Comparing the pandemic in the U.S. and the potato famine in Ireland

Millions of words have been written on the new Coronavirus. It has produced much good journalism and a lot of dreck, mostly from Trump and his troop of toadies.

One thing I have not seen mentioned is the similarity between the reaction of the British government to the potato famine in 19th century Ireland and the Trump regime’s response to COVID-19. These things they have in common: Power and policy in both countries exercised according to an ultra-capitalist, laissez-faire+ ideology.

Under this ideology, government in Great Britain refused to assist the starving Irish and kept importing a vast amount of food from Ireland as the Irish went hungry.

The Trump administration is refusing to extend any aid in addition to what has already been given mainly not for humanitarian reasons but at the urging of the Federal Reserve that feared a collapse in demand would lead to a Depression that would dwarf 1929.

In both cases, racism was a big part of the policy equation. The British colonized the Irish, oppressed them politically and economically, and saw them as inferior. The main British policymaker on the Irish question wrote that the potato blight was a blessing from God that would reduce the Irish population.

Systemic racism in the United States is having a huge impact, still largely understated, on the odds of living or dying in the pandemic. Just as the potato famine killed the Irish and not their British overlords, much of the dying in the United States befalls the Latino, Black and Native American minorities. This part is well known. What follows not so much.

It works like this. First, one of the main reasons this country alone among the rich countries does not have a universal health care is racial. Too many whites in this country do not want to spend any of “their hard-earned money” on health care for what they see as a shiftless and dangerous underclass.

Second, the economically and occupationally disadvantaged position of the Black population means many cannot afford private health insurance and may hesitate in seeking medical care until it is too late.

Third, Blacks and Latinos are a disproportionately high percentage of “essential workers” (read disposable people) who take great risks for low pay and thereby keep the middle class relatively safe.

Fourth, as British officials saw the potato famine as a blessing that would serve to decimate the Irish, Trump administration officials have been exposed as urging a slow motion response when the pandemic was affecting the Democratic and heavily minority populations on the coasts. “Those are not our voters,” one official has been quoted as saying.

Disenfranchising opponents is one of the two remaining hopes for the Trumpistas (the other is provoking hatred, violence, and chaos to blame Democrats for it, scare white voters, and pose as the party of law and order). Wreaking havoc with and defunding the postal service, gerrymandering, and selective elimination of polling places are means of disenfranchisement. But the death of those who are not your voters is more effective and final.

The Coronavirus pandemic will leave a horrendous and largely unnecessary toll of death and suffering. The Irish famine produced a much worse one on a per capita and absolute basis. But the Irish were a colonized and economically oppressed people, despised by many of their exploiters. What is the reason for the laissez faire or, more accurately, the laissez mourir attitude this administration practices, the identical logic the British employed during the blight, against the people of a nation it is obligated to defend and protect?

Donald Trump and his acolytes do not understand their first duty as one of defending the lives of all the people. Like other racial supremacists, they may even say a prophylactic benefit in the selective carnage. Camus wrote that the most important thing was to save the bodies and that “all your philosophy is not worth a single strand of a woman’s hair.” Dan Patrick, Lt. Gov. of Texas, a strong Trump supporter, expressed Trump’s antithetical approach on Faux News: “There are more important things than living.”

More important things like what? The value of the stock market. The hegemony of the ideology of savage capitalism. White supremacy. The Republican counterrevolution against the last four decades of history—women’s rights, civil rights, LGBQT+ rights, the browning of America, an immigration system open to people from Africa, Asia and Latin America created by the 1965 immigration reform law, the right to an abortion. Among other rights.

Costly in lives, the Trump administration’s response to the Coronavirus is less a failure than a reflection of a malevolent mindset. The culture war in this country is between those who think lives matter most—black lives, brown lives, white lives, Native American lives, immigrants’ lives—and those who value continuing domination, staying on top economically, politically and ideologically, much more.