The Missing Calculus of Social Distancing
It’s less about the unknowns of the virus, and more about unknowns created by reckless policy decisions years ago.
In late March, when Trump butted heads against Fauci and others about “reopening” the country for Easter, and before Trump acquiesced, America: The Jesuit Review published an article about how social distancing represents a battle between prudence and ignorance. Especially lately that can take on multiple meanings, but what the article is referring to is the unknowns of the virus itself, especially the unknowns of who’s infected and who can die.
There is one thing that is widely known about the virus now — reflected in the fundamental differences of those countries that haven’t recovered yet, principally the United States, and those that have, namely South Korea.
Integral to that are very fundamental differences in culture and society. For starters, the great debate about government protections doesn’t exist in recovering countries. While other countries have found excellent balances between a strong government and its people, we’ve made tremendous sacrifices in this country at the alter of “small government for states’ rights” and “Reaganomics” and demonizing anybody who dare suggests “socialism,” claiming that the pandemic doesn’t prove we need socialism, even though it does.
But that’s ignoring the larger picture of national preparation. Time and time again, social distancing has proven to be a very lousy band-aid compared to testing, contact tracing and more effective and precise means of quarantine — not just in helping to “reopen” the economy but in helping to prevent thousands to tens of thousands from dying, ending the misery of millions under quarantine and providing superior, better care to those infected and especially at highest risk of dying.
But the United States is stuck with mass “social distancing” because, as lousy and terrible a solution it is, it’s still the best solution we’ve got.
You can thank Donald Trump for that. But you can also thank a cultural tendency to shy away from preparedness in general.
Lacking preparedness is an American tradition according to its own history — you only need to look a little past its independence as a nation. Actually, there are quite a few parallels between that time and right now. The Articles of Confederation, a weak and ineffectual precursor to the Constitution, was an early sign of the types of bullheaded sacrifices willing to be made in the name of “states rights,” including slavery (the Confederate States of America, in addition to wanting to preserve the “institution” of slavery, also wanted to effectively restore the Articles of Confederation for their own government). Soon after the adoption of the Constitution and into the Presidency of Washington, the Whiskey Rebellion was America’s first Constitutional crisis — effectively, a lack of preparedness on how to even properly conduct taxes. And the War of 1812 was a perfect storm of American leadership’s lack of will to fund a strong government, including its military forces, but also impulsive inclination towards immediate military blustering and eventual action as a solution to all foreign policy ills — the main causes of the conflict had been solved even before hostilities began or even outright imagined — backed up with the belief that America will prevail as victorious by the Grace of God and literal divine intervention, or something.
A little more recently, there was the lack of protections in the wake of “Black Tuesday” and the consequent Great Depression; a lack of preparedness and ecological care for soil erosion, creating “The Great Dust Bowl,” and of course the fiasco that rendered one of America’s most important military bases nearly completely vulnerable to open large-scale attack on December 7, 1941.
A lack of belief that major disruptions and events are even physically possible in the United States have not just left us chronically vulnerable, but institutionally embedded that vulnerability into our very culture and leadership. 9/11 was as much a result of institutionalized vulnerability as much as deliberate attack. The 2008 recession was the result of an institutionalized over-trust of the unchecked pursuit of financial exploitation, just as it was prior to October 1929. It’s amazing that the early 2000s SARS pandemic didn’t become a first round of “social distancing” given how it was under a Republican’s watch (George W. Bush) when all federal priority funding was given over to multiple active military campaigns no less. Obama didn’t have to learn that lesson the hard way during the MERS pandemic, and a strong response was put in place — so strong, that we’ve almost literally forgotten about it.
And then Trump scrapped those measures. Whether he did it as part of the larger Republican Party mandate as a sacrifice to the altar of small government, or just to spite Obama, is largely moot and to the minds of most Republicans likely one and the same anyway.
The most damning thing of all is that this is a President, a Party and a Mandate that slightly over half of the voting public explicitly did not vote for. This is no longer a symptom of institutionalized unpreparedness, but an institutionalized brokenness that now defines the American Experience — and has defined it arguably for the vast majority of this century so far, if not earlier.
The most important lesson to learn from all this coronavirus calculus is that the “new normal” shouldn’t be normal — and it isn’t normal for the vast majority of recovering countries. This is less about a deadly virus pandemic, and more about a seemingly irreparable broken society that can’t even afford to the same level of testing and protective gear for its own citizenry and medical personnel and creating fights over them, because it’d rather spend it on and make sacrifices to shiny military weapons and large mega-corporations instead.
