Beware of Those Who Never Admit Having Been Wrong

As America continues to reel socially and economically from the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we continue to see wrong response after wrong response to the virus and the threat it poses by both Donald Trump - a man who never ever admits error - and his circle off sycophants who represent a who's who of a Republican Party/conservative movement that eschews expertise and basic competence, not to men any ability to admit error. These individuals tell Trump what he wants to hear and frighteningly are listened to over the advice of true experts who find themselves silenced - none of the doctors on Trump's Covid-19 response team are being allowed to testify before Congress for the likely reason that what they have to say will upset Der Trumpenführer.  A column in the New York Times looks at the consequence of never admitting error especially when faced with a pandemic that does not lend itself to spin on Fox News.  Here are column highlights:

“You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down close to zero.”

We have contained this, and the economy is “holding up nicely.” It’s not nearly as serious as the common flu. We’re going to have 50,000 or 60,000 deaths, and that’s great. OK, we may have more than 100,000 deaths, but we’re doing a great job and should reopen the economy.

You sometimes hear people say that Donald Trump and his minions minimized the dangers of Covid-19, and that this misjudgment helps explain why their policy response has been so disastrously inadequate. But this statement, while true, misses crucial aspects of what’s going on.

For Trump and company didn’t make a one-time mistake. They grossly minimized the pandemic and its dangers every step of the way, week after week over a period of months. And they’re still doing it.

Now, everyone makes bad predictions; God knows I have. But when you keep getting things wrong, and especially when you keep getting them wrong in the same direction, you’re supposed to engage in some self-reflection — and learn from your mistakes.

To engage in such self-reflection, however, you have to be willing to admit that you were wrong in the first place.

We all know that Trump himself is incapable of making such an admission. At a time of crisis, America is led by a whiny, childlike man whose ego is too fragile to let him concede ever having made any kind of error. And he has surrounded himself with people who share his lack of character.

But where do these people come from? What has struck me, as details of Trump’s coronavirus debacle continue to emerge, is that he wasn’t getting bad advice from obscure, fringe figures whose only claim to fame was their successful sycophancy. On the contrary, the people telling him what he wanted to hear were, by and large, pillars of the conservative establishment with long pre-Trump careers.

On Saturday The Washington Post reported that in late March Trump was unhappy with epidemiological models suggesting a death toll over 100,000 — which, by the way, now seems highly likely. So the White House created its own team led by Kevin Hassett, whom The Post describes as “a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases.” . . . . What The Post didn’t say was that aside from not having any background in epidemiology, Hassett has an, um, interesting record as an economist.

In the mid-2000s Hassett denied that there was a housing bubble, suggesting that only liberals believed that there was.

Finally, Hassett promised that the 2017 Trump tax cut would lead to a big boost in business investment; it didn’t, but he insisted that it did.

You might think that an economist would pay some professional penalty for this kind of track record — not simply one of making bad predictions, which everyone does, but of both being wrong at every important juncture and refusing to admit or learn from mistakes.

The moral of this story, I’d argue, is that observers trying to understand America’s lethally bad response to the coronavirus focus too much on Trump’s personal flaws, and not enough on the character of the party he leads.

Yes, Trump’s insecurity leads him to reject expertise, listen only to people who tell him what makes him feel good and refuse to acknowledge error. But disdain for experts, preference for incompetent loyalists and failure to learn from experience are standard operating procedure for the whole modern G.O.P.

Trump’s narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn’t an outlier; he’s more a culmination of the American right’s long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump’s character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.

The Morbid Ideology Behind "Reopen America" Protests

As several posts have noted, the protests to "reopen America" are supposed to give the impression that they are "grassroots" and "spontaneous" actions of patriotic Americans.  Sadly, the mainstream media - especially TV networks - gives them coverage and never looks behind the facade.  In reality, the protests trace to billionaires and money interests (with help from white supremacists) that have funded their organization and manipulated those aggrieved by  the loss of white status/privilege as they are about the economic shutdown.   The goals of the behind the scenes backers?  Actually, there are several, one being to distract from the Trump/Pence regimes utter bungling of the federal government response to the pandemic. Another is to distract attention from the GOP's agenda of A piece in New Republic looks at this malignant ideology behind the protests which in true GOP/right wing form use racism and resentment to play those who have suffered most because of GOP policies.  Here are excerpts:

Photos of the small “reopen America” protests, which have made the rounds on social media over the past week, have revealed a spectacle as cartoonish as it is macabre: a rogue’s gallery of right-wing groups coming together to share in the spirit of defiance and, presumably, tiny droplets of mucusfar right  and saliva. The protests (and their backing by deep-pocketed funders) invited many comparisons to the Tea Party movement of a decade ago. Unlike that movement, these small protests are likely to die out soon. Nevertheless, they have captured something vitally important about how the right is responding to this fraught moment in our recent history.

As jobless claims have soared past an astonishing 26 million with no end in sight, the Covid-19 pandemic may well push the United States into a profound and long-lasting economic crisis. . . . The onset of this immiseration has begun to propel bold ideas and movements from the left to demand a reorganization of the economy and a fundamental shift in political power. But the right is swiftly establishing its own morbid template for how to interpret and respond to both the pandemic and its economic effects.

Republican politicians and right-wing pundits endlessly echo a central claim: “The cure is worse than the disease.” In other words, you can either risk dying from the virus or face certain economic ruin, as if there are no other choices. Their hope is that people already conditioned by an ideology centered on the marketplace, the individual, and the nation will be more likely to believe that their lives and livelihoods are under greater threat from state-ordered economic shutdowns and coercive social measures than they are from the disease. For them, the idea that Covid-19 could ultimately be overcome–even if at great human cost–by working and shopping is more appealing, and even more imaginable, than a new politics of mutuality that might redistribute power and resources in an egalitarian way.  

Recall the Tea Party’s origins during the Great Recession. . . . . Those two animating features of the movement—anti-black racism and opposition to the Affordable Care Act—defined a movement that in essence chose investments in whiteness over the assurance of at least some semblance of health care.

This was followed in the 2016 election by a Republican candidate who surged among voters who had high levels of racial resentment, strong feelings of political powerlessness, and growing economic anxiety (regardless of income level). Donald Trump . . . . demonizing Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, black protesters, and foreign rivals. All of this set the stage for how the right would come to respond to the current pandemic.

The rhetorical oppositions of work to welfare, self-reliance to dependence, individual to state, citizen to foreigner—oppositions animated by race, gender, and class—run deep in American political culture. All are reflected in the politics of the pandemic right now, making for a grim political vision of American freedom.

The dozen or so Republicans in the House of Representatives refusing to wear masks when called to vote on the latest coronavirus relief bill performed precisely that kind of political theater for their constituents. It is meant as a tough-guy taunt, to show their own robustness and the weakness of their opponents. But it also reveals something more pathological. The risky behavior demonstrates vitality precisely because it tempts fate, suggestive of Freud’s death drive, which he described as a force “whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death.”

There is now a well-documented relationship between whiteness, status, and morbidity. . . . . over the last few years, there have been long-term increases in “deaths of despair”—overdoses, suicides, alcohol-related fatalities—among middle-aged whites without college degrees. There is much yet to be understood about reasons for this phenomenon, but a sense of the declining status of whiteness appears tightly connected to collective self-harm.

Demands to reopen states provide great cover for the Trump administration, the Republican Party in Congress, red state governors, and the Federal Reserve, who are working to keep current wealth stratifications in place and protect the rich from economic harm—and doing so without much pushback from Democrats. As conditions become more dire, the right will do all it can to enlist the loyalty of middle- and working-class victims of the crisis. Here, the logics of race and nation will become increasingly important.

Many of the demonstrators at the recent protests, repeating Fox News talking points, focused their ire on urban America . . . and beneath it, the racial demonization of black and brown denizens of cities. It is this sentiment that gives cover to Republican resistance to federal spending when couched in language like Mitch McConnell’s opposition to “blue state bailouts.”

Within the Trump administration, the nationalist tide continues to rise. . . . . Defenders of the current political order will continue to do whatever is necessary to protect wealth and privilege. They understand that to address the enormity of the economic crisis would upend the neoliberal consensus of this second Gilded Age, which has greatly enriched a few while systematically dismantling public goods, disempowering workers, and diminishing democratic rule. Their hope is that enough Americans go along with this resistance, even if it kills them. 

Try as I might, I find it difficult to have any empathy for the participants in these protests, not the least because so many are motivated ultimately by racism.  In addition, they refuse to look at themselves as a major cause of their own plight.  Many rejected education, have embraced ignorance, and have supported right wing politicians - like Trump - who have worked against their financial interests. Because of their own bad decisions in many cases they feel their skin color is their only claim to privilege.