At the New York Times, Zachary Carter says the coronavirus killed the gospel of small government. I doubt this is true; one suspects the true believers will take their dream of drowning government in a bathtub to their graves. But what Carter writes is still very much worth reading. Among other things, Carter writes that the U.S. response to the pandemic was hampered by decades of neglecting the nation’s problems.
Doctors and nurses were left without basic protective equipment because the United States lacked the manufacturing capacity to produce it. Efforts to track and contain the virus were delayed by bottlenecks in test production and shortages of supplementary equipment like swabs. Once tests could be administered, a nationwide scarcity of test-processing equipment prolonged the delivery of test results.
The reason: More than a decade into a hospital-closure crisis, the United States faced a shortage of beds and medical facilities necessary to manage an emergency. Hospitals overrun with Covid-19 patients turned away ambulances. Vaccine distribution, while steadily improving, has been hampered by shortages of both staffing and supplies. The poverty of local government infrastructure has disgraced the rollout further. Websites crash, phone lines are busy, parking lots are full.
These are not only public health failures but also economic failures — an inability to marshal resources to solve a problem. And the often-toxic incompetence of American political leadership has obscured the structural causes of this failure.
See also The Dead End of Small Government.
Once upon a time the U.S. regularly made robust investments in infrastructure, space flight, scientific research, education, etc. The amount of such investment as a percentage of GDP plummeted in 1980, Carter wrote. Good old Reaganomics. Tax cuts were more important. As a result, when the pandemic came and we needed secure infrastructure and supply lines and something at least resembling a public health system, we were in trouble. Various commissions over the years had warned that we were unprepared to deal with various sorts of crises for various reasons, but these concerns were not addressed by our government. “And the past year has exposed its impoverished thinking: The trouble was not spending too much ahead of the crisis, but spending too little — on research, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity,” Carter writes.
So we went into the pandemic with a lot of handicaps. The biggest handicap was Donald Trump. I am sure many books will be written about all the ways Trump’s so-called response to the pandemic was unacceptable, but for now I want to focus on vaccines.
Trump and his supporters want you to know that we have vaccines because of his stability and genius, or something. There’s a lot of confusion about exactly what the Trump Administration did and did not do, so let’s look at that.
Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” provided grants to pay for research and development of vaccines. Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and some other companies took the grants, but Pfizer did not. Since Pfizer’s was the first vaccine to be approved for emergency use, one wonders if the grants really speeded up the development part. However, Warp Speed also paid to have vaccines manufactured in advance of approval so that they would be immediately available if approved. Waiting for approval to begin manufacturing would have added a few months to the wait time, I understajd. So, credit where credit is due; vaccines were available more quickly than they would have been otherwise.
However, the pre-orders were relatively small. For example, the pre-order to Pfizer was for 100 million doses, or enough to vaccinate 50 million people. The European Union pre-ordered twice that. And then in late December, in response to criticism of the scarcity of the vaccines, the Trumpers released all of the inventory. When Joe Biden took office, the stockpile was depleted.
The Trump effort completely fell apart in the distribution phase. The Trump distribution plan was, mostly, let the states figure it out. See No, Trump Doesn’t Deserve Credit For Planning Vaccine Distribution by Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo.
A look at what actually happened in the Trump administration’s last months shows that the White House lacked a plan for the “last mile” of distribution, leaving that to the states while lobbying Congress not to pass much-needed funding that would spur state and local governments to get the vaccine into arms. …
…What the Trump administration left the country with was a partnership with pharmacies to vaccinate nursing homes — the only real footprint of a federal plan to deliver vaccine into people’s arms. And even that foundered amid allegations of inefficiency compared to states that opted out.
What’s more is that that one plan only covered the first phase of distribution: nursing home residents and hospital workers, who received inoculations from the medical facilities at which they worked. It set the Biden administration up for a “vaccine cliff,” an outcome that was avoided in part due to the outcry over the sheer ineptitude of the effort’s early stages.
Josh Marshall explained this more succinctly:
The administration had a system and funding for getting assisted living facilities vaccinated and I believe also health care workers vaccinated. But that program and funding was designed to run out at the beginning of February. And that was it. So it seemed almost intentionally designed to get everyone pumped up about getting vaccinated and then have all the plans and money run out about one week after Biden’s inauguration. So a pre-planned train-wreck on Biden’s watch.
Beyond that, there was no plan other than to dump the vaccines onto the states. The Trumpers couldn’t even manage to communicate to states what to expect and when, making the two-vaccine protocol a tad difficult to coordinate.
Josh Marshall also has a long post about why the Trump response was so screwed up, which unfortunately is behind a subscription wall. Basically, he says that the early phase of Warp Speed, sending money to pharmaceutical companies, was the simple part. The federal government has a lot of money. It got sent to pharmaceutical companies. Not that hard. But the vaccine distribution part is extraordinarily complex, and it’s obvious the Trumpers just couldn’t do it. They lacked experience and expertise and, worse, had no respect for those who did have experience and expertise. They were too stupid and incompetent to realize how in over their heads they were.
And Trump himself is nothing if not risk-averse. His pattern throughout his time in the White House was to refuse to deal with difficult problems and then blame whoever did take on the problem for screwing it up.
From the very start of the Pandemic in the first weeks of 2020 the Trump administration consistently sought to disclaim responsibility for things that would be genuinely difficult and could have challenging or bad outcomes. Push the tough tasks on to others and if it goes badly blame them. This frequently went to absurd lengths as when the White House insisted that states short on ventilators at the peak of the spring surge should have known to purchase them in advance of the pandemic. Over the course of the year Trump spun up an alternative reality in which the US was somehow still operating under the Articles of Confederation in which individual states were responsible for things that have been viewed as inherently federal responsibilities for decades or centuries.
But in a lot of ways Trump wasn’t that much of an outlier. Ever since the rise of Reagan and of “movement conservatism,” the pattern has been to cut taxes, cut spending, trust the “free market” to solve problems, listen to ideological crackpots instead of experts, and when things get screwed up, blame liberals. And here we are.
Just about exactly one year ago, when we were just beginning to face the pandemic, Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times wrote a column headlined “The Era of Small Government Is Over.” He understood what we were about to go through. Unfortunately, the column should have been headlines “The Era of Small Government Should End Now, But It Probably Won’t.” Because it didn’t. And there are plenty of people in government who embrace their “small government” fantasies even now.
But maybe the influence of “small government” ideology will shrink enough that we can drown it in a bathrub. Then something good will have come out of this awful pandemic.
And Trump himself is nothing if not risk-averse. His pattern throughout his time in the White House was to refuse to deal with difficult problems and then blame whoever did take on the problem for screwing it up.
It never was about governing, only about using the Office to grift, that’s what he’s good at. No interest or capacity for anything else.
What’s galling is that about a quarter million or more people didn’t need to die. Was reading about how movie productions are thriving in Australia, because they successfully clamped down the virus, and so business is open. That could’ve been here.
Watched a video from AOC, explaining the relief act. It’s of such a magnitude, and conservatives have nothing to offer but Dr Seuss and Mr PotatoHead, that I suspect there will be a sea-change in the way people view government, long overdue.
We simply have to mobilize against the tsunami of voter suppression that’s coming. This, plus a rigged Supreme Court is the only thing keeping conservatives from being swept away.
The other thing about AOC, and I don’t think it’s just me, but she comes off as a trustworthy source of news. She is real leader for her generation and beyond. Smart and knows how to use social media.
This past year has been a transformative decade.
I think America is about to wake up from the nightmare of Reaganism, and we better not blow it. We boomers who remember the way things were, and have seen this country's noblest aspirations corrupted by predators.
From someone I’ve started to follow, Scott Galloway, this is from his recent article “Institutions”, which appeared in the Economist. Sidenote: I don’t subscribe to “the Economist”, I do subscribe (free) to Galloway, and that’s where this is excerpted:
An absolutely excellent article, in particular focusing on Reaganism and its long term impact to our nation (setting the stage for "small government) and the world in so many adverse ways.
The details on how the Trump Administration did everything in its power to ensure delivery of the covid 19 vaccine would ultimately fail very early in 2020 by poor planning, implementation and refusal to accept responsibility is stunning. Having retired from two careers where strong leadership, ethics, setting the example, and the importance of responsibility and ethical leadership was of utmost importance. Watching Trump's example of dodging responsibility by blaming those who stepped up as "failures" was absolutely abhorrent to me. President Truman's famous "The Buck Stops Here" is an example of what leadership should be, not pursuit of ill gotten gain and blaming others for his (Trump) failures.
Yes, small government must be replaced by a government that abides by the Constitution, focuses on "People First", not "Party First" is a step in the right direction to restore democracy as we have known it for decades.
Thanks for bringing light to the past four years of darkness.
Scott Galloway is so good he needs put on my regular
read list. Thanks.
As someone who lived before and after Reagan, I agree with this emphatically.
The Gipper really reset the whole mechanism, even if he was just a sales guy and staff was back there working the sails.
The whole tenor of this country changed very dramatically in those years. Reagan was outwardly sunny, but the program was very negative. I know that there are objective things that were done, but the basic social contract was seriously altered and it's hard to put your finger on something like that, it's a little ephemeral. It's like the death of 1,000 cuts.
I think nothing encapsulates it like "JUST SAY NO". That was about drugs, but in an unwitting way it laid it all out – like Buckley did, 30 years before. But this time, in the 1980's, everyone applauded this profoundly negative message. There was the obvious racism of the Reagan years, but as now, I still think the racism of the GOP is more strategic than foundational – they don't give a shit about working-class crackers any more than Louis Farrakhan does.
America has been pretty angry ever since Reagan. It's not a coincidence.
Trump was just the latest version of this negative, anti-social, survival of the fittest message. It's bad shit and when you're swimming in it, sometimes it's hard to see all the shit, let alone where it all came from.
At least Trump broke the mirror.
The rule is to set back clocks one hour at two AM. Can I set back my clock two hours at one AM? Trying to make up some sleep.
Yeah, seems to me that would work. But I just go by what it says on my phone. Math is hard.
Doug,
Fall back.
Spring forward.
Screwed up my own joke. I hate that.
And there are some basic contradictions in the Republicans' philosophy that I've always found amusing. Like, "We want a small, limited government that makes sure not a single person ever crosses a 2000 mile border without written permission."
Or, "We want a small, limited government that completely and forever eradicates the practice of abortion."
Remember the essence of modernity, which is that nothing is about what it says it is about. "Small government" versus "big government" is about accountability, full stop. The current phenomenon of "populism" is a revolt against accountability, full stop. There is nothing else to it. No one hates government for any other reason than criminals hate police. View everything through this lens. You will never be wrong.
It is a big diverse country, and really hard to govern. Unfortunately Republican thinking is too rigid (I use the word thinking with a very restricted definition here) to be up to the task unless they really do a major party overhaul. They do not want to do that. So they are doing plan B which is to implement measures of voter repression.
I write from rural red reality. Life is like being lost on a remote island with only illiterate natives who speak an odd dialect of a very foreign tongue. So notes in a bottle are my life here in rural red reality.
We used to have Democrats running the party in the county and some cities. Now democrats do not even run a candidate in most county elected positions. Who cares if you can vote, as you end up leaving a large part of the ballot blank. I would say in most of the land mass of the state this is the case. Going to the polls and voting is in a large part a waste of time. So it is no wonder that in places where their are few steady paid jobs, you can bet that those county jobs, elected or non-elected, are filled with Republicans. All Republicans. All Republican lackeys. A rich few can and do pull all the strings. It is no wonder that Republicans are the party of small government which is better named small place government. When you want the fix to be in, the Republican Party is your party. When you want ideas for small places that will get them smaller yet, double down on the Republican Party. If you want to have a vote in local politics with a choice between two people, you may have to register as a Republican to do that.
No this does not raise a future generation of Republicans well suited to run anything big and complicated. It is the party of small places government, for in small places that is the only government you are likely to get.
The way people have voted with their feet, self sorting into geographic areas is a complicated issue, that's made worse by gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering is relatively easy to fix – although it will likely have to wait a decade or two, given political reality.
I fled my home state of western Pennsylvania 25 years ago for the left coast, and never looked back. It was one of the best decisions of my life.
Now think about the concept of equality, and its mirror-image, inequality.
Now think about inequality, not of wealth, but of population density.
Now think about the thumb placed on the scale by the Founders in favor of lower population density.
Now think about the fact that as inequality of population density increases, under the regime of the 1787 Constitution, the immediate result is ever more political power in the hands of an ever smaller minority of the population.
Now think about the fact that the Founders were a parcel of lightweights who could not even write literate English, leaving aside whether anyone today knows how to read C18 English, literate or otherwise.
Now think about the fact that their motivations for favoring lower population density were ideological, which is to say, superstitious and incoherent.
Now think about how very completely fccked, right through the skull and out the other side, that leaves us today.
Now figure out for yourself whether amelioration of our present condition could possibly come through incremental reform of our existing institutions. You may have all the time, pencils, and paper you need.
Agree with the point expressed in your last paragraph. I would love to start over from scratch.
I'd argue about: the difference in population densities wasn't as great back then as it is today. Even around 1900, a lot more people lived on farms. In our own time, the large national chains have gutted small towns and small town businesses, effectively creating a large "outback" dependent on the big urban centers.
I don't think the founders particularly favored the rural over the urban, but I'm sure they had to compromise with those states (the south) whose economies were plantation based.
The founders had a lot of anti-majoritarian things going on, to wit, the whole notion of a Senate that was unelected, and how only men could vote. They were the aristocrats of their day, coming out of centuries of aristocratic rule. They had only a rudimentary understanding of "factions" or political parties, and could never have imagined an entire party gone mad, and bringing along enough people to tip the whole thing over.
You are agreeing with me about the increase, over time, of inequality of population density. The perverse effect of the Founders' bias is that while economic power has become more concentrated in [coastal] cities, political power has gone the other way.
And, yes, the Founders did have a strong bias in favor of the peasant mindset, and they weren't shy about expressing it, either. They understood that rural and urban civilizations have nothing in common (start with privacy, whose valence is exactly opposite in the two environments), and they were ideologically convinced (which is to say, on the basis of no actual thought whatsoever) that city-dwellers were Bad People through and through.
The point is that urban and rural cannot be governed under the same laws and institutions, because their moral and ethical perspectives are entirely disjoint. The point is not even that the Founders made the wrong choice: the point is that they tried to pretend that they were not making a choice. That is what they cannot be forgiven for.
Jennifer Rubin on The Difference between Democrats and Republicans, is seen in the way we handle Cuomo vs Trump. In a variety of ways, Democrats are cleaning house, urging Cuomo to resign. Despite committing things far worse (treason) than Cuomo, Republicans stood by Trump, even to the point of insurrection.
One party has moral authority, the other has abandoned morals, despite all the smokescreen to the contrary. The phrase “corrupt Republican” needs to become a household term. A demonstration of competent government, coming to the aid of a beleagured population is a great start on this project of deprogramming the population.
Great Post Reply,,,
i like it
Some days, when it rains, it pours (hopefully my last post for awhile). Thom Hartmann on Why the “Reagan Revolution” Scheme to Gut America’s Middle Class is Coming to an End. “The signal was in Biden’s speech, but entirely missed by the press”. Hartmann often comes up with the most mind-blowing ideas, by dredging through history: