This is the end state of modern politics, where all causes and effects have been removed from politics--which is to say where all POLITICS have been removed from politics--and all we are left with is vague concerns about the soul and character of America.
Yes, the terms get thrown around a lot, but this is the takeover of technocracy and neoliberalism, where the details of governance and society are more or less off the table. What is there left to think about? Why "the people" are the way they are.
The implication for this worldview is that politics is a machine and you just need leaders smart enough to know how to run it. All citizens can really do is be smart enough to trust the experts and be nice to each other while the government just does its thing.
And I never mean "neoliberal" or "technocrat" as a smear--they're ideologies! Very clear ones. And we are living with their outcomes.
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The USPS is incredibly popular and it would be the easiest thing in the world to run an aggressive campaign defending its existence and making the case for public services. But the Dems won’t do it because, fundamentally, they don’t really believe in that.
The guiding liberal ethos says that public services are a necessary evil and that, ideally, private businesses would get their act together and take over virtually everything. The market is more efficient, etc...
It’s the same reason they wouldn’t just sell universal healthcare. Remember, the healthcare marketplace was a SELLING POINT. As if people would say, “Oh thank goodness it’s a marketplace, not some crummy free service!”
What I hope people are learning is that the US's supposedly dynamic, resilient, market-driven system is incredibly brittle, unimaginative and unresponsive to actual needs. Any action outside of, "Keep doing what you always do," is unthinkably ambitious.
Closing schools for a year is an incredibly obvious choice and only crazy if you believe that the limits of our political system are the actual limits of the world, which is to say if you live in a world of complete denial.
It's the same approach that leads economists to create graphs of how they think the world should work and then insist that the world actually is contained within that graph. Delusional, and dangerously so.
It’s the replacement of the impulse for change or progress—something proactive—with the impulse to make someone feel humiliated and ashamed—something reactive, and corrosive. A sort of brief story:
A few years ago my sister was in the ICU, after being in a hit and run. She wouldn’t make it, which we didn’t know at the time, but things weren’t looking good. It had been about two weeks of her in an induced coma with no progress. One night we went out to dinner.
We tried to parallel park but the spot was too small; I tapped the bumper of the car in front of me. No damage, just “Yeah this is too small.” But I saw a spot a few cars away I had missed, so we parked there.
People like to point to the coronavirus chart and say “Wow look how dumb/bad/selfish Americans are.” But you know what happened when people were told to stay home, and paid to do so? They stayed home, and cases went down. People didn’t stop caring, the government just gave up.
Wow people stopped staying home when they ran out of money/saw no end in sight and no possibility of long term assistance. Yeah, what monsters, feeding their families at a time like this.
We should be celebrating how effectively we fought coronavirus FOR A TIME. We really did clamp down on it. I was moved by people’s commitment. What changed was the governmental support.
As anyone who has ever tried to get unemployment or healthcare will tell you, our current system assumes that the worst possible outcome is not death or poverty but someone accidentally getting a little more than they deserve.
“Deserve.”
“We understand you’re struggling to feed your family since getting laid off, but put yourself in our shoes! How could we live with ourselves if we knew you were just...*getting* money??”