03-17-2020, 03:23 PM
(03-16-2020, 10:07 AM)sbarrera Wrote: I'm sure many of us have seen memes bringing up H1N1 in comparison with COVID-19 - usually to make a partisan point about the administration's handling of one or the other. Looking back at the 2009 pandemic data, it looks like it was pretty serious - 59 million Americans infected, 265,000 hospitalized, and 12,000 dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_p...ted_States
But I don't remember as strong a social reaction as is happening with COVID-19. What's different? This would have been at the beginning of the 4T, as opposed to the middle. We were just getting through a financial crisis that had already started, rather than dealing with one *caused* by the reaction to the pandemic. What else is different? Were we just no there in the Crisis mood yet, or intensely enough? Is it that COVID-19 has been so demonstrably bad for other countries (Italy in particular) so it is more ominous a threat?
One difference is in the quality of political leadership. Obama versus Trump? That is one of the starkest divides ever between competence and incompetence (Lincoln and either his predecessor and his successor; Hoover and FDR). A second is that Americans had a different focus -- getting the overall economy back on track in 2009.
America was in a Crisis mood in 2009, but the economic elites recovered first and then did everything to get us out of a Crisis Mood. Just think of Tea Party ideology as an attempt to maintain the vices of a 3T with the ideological stagnation of a 1T. The resident has his flaws, but know well: he combines the worst features of 1T leadership with the worst of 3T leadership. If a wholesome 1T is a time of political entrenchment and social conformity it also comes with the smoothing of economic inequity. The Trump 1T-3T hybrid is an attempt to enforce political entrenchment and social conformity -- but at the same time the intensification of economic inequity. Such is sure failure because people do not see their suffering amid opulent splendor as a noble purpose.
To be sure, Obama is a mature Reactive, the sort of leader that Americans usually end up with after the Crisis is over. But Obama has his virtues, and he is certainly less dangerous than a hot-head who stokes the furnace of extremism. (The worst possible sort of leader in a Crisis is an angry Reactive who uses his power to settle old scores, as was so with fascists and Stalinist operatives and stooges. Szalasi and Rakosi in Hungary illustrate the type from both fascist and Commie examples). At least Obama was good at calming things; Trump is not the sort to inculcate calm through any measure.
Donald Trump is not up to the task of reassuring us. He is the most polarizing figure of American politics since just before the Civil War, when people defending slavery tried to convince other Americans that slavery was itself a noble cause. He manifestly lacks empathy, caution, integrity, and humility that allow him to relate at all to people on the Other Side. If any consensus can form in America it will be that Donald Trump is a non-solution.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.