By Chris Newfield
Chris Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This essay was originally published on his blog Middle-Class Death Trips and is reprinted with permission.
The short story of the U.S. 21th century is the tale of four disasters. The first was the response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001–the invasion and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ensuing era of permanent war and suffering in the greater Middle East. The second was the failed response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: that’s Kanye West in the image, intoning his immortal line, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” The third was the 2008 financial crisis. The fourth is unfolding now–the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic depression likely to ensue.
The failed response to these disasters has a common element. It is the Republican party and its world view.
George W. Bush ignored intelligence warnings about the activities that led to the attacks, which caught the enormous US military completely off guard. Military solutions made the situation worse, and were overcompensations for the initial failure.
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 became a human catastrophe, particularly for Black residents of New Orleans and southern Louisiana, through the Bush administration’s then-astonishing failure to manage basic disaster relief. FEMA was run by a political crony. Much talk of reform ensued, but the structural problems persisted and then got worse under Trump, leading to the failures of 2020 that we are living through.
The 2008 financial crisis was created by Republican economic policies, which always center on tax cuts, government starvation, deregulation of business and banking, the continuous priming of equity markets with low interest rates and other tools, and asset securitization and other financialization processes that attracted capital out of production and non-financial services.
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic will be greatly worsened by another Republican administration’s refusal to prepare for it. A comparison to a competent public system like Germany’s is profoundly painful. Why can’t we do that here? The U.S. is now a formerly-1st world country, not a leader in any domain that requires cooperative skill in the use of large-scale structures.
Why have Republicans presided over all of these disasters – 4 out of 4? Bad luck? My selective reading? (true, I forgot Benghazi!) Neither. It’s because their core belief is that “government isn’t the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Government isn’t something that creates and orchestrates common goods. Government is a piñata to hit with the political bat until the candy falls out for you.
To rehearse: Step 1 is to appoint political allies rather than competent professionals–allies you control.
Step 2 is to neutralize regulatory power or independent oversight. The knowledge-creating function of government agencies is silenced if not destroyed. The same goes for unvarnished communication with the public. (Attacks on a still-independent academia are part of this.)
Step 3 is to turn the government agency into an extraction pipeline that siphons public money into private pockets. Mineral leases on federal and/or Native lands are one example; subsidies for fossil fuel but not renewable development are another. The result of this structure in the pandemic is a war of all against all for masks, ventilators, and other basic equipment, like what you’d expect in a run-of-the-mill dictatorship.
Step 4 is Orwellian denial that the leadership has failed or manipuled reality– as when the Department of Health and Human Services rewrote their webpage in the hours after “the president’s ignorant son-in-law” falsely stated that the purpose of federal emergency stockpiles is not to help the states, to confirm his falsehood.
How did we get to this place–this place where the U.S. isn’t operationally competent anymore? It’s barely second rate in various measures of public health, disaster relief, housing, general education, and is worse than second-rate in other things like infrastructure. I can’t imagine the U.S. increasing the number of intensive care beds by 50% in 2 months, as Germany did. My hope a couple of weeks ago that UC medical centers would come to the rescue of California’s infected people, offering lots of tests, tracing, beds in MASH-style hospitals, is sad to remember.
So there’s the Republicans’ phony non-state state in Ruthie Gilmore’s term that hollows out government capacity to provide core human services–health, housing, and education–and to do this equitably, meaning without regard for ability to pay, as democracy theoretically demands. But Republicans didn’t take over the federal and most state governments at gunpoint–they were fairly elected (mostly). How’d they get there and stay there?
Some of it is dirty tricks and highly organized, intelligent strategy, plus excellent propaganda skills. The roles of voter suppression and Fox News are well known. But this doesn’t change the fact that Republicans are there because white middle class voters keep them there. Whites majorities still vote Republican even under Trump; he has lost many college whites but has kept non-college white middle class voters. For decades, whites have voted overwhelmingly for conservative Republican policies on housing, health, education, taxes, voting, and civil rights. Running through white flight, property tax revolts and opposition to busing, the paleomammalian cortex of the white middle-class decided to dismantle the common goods that created it rather than share them with people of color.
This statement is pretty obvious to Black people: see, for example, this good explanation that historically-informed Black distrust of educated whites led them to support for Biden over Sanders in the South Carolina primary. There’s also more awareness of this issue in the white middle-class than was the case ten or thirty years ago, but it hasn’t changed anything–voting patterns haven’t shifted enough to insure Trump’s defeat in November. It’s this white expert discourse, even when officially anti-racist and enlightened. Experts are as likely to tell people they have to go without things they want and need–like free college or public housing–than to form plans for social reconstruction. Trump and Boris Johnson belong to parties that have openly sabotaged expert advice and expert institutions, so their failures to deliver affordable health care and higher ed are not mainly the experts’ fault. And yet experts as a group, and their universities, neither offer big plans for nor systematically expose the anti-professional right as ruining the country.
In part because of professional class passivity, neither non-college whites nor people of color look to universities, professionals, or college degrees as reliable sources for progressive politics. They aren’t seen as institutions hellbent to build shared resources and infrastructure for all. This is one reason why even Dem support for college is more obligatory than passionate. For example, one poll showed majorities of all groups, especially Latinx parents, saying that college is important for their children (p 15). And yet they are far more likely, in California, to say public colleges are doing a “good” than an “excellent” job (p 10). “Good” and “not so good” together have close to 3/4ths of respondents. I interpret this to mean that college isn’t building a better world for people. It’s mostly holding out the promise of a half-decent job.
The only solution is for experts and their white middle-class base to map out the complete reversal of anti-government neoliberalism. I say this although it is so entrenched, and the national opposition (Democrats) so compromised, that it is unlikely to happen without a political revolution.
Given its failure to reform its self-dealing neoliberalism, the white middle class will be one of this revolution’s targets. The war on college-educated experts started long ago, and is now being waged enthusiastically by the Trumpian right. The white middle class, since it turned on the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, and fought busing and property taxes in the 1970s, has sided with the inflation of asset prices over equitable development, including living wages for the multi-racial working class on which it depends. It has voted for people whose explicit program has been to cut taxes on business and the wealthy, give public lands to extraction companies, suppress unions, wages, and worker influence in their workplace, purge reproductive rights, and massively increase economic inequality, but but what the hell–these Republicans won’t raise property or income taxes, pass rent control, or integrate the schools, so we’ll just ride asset inflation up the steep slope of inequality.
And with COVID-19, the Republicans will allow tens of millions to lose their jobs instead of paying companies to keep them employed, because that policy, adopted even by Boris Johnson’s Tories in Britain, wouldn’t treat workers as disposable. Facing the Great Depression 2.0, borne of the right’s hollow state and hatred of mass security, the middle class can either side with the multiracial workers of the country it fake-helped through Clinton-Obamanomics while keeping its assets growing, and redeem expertise in the bargain. Or it can chose its overpriced property economy, and be crushed by the sultanistic oligarchy the Trump Party yearns to deliver.
