Solidarity: The most important weapon against a pandemic: The U.S. lacks it

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

John Donne (1572-1631), English poet and clergyman

*****

Coronavirus has shown the literal truth of this sublime poem. This ideology, dominant in the United States today, goes by many names—radical individualism, ultra-capitalism, laissez-faire, neoliberalism, hyper-capitalism, savage capitalism, collective irresponsibility. By whatever name, it translates to the idea, antithetical to Donne’s philosophy, that I am not my brother’s keeper. This is the antithesis of what is essential in battling a pandemic, which is solidarity.

The ideology of radical individualism is evident in this country in the near lack of a social and economic safety net, a tax system grotesquely skewed in favor of the rich, the rationing of health care and medications by ability to pay, the fierce resistance to vaccination, and the progressive shrinking of the public sector to near irrelevance and impotence. Weak governments don’t beat deadly pandemics.

Selfishness is the best ally of Covid-19, not only in this country but globally. The Biden administration boasts that it has donated billions of vaccine doses to poor countries. The truth is that the United States and the other wealthy countries could have done much more to save lives in those countries.

Donne would have stressed the moral obligation to that, but here Donne’s moral outlook and a strict pragmatism coincide. The virus, given free rein in a country lacking vaccines, evolves, mutates, and boomerangs back to us in the West, now more contagious and resistant to vaccines: omicron. It is the perfect example of how looking exclusively at our self-interest doesn’t even serve our self-interest. It is also a microcosm of how our society works—or does not work—in every sphere.

Take polarization, which, not without good reason, many view as an existential threat. A recent study (What Happens When Democracies Become Perniciously Polarized? – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) found that:

“The United States is quite alone among the ranks of perniciously polarized democracies in terms of its wealth and democratic experience. Of the episodes since 1950 where democracies polarized, all of those aside from the United States involved less wealthy, less longstanding democracies, many of which had democratized quite recently. None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania, or Western Europe, for example, have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.”

In several columns I have identified white panic as the core reason for the stark polarization we have been experiencing. The authors advance a similar thesis to explain this bit of American “exceptionalism:”

“The United States is perhaps alone in experiencing a demographic shift that poses a threat to the white population that has historically been the dominant group in all arenas of power, allowing political leaders to exploit insecurities surrounding this loss of status.”

Some of the things we are seeing today reflect what happens when a group privileged by default must for the first time vie with others for the good things in life. Theory suggests that it is not necessary for the historically disadvantaged groups to overtake the dominant ones for an adverse emotional response to materialize among the historically advantaged. As the ones on the bottom move up while the ones on top feel they are standing in place, the sense of threat begins to build, often long before the actual threat arrives, if it ever does.

The anticipatory reactions among those feeling threatened are to rebel against a common understanding of reality, against a government that would allow national identity to be transformed, against the political system that would produce such a government. White panic provides a rationale for terroristic threats and attacks against members of Congress, public health experts, educators, and governors, as well as brazen efforts to rig elections.

Even schoolchildren have not been exempted. Multiple media sources have reported that parents in southern California say that a man has been following children on their way home from school and harassing them for wearing masks. Typical parental overprotectiveness? No. The man was caught on camera.

White panic is driven by the fear that demographic diversity would result in national disintegration. In fact, it is the fierce resistance against inclusion and the ferocious rear-guard defense of white dominance that widened the chasm between Americans and revealed the depth of the racial fault lines in American society and the white-hot cauldron boiling just beneath the surface.

White panic and Covid-19 are the two parallel and mutually reinforcing calamities facing this country at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century. White panic seems to focus anger in two opposite directions. The refusal to be vaccinated is not only a supreme act of selfishness, aggression directed outwards, but also aggression directed inward, arguably a suicide attempt using a less than foolproof method, epidemiological Russian roulette. Inspired by white panic, the January 6 attack to prevent Joe Biden from being legally declared president was only the biggest battle in an ongoing civil war that has produced much aggression directed outwardly.

A case in point. The Senate Select Committee on the January 6 attack has uncovered documents that contained a draft for a coup to be carried out by the armed forces. There may be some of the same, or worse, to come.

Democrats and progressives should stop showing up with a water pistol to a gun fight. As in the Civil War, we have more forces than the reactionaries. We just need to have the guts to use them. Let’s quit playing softball.

Unique among opinion writers, I believe the Capitol police should have been issued rules of engagement featuring shoot to kill orders against any attacker that breached the Capitol. In that case they would not have been brutalized, tortured, and killed. Hopefully, we will never have to decide in ordering police to shoot to kill other Americans. Yet, such madness is abroad in the country, it could come to that. Yet, any time the right-wing goons intent on turning the United States into a version of apartheid South Africa have the defenders of the Republic against the wall, we should not hesitate to pull the trigger.