No living native Americans have ever lived through an experience like the nation now faces. 9-11 was a national trauma, but its impacts were short term for most of the country save New York City first and foremost, and around the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to a lesser extent. The questions that some are asking are (i) will this change America's divided state, and (ii) will it end Trumpism and its focus on an "us versus them" mentality. A piece in
Politico looks at these questions as does a column in
New York Magazine by Andrew Sullivan. Here is a taste from the optimistic piece in
Politico piece:
[N]o matter how the coronavirus
pandemic passes, or how quickly, there is likely in these strange housebound
weeks a new political epoch being born.
Trumpism as a style is defined not
just by boasting and bluster; his triumphalism depends on projecting certitude.
The president early on acted as if he could indeed create reality by
proclamation, when he assured the public that U.S. infections would soon be
down to zero.
Only in recent days, as the
possibility of widespread domestic disease mounts, has Trump acknowledged
imprecision—the fragmentary nature of our understanding of how far the virus
has spread, how effective efforts to blunt its impact will be, or when these
efforts will be deemed sufficient.
The coronavirus pandemic does not
remotely have the cataclysmic shock and violence of 9/11. For many people,
however, the virus’ actual day-in, day-out impact will be more pervasive. 9-11
was followed by a period, which turned out to be short-lived, of national
connection and goodwill. Trump, who has made mockery and castigation of
opponents his signature, surely did not conjure fuzzy feelings from many
quarters with his appeal at the White House on Wednesday that, “We are all in
this together.”
Yet the pandemic has a logic that
transcends politics and personal feeling. Never mind how one feels about Trump.
Never mind how we feel about one another. The reality of a dangerous virus is
that we are all in this together.
Andrew Sullivan's piece is lengthier and notes among other things that much of America's medical supplies come from China - the nation Trump is seeking to blame for his administrations failure to prepare for a pandemic. It also looks at how the pandemic could either strengthen Trump - especially among his cult followers - or be his undoing. It might also force Americans to reassess where American society had descended. Which direction will prevail is yet to be seen. Here are column highlights:
And this will change us. It must.
All plagues change society and culture, reversing some trends while
accelerating others, shifting consciousness far and wide, with consequences we
won’t discover for years or decades. The one thing we know about epidemics is
that at some point they will end. The one thing we don’t know is who we will be
then.
I know that I was a different man at
the end of the plague of AIDS than I was at the beginning, just as so many gay
men and many others were. You come face-to-face with mortality and the
randomness of fate, and you are changed. You have a choice: to submit to fear
and go under, or to live with the virus and do what you can. And the living
with it, while fighting it, is what changes you over time; it requires more
than a little nerve and more than a little steel. Plague living dispenses with
the unnecessary, lays bare whom you can trust and whom you can’t, and also
reveals what matters. Plagues
destroy so much — but through the devastation, they can also rebuild and renew.
. . . . Like wars, plagues can make us see where we are, shake us into a new
understanding of the world, reshape our priorities, and help us judge what
really matters and what actually doesn’t. Testing kits matter. Twitter not so
much. Politically, who knows? Much will depend on the skills of the politicians
grasping this moment for their various ends. But a lot is at stake, and I
suspect that those who think COVID-19 all but kills Donald Trump’s reelection
prospects are being, as usual, too optimistic.
National crises, even when
handled at this level of incompetence and deceit, can, over time, galvanize
public support for a national leader. As Trump instinctually finds a way to
identify the virus as “foreign,” he will draw on these lizard-brain impulses,
and in a time of fear, offer the balm of certainty to his cult and beyond. It’s
the final bonding: blind support for the leader even at the risk of your own
sickness and death. Watching
Fox News operate in real time in ways Orwell described so brilliantly in Nineteen
Eighty-Four — compare “We had always been at war with Eastasia” with “I’ve
felt that it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic” — you’d
be a fool not to see the potential for the Republican right to use this plague
for whatever end they want. On
the other hand, even further incompetence or failure on Trump’s part could
finally, maybe, puncture the cult, and deliver the White House to Biden and the
Congress to the Democrats. And the huge sums now being proposed by even the GOP
to shore up the economy and the stock market at a time of massive debt, as well
as the stark failures of our public-health planning, could make an activist
government agenda much more politically palatable to Americans. “You never want
a serious crisis to go to waste,” as Rahm Emanuel once put it. And if a
public-health catastrophe doesn’t bring home the need for effective universal
health care, what could? This virus is also an opportunity for the left to move
away from its unpopular woke identity obsessions toward a case for structural
economic change fitting for the scale of the epidemic. For
the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be spending much, much more time at home, or
communicating entirely virtually. There will abruptly be less work to do, and
less money coming in, and marriages under the acute stress of unending
cohabitation. We will retreat into our online worlds, where viruses only affect
computers, and withdraw from our neighbors when we could do with coming
together. Good
will happen too. Surely it will. The silence in the streets portends something
new. The other day, I realized I’d been texting a lot less and calling a lot
more. I wanted to make sure my friends and family were okay, and I needed to
see their faces and hear their voices to be reassured. As we withdraw from each
other in the flesh, we may begin to appreciate better what we had until so
recently: friendship and love made manifest by being together, simple gifts
like a shared joint, a head resting on your shoulder, a hand squeezed, a toast
raised. These
weeks of confinement can be seen also, it seems to me, as weeks of a national
retreat, a chance to reset and rethink our lives, to ponder their fragility. I
learned one thing in my 20s and 30s in the AIDS epidemic: Living in a plague is
just an intensified way of living. It merely unveils the radical uncertainty of
life that is already here, and puts it into far sharper focus. The trick, as the great religions teach us, is counterintuitive: not
to seize control, but to gain some balance and even serenity in absorbing what
you can’t. . . . There may be moments in this great public silence when we
learn and relearn this lesson.
