The only disaster the acting president cares about is his losing reelection. But those with the ability to manipulate the enfant terrible will see opportunity knocking in the convergence of a pandemic, the second economic meltdown this century, and a presidential election.
Naomi Klein wrote during the second Bush II term that there are those waiting patiently and greedily to profit from disaster. Pre-positioned even. “Disaster capitalism,” she named it.
Klein warned that in such situations a regime will justify its antidemocratic actions with “there is no alternative” to “impose a system – whether political , religious or economic – that is rejected by large numbers of the people … even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.”
More than control of the White House is at stake this year. Those with means, the might and security will see that bigger picture and act on it before most of us can pull on our pants.
A former White House public health official told Republican House lawmakers that most people in the United States will likely be exposed to the coronavirus in the next two years:
The comment appeared to go further than the most recent public warnings from the CDC. Nancy Messonnier, director of the the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, said in a press call Monday that “as the trajectory of the outbreak continues, many people in the United States will at some point in time either this year or next be exposed to this virus and there’s a good chance many will become sick.”
Many. Not all. And many who do fall ill will recover quickly. For vulnerable populations that include older lawmakers the virus could prove far more urgent. While the White House dithers, pressure will build to act decisively and perhaps heavy handedly. This bug appears very contagious:
Governments are now bowing to the reality of unprecedented, economy-killing measures seen as Draconian just weeks ago. Italy early Sunday restricted travel in and out of the region surrounding Milan and ordered closings of schools, museums, pools, gyms and theaters, among other public places.
While a hard-and-fast lockdown of a U.S. city like Seattle is hard to imagine, something similar might happen, said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You don’t want to alarm people, but given the spread we see, you know, anything is possible,” he told Fox News.
That ought to worry people already seeing our democracy slipping away. (We’re not a democracy; we’re a republic Republicans insist.) While we are watching the virus spread and Democrats wage intramural skirmishes, what are we not seeing beyond the headlines?
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate examine the asymmetrical warfare waged by an increasingly right-leaning judiciary “unmoored from any standard judicial conventions of circumspection and restraint” and fueled by the “conservative outrage machine.”
More progressive judges are beginning to push back against the Roberts Supreme Court. U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman writes in the Harvard Law review of the “anti-democratic nature of the Court’s decisions weakening the middle class by augmenting corporate power and reducing that of ordinary Americans.”
Lithwick and Stern write, “Neomi Rao, a Trump judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has created a cottage industry out of writing preposterous Trump-friendly polemics [founded upon] the proposition that Trump must triumph and work backward from there.”
While defeating Trump is the shiny object of the left’s attentions, below the fold and off front pages antidemocratic efforts are afoot:
Adelman’s critique of the court’s conservative wing is not particularly seemly or polite. But it was not all that polite when the Supreme Court accurately noted that the Virginia judiciary endorsed “the doctrine of White Supremacy” in upholding interracial marriage bans. It was not especially polite when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that Arizona legislators suppressed minority votes out of racism. It was not all that polite when Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that Colorado voters discriminated against gay people out of sheer animus.
These cases reflect a decades-long effort to secure the blessings of liberty for a smaller and whiter slice of the electorate, and democracy be damned.
“If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier… as long as I’m the dictator,” George W. Bush said with a “hehehe” a month before his inauguration.
So, pay closer attention to down-ballot races where people of that mindset are pre-positioning to ensure and extend minority rule while your attentions are elsewhere. Trump isn’t joking. Nor are his white nationalist supporters.
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