As reported Friday by the New York Times, ”[S]ome of Mr. Trump’s advisers have privately said they are adhering to longstanding conservative opposition to big government, a view that reflects the administration’s conflicted view of how it should handle a crisis unlike any a modern president has faced.”

As of March 21, Trump acknowledged in his daily press conference that he still had not taken any measures under the Act.

x There it is. Trump admits he has NOT used the Defense Production Act to get companies to produce the amount of protective equipment American health workers desperately need.



This is a complete failure of leadership. Period .#coronavirus #GetMePPE pic.twitter.com/10KiOxR43U Ã¢ÂÂ Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) March 21, 2020

It will be important for Americans to hold this moment forever in their memories. The nationalization of a few select corporations could have alleviated untold suffering among a huge swath of the American population, preventing an agonizing death for many of them, but there were people in this administration who believed it was more important to allow those same corporations the freedom to do whatever they want—including doing nothing, if they wished. They believed it was better to let thousands of Americans suffer and die than to repudiate—even for a moment—their “free-market” ideology.

This is the natural endgame of “conservatism,” because it is a philosophy that ultimately reduces the human condition to an afterthought. It is a philosophy that sells itself with fantasies about “personal freedom,” but the freedom being sold is really only the freedom for a few people to accumulate unchecked wealth. In the imaginary world that “conservatism” aspires to, there is no social compact and Americans are not responsible for each other. So for the vast majority of those who must live in American society, and who are not corporate CEOs or in possession of great wealth, ultimately the so-called “freedom” of conservatism amounts to little more than freedom to die. Boiled down to its essence, so-called “conservatism” believes that if someone profits even while another dies, that is simply the law of the jungle: fixed, immutable, and not to be questioned, certainly not by the government.

This is why instead of bold, decisive national action we see a president extolling the so-called power of cash-strapped state governors, while minimizing his own responsibility to do anything. In probably the most revealing statement of the conservative mindset, the president on Thursday declared “The federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping. You know, we’re not a shipping clerk.” The Times expanded on that mindset.

The president’s advisers say they see the role of the federal government as facilitator, as opposed to chief producer and a national governor. They have tried to encourage states to get by with what they can, suggesting there will be support from the federal government but that this shouldn’t be the first option. And they have hoped that private companies will be spurred to increase production by the president’s statements.

So while we are being held hostage to this inane “philosophy,” while we “hope” for private corporations to exercise some semblance of civic responsibility, the days that we could be mass producing ventilators and other critical medical equipment slip by, one by one. Meanwhile the number of people infected by the virus grows by orders of magnitude each day, as noted by the mayor of New York City, now the epicenter of the pandemic.

“We’re talking about a president who is basically doing what Herbert Hoover did at the beginning of the Depression and minimizing the danger and refusing to use available federal action, and people are going to die, and they shouldn’t, they don’t have to, if we could get the support that we’re asking for,” [Mayor Bill DeBlasio] said in an interview with WNYC on Friday.

The fact that this will happen--is happening-- right before our eyes and still nothing whatsoever is being done is the harshest indictment of “conservatism” that could possibly be imagined. Here we see revealed in all its ignominy a hollow and meaningless philosophy, a flimsy excuse dressed up in noble-sounding principles to justify raw, human greed. It does not adapt to crises because “crisis” implies shared responsibility towards others in the society. Its sole goal is to perpetuate itself, even as it leaves behind a wake of human carnage. And just like this administration, it can never admit when it is wrong.