President-elect Joe Biden in his Thanksgiving message asserted that Americans “are at war with the virus, not with each other.”
He was certainly right about the war on the virus part and now that a number of highly effective vaccines are coming up for approval it feels like that war is at an end. Like it must have felt in the summer of 1918 after the final German offensive on the Western front petered out and American doughboys and war materiel began arriving in the exhausted, war-torn Europe. Or in the early months of 1945, when the noose was tightening around the capital of Hitler’s Reich. There were still major battles to be fought and lots of people were going to die, but peace was clearly at hand.
Nevertheless, while scientists are about to defeat the virus in the war, the unpleasant truth is that the virus has defeated the United States.
If you want a rhyming analogy, think once more of World War I. The Entente Cordiale allies defeated the Central Powers but the Germans defeated one of the potential victors, Russia, by allowing Vladimir Lenin and a trainload of his Bolsheviks to cross over from Switzerland.
The United States, a country with advanced technology, the world’s best medical facilities, enormous wealth and a high level of social organization, should have had the fastest and the most efficient response to the COVID19 pandemic. And it did — in New York, for example, where the virus outbreak came early and was the most severe. In New York, the response was swift and in line with the best advice of scientists and medical professionals. Even now, the second wave of the disease in New York is being dealt with properly.
But state and local authorities combatting the outbreak acted mostly on their own while at the federal level the response has been an abject failure. It was characterized by misinformation, lies, conspiracy theories and ridiculous claims, image was promoted over substance, medical professionals and scientists were sidelined and muzzled while quacks were given the national stage, the management of the response was entrusted to incompetent nincompoops, etc. Corruption and self-dealing — i.e., war profiteering if it was indeed a war — were rampant and sanctioned at the very top of the government.
The Trump administration was concerned with keeping the stock market going and not with saving American lives.
Worse, the response in Washington was criminally politicized. Early on the federal government dragged its feet because only Democratic majority states seemed to be affected. It held local officials hostage, demanding praise for Trump in return for the medical equipment they needed. Attacks on common-sense local quarantine measures were fomented from the White House, by the Anti-Masker in Chief.
Going forward, the moronic anti-mask movement is likely to transmogrify into an anti-vax resistance, giving the virus another victory.
The United States, which should have been best prepared and best equipped to weather COVID19, had instead one of the worst responses, on par with Brazil, India and Russia. While the rest of the world is dealing with the second wave of infections, America is still gripped by its first wave which has spread particularly widely among Trumpists many of whom have accepted Trump’s early contention that the virus was a Democrat hoax. Instead of a cool, scientific, effective response America presents the grim landscape of violent virus deniers and death cultists.
In its final weeks, the Trump misgovernment has given up doing anything about the virus altogether, except bragging about the development of the vaccines it had little to do with and blaming China for what it did at the start of the pandemic.
The number of victims of this lost war will likely surpass 350,000 by the time Biden is inaugurated.
The United States of America is the only global superpower. It boasts the world’s strongest economy and the largest, most technologically advanced military. Since technology is the foundation of modern military power, America’s leadership in this field is the guarantee of enduring military strength. No one can defeat the United States — except Americans themselves.
And indeed Biden is wrong: Americans are at war with each other. The virus was able to defeat America because some Americans — starting with the country’s President and a large number of appointed and elected officials — have been waging war on the United States of America. They started this war well before the outbreak of the disease, waging it not under the Stars and Stripes banner of their nation but under the treasonous Confederate flag, the mongrel Thin Blue Line police state flag and the Trump flags flying at Trump rallies.
The flags of Trumpism tell the whole story. When the Bolsheviks declared war on the Russian Empire, the first thing they did was establish their own colors — the blood-red flag of the global socialist movement.
The war in which the virus defeated America still goes on and is intensifying. Now it is a battle over the results of the 2020 presidential election — which Is still unfolding, mind you — and it will rage with new intensity when — or rather if — the Biden administration is installed.
Meanwhile, Biden is appointing his cabinet, selecting seasoned professionals who hark back to the America of the past. His middle-of-the-road choices confirm what I have always contended: the establishment Democrats are today’s conservative, whereas Trumpists are right-wing radicals and fascist revolutionaries. The establishment, which has been under a right-wing radical attack over the past four years, is hailing the 2020 election as the end of a national nightmare.
This includes the business establishment. The stock market has reacted with extreme enthusiasm to the combined news of the vaccine and the Biden victory. Stock investors feel that the war is about to end. Once we successfully navigate the next few months, the reasoning goes, pent-up demand will be unleashed. People who have been holed up at home since March will go out and spend all that money they have been saving. A number of economists, both liberal and conservative, are predicting an economic boom starting in the second quarter of 2021. Paul Krugman, a liberal and usually a bear, has written that he expects the incoming Biden administration to ride a robust business recovery for the next two years.
“America is back,” Biden declared while announcing his foreign policy team. But there is a hollow sound to such assertions. The fact that his first appointments were in foreign policy suggests that the president-elect doesn’t yet understand that he has a fire raging at home which will make foreign policy irrelevant at best. His appointment of Janet Yellen, whose tenure at the Federal Reserve was characterized by a dramatic expansion of the income gap that plunged America into the ranks of Third World nations, suggests he understands little about the lines on which the domestic war is being waged.
In short, toothpaste is not about to be cajoled back into the tube. America’s friends should wait to celebrate its return to the community of nations, and its foes should stock up on popcorn since the next months and years will be extremely eventful.
