But neither Trump nor many of his allies appear to care that much about the human toll. Or at least they’ve convinced themselves that an extended lockdown is more harmful than anything the virus can do. Trump, The Washington Post reports, is “fixated on the plummeting stock market, is chafing at the idea of the country remaining closed until the summer and growing tired of talking only about the coronavirus.” Key officials within the administration — like Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the Treasury — are pushing the president to get the economy back on track. “The president is right. The cure can’t be worse than the disease,” Larry Kudlow, director of the White House National Economic Council, said on Fox News on Monday. “And we’re going to have to make some difficult trade-offs.”

I suppose it is possible that when Trump and Kudlow say this, they are thinking of service employees and blue-collar workers, of people who live from paycheck to paycheck. But their mutual fixation on the stock market — Trump’s shift from apathy to attention came in the wake of a breathtaking sell-off — makes this unlikely. The “trade-off” here isn’t lives for prosperity — again, coronavirus will dampen economic activity with or without social distancing — it’s lives for shareholder value.

There’s another issue as well. The only way to sustain an economy in lockdown is unconditional government support for individuals, families and communities. It’s social democracy, if only for a while. And that amount of redistribution — from top to bottom, from creditors to debtors — is unacceptable to the president and his allies. Remember that the Trump administration is still trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and end food assistance for 700,000 Americans.

Marxists have a turn of phrase that dates back to the late 19th century: “Socialism or barbarism.” It comes from the German journalist and philosopher Karl Kautsky, who in 1892 wrote, “As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”

Two decades later, in a 1915 pamphlet, “The Crisis in German Social Democracy,” the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg recapitulated the idea, attributing it to Karl Marx’s lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads,” she wrote while a generation of European men marched to their doom in the First World War, “either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”

You don’t have to be a revolutionary socialist to understand the sentiment. In the face of disaster, the only path forward is solidarity and mutual concern. Reject it, and all that’s left is a cold and selfish disregard for human life.

“America will again — and soon — be open for business,” the president said on Monday. “Very soon, a lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. A lot sooner.”

In other words, Trump will sacrifice Americans to coronavirus if it will save the market and his prospects for re-election. Which is to say that given the choice between solidarity and barbarism, Trump will choose barbarism. We’ll see, in November, if the rest of the country follows suit.

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