Been thinking about the logic of US neoliberalism, what it considers tolerable and what it doesn't. Pre-corona, we knew it considered tens of thousands of medical bankruptcies and deaths from lack of insurance to be tolerable; we knew it considered big banks failing intolerable.
It's rapidly becoming clear that the total immiseration of a critical mass of Americans would be intolerable to the system (we are putting aside all human or moral considerations for these purposes). Most people need to have some baseline spending power or the system collapses.
The system can tolerate, and in fact depends on, a certain level of poverty, desperation, semi-employment, etc. But it also needs consumers, and it needs most people to buy in to its rules or else it can't sustain itself. Hence the various relief schemes being floated now.
But then I think about the small business economy (I'm personally fixated on the independent restaurants, bars, and cafes, many of them immigrant-owned, in NYC; you may be fixated on other businesses). The system *already* found the precarity of these businesses tolerable.
In the popular American imagination, everyone loves and supports small businesses. And policymakers will probably take some measures to protect small businesses through this. But a lot of these businesses were labors of love that were likely to fail even before this pandemic.
So if the failure of any number of them was tolerable before, it will be at least as tolerable now. What's any one small business going under? The pandemic will accelerate this. Thousands of these places will shutter permanently, and it will be treated as their individual failure
The cumulative effect of this, of course, will be nightmarish: for business owners, for employees, for customers, for the communities they support (including in subtle ways like eyes on the street and "character"). But the system will say, look, as long as people can buy food...
Anyway, there are many more immediate concerns but I worry this ends with Amazon and a handful of other giant corporations controlling our lives, a decade or so earlier than they might have anyway.
