The Coronavirus Is a Case Study of Political and Economic Dysfunction Sam Corey Follow Mar 17 · 8 min read

When it comes to American politics, I used to think the difference between genuinely cynical and genuinely stupid was determined by whoever draws the line in the sand. Well, 2020, a metonym for supposedly clear vision, has functioned more like an interminable feedback loop of sociopathy and idiocy. The establishment’s gilded edifice now torn away, and behind lies an anemic democracy led by agents of societal stasis maladjusted to justice. Red team, blue team — it’s the same horrifying tragicomedy.

Donald Trump has dealt with the coronavirus pandemic by assuming the role of Enrico Balazar in The Drawing of the Three, with a bizarre and blustering approach that is not so much tactical as it is instinctual. His decision to bloviate and wheel off yards of oafish spin is a logical continuation of his reflexive cruelty and comic-book-villain dada. It is not news, at this point, that Trump is constitutionally incapable of shaking his whim-tossed laziness and wild avarice and deal with any of the very important things required of his very important job. In the face of a viral pandemic, he brandished his familiar blunt tools — unflagging selfishness and testosterone fury, a knack for shoving others into oncoming traffic, and a wild and blank contempt for anyone not named Donald J. Trump — hoping it will result in compelling enough television to slither toward reelection.

This firehose of dizzying nonsequiturs lives in a sort of weightless suspension between his last lie and his next, and given his lifelong struggle with object permanence, inhabits an unidentifiable reality that blurs right in front of the tip of his nose. Trump is not a subtle performer; with a reputation tethered to The Stock Numbers Going Up, he was willing to sell out the health of every American because he is incapable of expressing anything other than whatever urge or anxiety is currently plaguing his damp and roiling existence. He lied about the coronavirus’s spread and called it a Democratic hoax; appointed his anti-science VP to janitorial duty; urged Americans to continue going to work; defunded the CDC’s capacity to combat global disease outbreaks; held ego-boosting MAGA rallies; claimed he had a “natural ability” to understand it; lied about insurers covering the full cost of testing and treatment; and oversaw the Fed loaning $1.5 trillion to the financial system while barely considering the workers on the losing end of the Dow’s violent plunge.

I heard squawking pundits describe this whirlwind slapstick kerfuffle as “Trump’s Katrina.” Peter Wehner went as far as to declare “The Trump Presidency Is Over” in the Atlantic, as if Ferret-Top hasn’t wiggled his way out of calling Mexicans criminals and rapists, mocking a disabled reporter and a Gold Star Family, commenting on Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycles, sharing his personal sexual-assault best practices with Billy Bush, saying there were “very fine people” amongst Nazi protesters, obstructing justice, and a whole host of other needless vulgarities.

After duffing every conceivable aspect of the federal government’s response to this epidemic, Trump went full MAGA in his initial coronavirus address, calling it a “foreign virus,” possibly laying the groundwork to weaponize xenophobia if the economy continues its dreadful freefall. The right-wing commentariat barrelled all last week with varying takes on the Democrats drumming up mass hysteria to cause a market selloff that would lead to the frogmarching of Trump from the Oval Office. Trish Reagan, on a deranged Fox segment titled “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam,” shrieked: “This is a time to be united, not to point fingers.” (Notice it’s always the people directly responsible for problems who snarl with desperate pleas to not politicize political events like the coronavirus. It’s a non-statement that simultaneously incites division while dumping on those who identify an issue, assign blame to its causes, and offer solutions to fix it.)

Enduring even two minutes of right-wing punditry is an exercise of battering your brain with fallacies, conspiracies, half-truths, untruths, outright lies, lies by omission, pants on fire, and Four Pinocchios. Now, imagine melting your mind with this clammy fibbing and flubby bluster for several hours a day, every day, until IQ points hemorrhage out of your ears. That is the average Republican voter. At risk of sounding cliché, this recalls a line from 1984: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Red Pill fever swamps were drowning in cockamamie Q’Anon crocks of Jeffrey Epstein’s body being the coronavirus kill switch meant to terminate anyone who pried into his secrets.

The GOP is a festival of six-faced gladhanding wheeler-dealers each taking a turn to sound the bullhorn of Coca-Cola patriotism and conning their base into thinking Jesus died for corporate buybacks; bound to a monosyllabic TV tyrant with a dedicated Secret Security team standing between him and whatever doorknob he tries to lick. Republicans spent last week blocking an emergency paid sick leave bill and attempting to stealthily wedge anti-choice laws into an emergency relief package. Eventually, a pale shadow of necessary solutions passed, inadequate legislation that grants 20% of the labor force the very thing that will curb symptomatic workers from spreading COVID-19.

The Democrats did what Democrats typically do — they made clear they were disappointed in the Republicans, and instead of leveraging a national health crisis and Trump’s birdbrained mismanagement to ensure the maximum amount of aid reach the greatest number of people, advocated for something vague and means-tested that would safeguard against too much federal support reaching insufficiently vulnerable plebs with untoward quickness. Even if deaths pile up and the economy decays, rest assured, a small business operating in a low-income neighborhood can qualify for a $250 tax savings credit.

Democrats know not to make any bold promises. These do-nothing putzes never want to be held accountable for their impotence. They’re a garbage casserole: layers of abstract platitudes, empty snark, Harry Potter memes, and culture war signifiers baked into triangulating mannequins. The DNC, a withered vessel sputtering on the dregs of distant glories.

There’s something poetic about Joe Biden as the likely standard-bearer for the feeble, pre-compromised iteration of contemporary liberalism, a hollow shell filled with Aetna stock. His meandering incoherence a heavy-handed metaphor for the dearth of his party’s ambitions. The Crimson King, the giddy abolition of Medicare-for-All, a jabbering, annihilating cackle who wandered off-camera minutes into his virtual town hall toward the end of the world, wondering why he wasn’t swinging to a doo-wop concert set in 1956.

Democratic voters were presented with a candidate who preached the virtues of universal healthcare as part of a larger vision of collective cooperation to deal with the very kind of daunting problems currently haunting us. But he’s been brushed aside into the dust bin of failed idealism because of manufactured concerns over online bullies and “electability” — whatever that means during the Pussy Grabber Administration. “I love his ideas, but Bernie can’t be president.” Why not? “REASONS!!!” Now, Bernie Sanders seems destined to a fate of fireside alarmist crank delivering apocalyptic prophecies quickly morphing into a quotidian reality. With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of back to normal.

The nation feels the fear of a mucous-slick grotesquerie subsuming the sprawls of concrete connecting a nation longing to binge Friends reruns in peace. ALL-CAPS demands for testing clutter the Twittersphere, and from the cracked, scaled lips of craven and undiscerning MSDNC swine, echoes of how are you gonna pay for it? and have you laid out a detailed plan? rasp into the contaminated air. Liberal America has been whipped up into this orgiastic frenzy to browbeat ideological deviance rather than lift themselves from the ol’ familiar double-downer sideshow of half-measures and diminished expectations. Progressive enthusiasm silenced by a quiet resignation.

This is a nation of 320 million frightened and gullible used car salesmen with enough disposable income to buy all the guns and streaming subscriptions and Domino’s we need, bred by peeling back our brains and burying our heads in whatever ceaseless shitstream of fables that mollycoddles our ideas of American Exceptionalism, with little to no qualms about giving the individual as much freedom as they want so long as they’re born in a ditch and those in power can commoditize all the ladders they need to climb out. This brand of liberty, it turns out, keeps the markets humming.

About a decade ago, the American economy streaked out of the bushes of recession and has kept enough distance between itself and the drooling red-eyed zombie of the ’08 financial meltdown in a mad dash of speculation and quantitative easing. Perhaps the coronavirus is what causes it to trip and stare into the warning signs long snuffed in muted desperation: the divorcing of productivity from profit, the wealthy’s ill-gotten tax cut gains, corporate buybacks, last September’s repo crisis, and recent flocks to gobble 10-year treasuries. This economy has the backbone of a mollusk. This extended snow day of nobody move, nobody touch anybody, nobody go anywhere could last weeks to months, sparking a rolling recession where the travel, tourism, restaurant, and film industries grind to a halt.

An idealist might assume COVID-19 would imbue this coming-to-Jesus moment where the establishment finally recognizes how universal healthcare would help Americans seek medical treatments without fretting over co-pays. You know, just like when Vietnam and Iraq taught us about the horrors of unnecessary military blunders, or when the Great Recession was the painful consequence of rampant deregulation, or when 2016 showcased the limited electoral appeal of bloodless technocrats with less charisma than a bowl of oatmeal. As Upton Sinclair says, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

This freak show flies far beyond the scope of a doofus Jell-O-Shot and his bungling of disease contamination. The coronavirus is more proof of just how much of contemporary American life is a sham, with power structures built on corporate profiteering as opposed to our best interests. Whole Foods, instead of giving their employees sick days, expect them to donate their paid time off to each other. Barren supermarket shelves resemble conservative parodies of socialist economies. Stockpiles of sanitizers and masks hoarded and a store’s worth of paper towels stuffed into a single shopping cart because apparently coronavirus makes you poop yourself to death. What about this inspires any confidence in how we would react to a looming climate catastrophe?

America hangs in a frustrated limbo created mainly by the gross cynicism of basilisk leaders barely squinting beyond the horizons of quarterly profit margins. The gasping breaths of a wheezing empire too stupid for its own bloated significance and too self-serving to buck this spiral of ruination, doddering through a pornographic spectacle of high-frequency trading and brand illusions until it reaches suicide-by-autoerotic-asphyxiation.

Coronavirus, grab us by the hand and guide us toward the gates of hell. We’ll complain about snake emojis along the way.