Why the coronavirus beat us

Sunday, the New York Times Magazine published “Why We Are Losing the Battle with Covid-19.” ‘The Escalating Crisis in Texas Shows How the Chronic Underfunding of Public Health Puts America on Track for the Worst Coronavirus Response in the Developed World.’

The article, which takes the shadow for the prey, is in fact a disturbing example of how we are still failing to grasp why the United States has had (rather than merely being on track for) the worst Coronavirus response in the developed world.

To be sure, factors such as  underfunding of public health, widespread ignorance of and disdain for science, defiant ultra-individualistic attitudes, and a lack of solidarity with the most vulnerable, all have played a role in bringing on this calamity. But neither singly nor in combination are they the cause of this country’s failed war against Covid-19. Rather, each is a consequence (or a symptom) of a deeper rot.

The root cause of the catastrophe we are enduring is that we live under a political and economic system under which private profit is virtually the sole driving force. Why does only 3 percent of the colossal amount this country spends on health care go to public health? Because there is almost no private profit in public health. Same reason funding has been cut from everything else public, from public education to public broadcasting. And the reason for that is that we live under an extreme form of capitalism that the economist Thomas Piketty calls hypercapitalism.

For four decades, as the Republican Party has moved from the center right to the hard right and plutocrats have been empowered by a right-leaning Supreme Court to spend as much as they want on political campaigns, the political economy has transitioned from a half-baked welfare state to the most unequal and savage style of capitalism on the planet.

An analogy should help clarify why identifying the underfunding of public health as the reason we have lost the war against the novel Coronavirus is misleading. Unprotected sex, contaminated blood transfusions, promiscuity, infected intravenous needles are the main ways of contracting AIDS. But the ultimate cause of AIDS is none of these things. It is HIV, a virus that colonizes the immune system and, untreated, destroys it and kills its host.

Hypercapitalism is the virus that has colonized our societal immune system and prevents it from avoiding such ills as from deaths of despair to chronic malnutrition, from curable cancers that kill the uninsured to the new Coronavirus.

Understanding this is crucial because winning the wars of the future against new plagues and old will require more than rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. It will take designing and building a whole new ship of state, a different and more just political economy.

Hypercapitalism is not inevitable because of any sort of supposed American exceptionalism. Private profit always has been a key driver in capitalism, but in other developed countries and in the system that existed in this country until the 1980s (when Ronald Reagan started the ongoing Republican right-wing counterrevolution), private profit is not sole driver. The government and the unions put some modest limits on the priority of private profit. Now, private profit checks the power of the state and the unions, and it has succeeded in shrinking them to near irrelevance.

The blind spot in the Times piece on the root cause of the Covid-19 disaster is a blind spot common to much of even the best mainstream American journalism. An early 20^th century American sociologist wrote that journalism is like a clock with only one hand, the one that shows the minute. Sociology, in contrast, marks the minute and the hour. Another way of saying the same thing is that this sort of journalism is usually ahistorical.

There are many exceptions. One is The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer who has written magnificent historically informed books about torture in the George W. Bush administration and on the rise of American plutocracy.

The source of the neglect of public health in the United States compared to other advanced countries is the same reason we rank at the bottom among other developed states regarding the well-being of the population, as reflected in the human development index, and on such specific indicators as infant mortality, maternal mortality, hunger, and the chasm between the pay of CEOs and the wages of the average worker. The shrinkage of the middle class, the sharp decrease in the real value of the minimum wage, and the flatlining of the earnings of salaried workers have the same origin.

Today, a thousand Americans died from Covid-19 for the first time since May. We are back to square one, thanks in great part to Donald Trump. But Trump, for all his madness, does not exist in a vacuum nor is he an anomaly.

“This not who we are,” is the mantra many people rely on to explain away Trump’s outrages. But Donald Trump won the votes of 48 percent of American voters in 2016 when even his Republican primary opponents knew he was a bigot, a misogynist, and a con man.

I have a counter to the comforting “this is not who we are” mantra. About 15 years ago, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote a book titled “Who We Are,” in which he argues essentially that this is not a country of immigrants because the real Americans are the white descendants of settlers from the British Isles and other areas of northern Europe.

Today, despite some erosion in support from his base, according to the polls, and despite his disaster of a presidency, Trump leads Biden among whites by 21 percent!

Please, stop telling me this is not who we are. This, according to Huntington and the majority of whites, who see themselves and are seen by the world as the prototypical Americans, is exactly who we are.