. Scheduled to take place just six weeks before the (now delayed) April 26 constitutional plebiscite — the first concrete possibility to put an end to the constitutional legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship — 8M was to contribute to a growing rejection of the dictatorial charter, endorsed by the government and the country’s various right-wing forces. Moreover, in the wake of the October protests, as well as the global success of the feminist performance piece Un violador en tu camino (“A Rapist in Your Path”) by the group Las Tesis, there was much anticipation about the size and power of this year’s demonstration — which, in Santiago alone, reached 2 million.
Over the last four years, the feminist movement in Chile, as in other countries, has been growing enormously. Since the Ni Una Menos (“Not one [woman] less”) demonstration in October 2016, when a hundred thousand people marched to end violence against women and femicide, feminism has become the most important mass movement in the country, and a hugely politicizing force.
The range of participants at the 8M demonstrations is illustrative of this. It is not only anti-capitalist militants and those from social or political organizations who attend, but huge numbers of unaffiliated women, often marching for the first time. They are motivated by ideas of equality — equality of opportunity, of wages, the distribution of reproductive work — and reproductive rights; the green scarf representing the fight for abortion has become omnipresent. Above all, they are demanding an end to sexist violence and femicides.
This heterogeneity makes it difficult to classify the movement in terms of traditional social categories. Polarities like left and right, for example, fail to account for the composition of the movement. Crucially, today’s feminism has managed to mobilize social groups outside the usual activist contingents.
Why have Chilean women risen up in such numbers over the last four years? The phenomenon can be explained by the soaring inequalities brought on by Chile’s neoliberal modernization, which has disproportionately affected women. Chile is a world leader in inequality: it is the most unequal country in the OECD, and one of thirty countries with the worst income distribution globally. Wages and pensions are insufficient to the cost of living, health and education are heavy economic burdens, and the majority of the population is mired in debt.
Women bear the brunt of inequality, suffering substantially lower salaries and pensions than men, while shouldering the greater burden of unpaid domestic work. Traditional gender roles are further perpetuated in education and labor markets, among many other forms of subordination in all spheres of life. Seizing on this discontent, the feminist movement has sparked a collective revolt that has awakened not only women, but society at large.
The uprising in October is the most salient example of this society-wide shift. The new movement puts at the center of the struggle the need to recover life from capital, in a country that has carried the commodification of social reproduction to an extreme.
Because feminism has generated such an enormous capacity for mobilization in Chile, it has also been able to spearhead other struggles against neoliberalism. The fragmented and weakened Chilean left will have a better chance of rebuilding itself if it remains open to and works closely with this mass feminist movement.
Another End of the World
“Otro fin del mundo es posible” (“Another end of the world is possible”), says one of the hundreds of graffiti from the social uprising. Apocalyptic thinking is nothing new, but the conditions imposed by the pandemic undoubtedly fuel speculation about our collective future. We know we must take our destiny into our own hands.
As the Chinese left collective Chuang rightly stresses, one of the most important aspects of this crisis is that it sheds a critical light on daily experience and denaturalizes the norms that millions of human beings have taken for granted. Millions of people are wondering together: What will become of our lives, how will we pay our rent or mortgage, what will we do if we lose our jobs? Millions are observing the indifferent attitude of multinational conglomerates and political elites. A still unknown quantity will die, or have their loved ones die — not just because of the lethalness of this virus, but because our health systems are woefully inadequate.
2019 was already a year of revolt: from Santiago to Hong Kong, from Paris to Baghdad and beyond, unrest shook the world. In these new conditions, we can expect much more. Economists agree that an economic recession far worse than 2008 is in the offing. Maybe that’s why there are some optimists in these uncertain times who envision an exit ramp from neoliberalism. It is not clear, though, that history is moving in that direction.
Here, Chile offers a valuable lesson: recent experience shows that revolt is not synonymous with revolution, and many of the popular uprisings that have rocked the world this last decade have not led to greater social emancipation, nor created new democratic projects.
We cannot afford to ignore this problem. The current moment, like any crisis, is opaque and ambivalent. The wavering indecision between rebellion and authoritarianism, solidarity and profiteering, internationalism and chauvinism, is accentuated in times of danger like the one we are living through. Only our struggle will decide which side will win out.
This crisis will give way to a period of contestation. Whether the outcome will be a ramped-up neoliberal capitalism, or a Keynesian revival of the welfare state — exclusively for developed countries — or genuine democratic progress will depend on the strength of our movement.
The example of the Chilean uprising teaches us that revolts are necessary, but they are not sufficient in themselves to defeating neoliberalism. The struggle for a new egalitarian order can only be assumed by social forces that are sufficiently organized and strong enough to confront capital and its guardians.
In Chile, as in other parts of the world, these forces are still in the making. And in the current state of the class struggle — the unvarnished kind, in the direct struggle for life over death — the feminist movement is best placed to lead a process of struggle capable of pushing forward a new historic, radically democratic agenda. For decades, if not centuries, feminists have been articulating an alternative vision for society: now is the time to listen and join in the fight.
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So Where Do We Go From Here? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48687"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Blog</span></a>
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Friday, 01 May 2020 12:24 |
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Keillor writes: "Government is failing. People are dying. Comedy is at the heart of being American. Where do we go from here?"
Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)
So Where Do We Go From Here?
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
01 May 20
shouldn’t be sitting reading stories about victims of the plague but I do and a great one was in the Sunday New York Times, by Pam Belluck, an epic about a healthy young father of three, 49, struck down hard and suddenly by COVID-19 who was kept alive on a ventilator for a month by doctors at Massachusetts General and almost given up for lost, but somehow, by extraordinary means and technology and dedicated doctors and God’s mercy and a visit from his wife who sat and held his hand for three hours when he seemed to be a goner, he came back to life, and in the online edition of the Times, there’s a video of the hospital staff in blue scrubs lining a hallway and applauding as the gentleman is wheeled out of the ICU. I don’t cry easily but it brings tears to my eyes.
This is the heart of the coronavirus story, not the briefings, not the demonstrations at state capitols, but the heroic work of medical professionals to spare us the miseries of this defiant disease. The Belluck story is a work of narrative art. It should get a Pulitzer Prize.
I’m 77, safely sequestered in a New York apartment under the supervision of my wife who intends to keep me around, so we stay put. The medical troops are doing their duty, and we the people assist them by staying out of harm’s way. Men and women are riding the subway into Manhattan in order to do the essential things to support life, bring in groceries, deliver them, take away garbage, run the hospitals and clinics, provide security. When the pandemic is over, our society will need to stop and think about who is essential and why should the delivery truck driver earn a tiny fraction of what is paid to the Executive Vice President for Interactive Synergy & Proactive Metrics?
It’s been said a thousand times but nonetheless: the nation is in unknown territory. Truly. Nobody knows. The disease is not running a predictable course. Social distancing helps but it is revolutionary and now comes the counterrevolution. Washington is adrift. In a rational world, Mr. Trump would announce that he is canceling his reelection campaign so that he can focus on the job at hand, the two missions are incompatible. Nobody thinks he’d do that. Reimpeachment is not in the cards: is sheer incompetence a “high crime and misdemeanor”? The Founders didn’t anticipate this; they associated narcissism with royalty, not democratically elected leaders.
The White House is not sympathetic to the plight of the Postal Service because Mr. Trump never wrote a letter in his life and put it in an envelope and mailed it. The New York transit system is billions in the red but he’s never ridden the subway so it doesn’t matter. He has run the pandemic response as a reality show off the top of his head, with no acknowledgment of the deaths and suffering it’s caused because it isn’t real to him.
He is, however, friendly to us Christians though he himself could not recite the Lord’s Prayer if you offered him a million bucks. But a goodly percentage of Protestants are Republicans, so he favors us, and nowhere in America are our people being burned at the stake. The judiciary is being repopulated with men who might well favor mandatory memorization of Bible verses in public schools. This would not do much to stop the virus, but it might be enough to reelect the man.
My parents fell in love in 1931, at the start of the Great Depression, and neither had any money so they waited it out, he working on the farm, she as a caregiver in Minneapolis, and five years later, they married in a fever and started a family. It was not easy, but it was familiar ground: you worked hard, were frugal, and when necessary you leaned on your relatives. Neither of them recalled the Thirties as a time of suffering. It was what it was and you did what needed to be done, and they were young and in love.
This is different.
Comedians have been feasting on this man. The Clorox/UV episode of the Trump show was huge on social media. But we’ve come to a strange new place where the president isn’t funny anymore. Government is failing. People are dying. Comedy is at the heart of being American. Where do we go from here?
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