“The era of small government is over,” declares Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times as the COVID-19 crisis deepens. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told the public Tuesday the epidemic there might not peak for another 45 days.
Peak.
Worse, New York would need as many as 110,000 hospital beds for treating patients. The state has 5,000. Most patients will need ICU beds and ventilators (30,000 of those; the state has 3,000 on hand), Cuomo said. He called on federal authorities to charge the Army Corps of Engineers with constructing temporary facilities to meet the need. That need will be nationwide and could last months.
Commenting on his past friction with President Trump, Cuomo told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “We are going to have a real tragedy where people die because they couldn’t get the right health care. And I need the help of the federal government – I need that partnership. I’m a former cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration. I was Secretary of Housing and Urban development. I did disasters all across the country. I know the potential of the federal government and we need it here.”
There’s no heavier burden than a great potential, Peanuts‘ Linus once said. Now that we need to realize it, the man with the power lacks every quality needed to meet the moment, especially as a lawmaker, a statesman, and a human being. He cannot even fake empathy. He is the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time. Plus, Trump leads a political party ill-disposed to large-scale government action for mitigating human-sized tragedies.
Sometimes you go to war against a virus with the misleaders you have. What is required of them now is “to take responsibility for economic life on a scale not seen since the New Deal,” Bouie believes. They’ve spent over half a century trying to dismantle the original New Deal.
Echoes of Buck Turgidson
Odds are this will not end well. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that as many as two million Americans could die, many times more than died in WWII. Another estimate from the Imperial College London agrees with that two-million figure should efforts to contain the contagion prove insufficient:
If Britain and the United States pursued more-ambitious measures to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus, to slow but not necessarily stop the epidemic over the coming few months, they could reduce mortality by half, to 260,000 people in the United Kingdom and 1.1 million in the United States.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has recommended $850 billion in economic stimulus to include bailouts for large businesses (naturally) and loans to small ones, plus an assortment of tax deferments and cuts. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah and several Democrats in Congress have suggested cash payments directly to citizens to help pay for housing, food and medicine while businesses are closed. None of which will help citizens fighting for their lives in hospital hallways.
Republicans have for decades eschewed “big government” action. Conservative ideologues funding them insist the Market (bless its name) is best equipped to meet human needs. But short-term shortages of hospital beds and ventilators will not be met by market demand. The acting president has spent the first three years of his tenure dismantling the supposed “Deep State” peopled with women and men who seek public service as a calling. He has replaced experienced public servants with fawning Trump-o-philes. Now when America needs experience and a steady hand most, Trump is left to outsource federal responsibilities to private sector CEOs driven instead by pecuniary impulses. The man who suggested raking forests to mitigate wildfires might as well try to learn the violin overnight.
Nothing on the table is too big for this moment, Bouie argues:
In forcing people to stay away from each other, the outbreak has made our mutual interdependence clear. This, in turn, has made it a powerful, real-life argument for the broadest forms of social insurance.
And for the party that pioneered American social insurance, the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J., it’s an opportunity to once again embrace direct state action as a powerful tool for preserving and promoting prosperity. If the era of small government is over, and it is, then it’s well past time for Democrats to seize a moment that belongs to them.
First, Democrats have to help an incompetent president and his party not kill their own constituents.
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