The United States — the world, in fact — is in the grip of an economic cult and has been for decades. Midas cult members are free-market fundamentalists operating on the principle that anything that might be turned into gold should be. It would be hard to find a more paradigm case then the account in Vanity Fair of Jared Kushner’s White House Situation Room meeting in March to address COVID-19 shortages.
It was Saturday, March 20 at 6:30 p.m. The acting president’s son-in-law is “an observant Jew and normally wouldn’t work during Shabbat” who has a “rabbinic dispensation” to work on affairs of public importance, an administration official told Vanity Fair‘s Katherine Eban.
The assembled group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, business executives, and venture capitalists were prepared to mobilize corporate resources to meet shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the spreading pandemic. Photos had already circulated of intensive care nurses wearing garbage bags for surgical gowns. If Donald Trump would invoke the Defense Production Act, America’s industrial might was prepared to meet the challenge.
What happened next is right out of a movie, or soon will be:
Kushner, seated at the head of the conference table, in a chair taller than all the others, was quick to strike a confrontational tone. “The federal government is not going to lead this response,” he announced. “It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”
One attendee explained to Kushner that due to the finite supply of PPE, Americans were bidding against each other and driving prices up. To solve that, businesses eager to help were looking to the federal government for leadership and direction.
“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner said dismissively. “That is not the role of government.”
The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his desperate call for supplies.
“That’s the CNN bullshit,” Kushner snapped. “They lie.”
According to another attendee, Kushner then began to rail against the governor: “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”
“That’s when I was like, We’re screwed,” the shocked attendee told Vanity Fair.
Rigid ideology can be deadly. Left or right, it can blind one to the suffering of others when pursuing an idea, preserving it pure and unblemished, is more important than its real-world consequences. That it crushes skulls under its wheels, incinerates them in ovens, or leaves them scattered beside bones in muddy fields is of no interest to zealots.
Margaret Thatcher’s famous 1987 quote is often stripped of its context. But even in context, it reveals a mind more interested in pursuit of the idea than in its effects:
“I think we have been through a period when too many people have been given to understand that when they have a problem it is government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant. I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They are casting their problems on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no governments can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours. People have got their entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There is no such thing as an entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”
“People must look to themselves first” has merit as far as it goes. The problem with zealots is they go too far. Insisting people or states act alone in a global pandemic is (someone suggested) like believing you can have a smoking section in an elevator.
This government’s constitutional obligation is to look after “the general welfare,” especially where individual effort is insufficient to the situation, as the name of the West Wing conference room suggests. Even the capitalists gathered there recognized that if Kushner did not (Vanity Fair again):
“We had so much potential to commandeer against this,” said one person who attended the meeting. “We had a real system for contact tracing, the world’s best mobile engineers on standby. There was a real opportunity to have a coordinated response.”
That attendee said he remains “angry” over the federal government’s intransigence in stockpiling supplies and feels certain that people died because of it. “At the time I just thought of it as blind capitalism and extreme libertarian ideals gone wrong,” he said. “In hindsight it’s not crazy to think it was some purposeful belief that it was okay if Cuomo had a tough go of it because [New York] was a blue state.”
According to another attendee, it seemed “very clear” Kushner was less interested in finding a solution because, at the time, the virus was primarily ravaging cities in blue states: “We were flabbergasted. I basically had an out-of-body experience: Where am I, and what happened to America?”
The Midas cult puts its faith first in entrepreneurship. Any product or service the government might provide on a not-for-profit basis that the private sector might provide at a profit (even if only in theory) is an abomination, a crime against capitalism. Hence the privatization of military supply and logistics in Iraq, the diversion of education funding to privately run charter schools, and the erosion of the constitutionally authorized U.S. Postal Service. The only reason cultists have not privatized more of the country’s defense is there is no market for carrier strike groups and missile systems outside the Pentagon. Besides, privately owned defense-industry companies are already comfortably awash in tax dollars.
There are more layers to the Trump family’s pathologies beneath the worship of mammon. Social, political, and personal animus among them, clearly. But the economic cult behind recent deadly decisions did not begin with this administration. That the Midas cult eventually would cost people their lives was inevitable. In this case, tens of thousands, and we are not done yet.
Religious faith or no faith is no prophylactic against such ideological contagion. Christian evangelicals are among Trump’s most devoted followers. QAnon with its anti-Semitic overtones and other paranoid theories infect not only street-level Republican believers, but the upper echelons of the Trump administration. The left wing has zealots just as committed to consequence-free ideological clarity. An advisory: Loss of the ability to laugh at yourself is the first warning sign of fundamentalism.
Rosh Hashanah begins this evening.
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