[link:https://eand.co/why-trumpist-america-doesnt-care-about-coronavirus-efe7a388b338?source=your_stories_page---------------------------|]
It shocks and horrifies the world. America has 120,000 dead and counting of Coronavirus. That number’s going to rise to 200,000 in the blink of an eye. Where will it end? 500,000, a million — these figures are no longer the stuff of nightmares. Just of the grim and dystopian reality called American life.
But what truly startles the world is this: Donald Trump doesn’t appear to care. Not one bit. Mostly, he’s — still — golfing. When he wasn’t golfing, first, he minimized, then he pretended it would all go away, then he told people to drink bleach, then he…reopened the economy before the first wave had even crested. Which means that, of course, this.
While much of the rest of the world is already carefully preparing and planning for how to fight a second wave — America still has no strategy or plan for the first. It never did have anything resembling a national strategy for a lethal pandemic. Hence, in America, there’s just a rising tide of death, still surging ever higher. What the?
The question is this. Why doesn’t Trump care about Coronavirus?
Imagine that you’re Trump. A man with the mind of a wounded child. A narcissist, with nothing inside but the desperate need to be loved, but since you can’t have that, you’ll settle for being feared. What would you be thinking of right about now?
You wouldn’t be thinking of a pandemic. Why would you care about that? Right about now, you’d have one — and only one — priority. How to stay in power, by any means necessary.
The Coronavirus Depression
[link:
https://eand.co/the-coronavirus-depression-602f5d3cb469?source=your_stories_page---------------------------|]
Will the economy magically “bounce back”? Maybe. But even if it does, it’s only going to bounce back to the invisible depression Americans were already in. Yet even that much is unrealistically optimistic. Why?
People are going to “go back to work”, sure — they’ll have to, because, if you understand the average American is now an indebted, helpless prole, well, it’s either that or starve. But the jobs on offer in the post-Coronavirus economy aren’t going to be like even those of before. You see, Coronavirus is already wiping out a huge, huge swathe of small and medium sized businesses. Maybe you already see it happening on your block, in your town. The butcher, the baker, the brewer. Bang! Shut down — at least some of them, many of them, enough of them. Each one takes jobs with them. Tens, dozens, hundreds.
What are those jobs replaced by? Amazon deliveries. Instacart deliveries. Driving Ubers. Maybe being a Facebook “content moderator”, if you’re lucky. So what are these new jobs like? Well, in a word, they suck. They don’t offer protections, benefits, guarantees, or even stable incomes. If you’re delivering Instacart groceries…you’re relying on tips to make a decent living. If you’re stocking that Amazon warehouse, you don’t have a career, you barely even have a job. These new jobs are exploitative to the very bone — they are as exploitative and abusive as is legally and technically possible right about now.
But people who don’t even have stable incomes cannot really create a stable society, democracy, or economy. Isn’t that much obvious when I put it that way? If you don’t have a regular, stable income — at least not one far, far above the poverty line — then you cannot really ever have much confidence. In institutions. In your life. In your future. In yourself. As a result, you won’t spend much...That much is what already began to happen to America over the last decade. As it began to implode economically, social bonds tore, people’s faith in the system vanished — and the result was, predictably, the flight to safety and strength in the arms of a demagogue. Coronavirus will act as a great accelerator of America’s decades-long invisible depression for the average person — and maybe finally make it visible, too, that way.
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