This passage in the latest piece by Susan Glasser of the New Yorker brought me up short:
[Biden] came into office promising an end to the pandemic and a return to competent, commonsense governance. It’s why he beat Trump. But his first nine months in office have shown pretty conclusively that it is not possible to beat covid in a political environment that has arguably got worse, not better, since January. Consider the news this week that now one in five hundred Americans has died in the pandemic; total deaths in the country approach seven hundred thousand. What’s worse, covid deaths—the vast majority of them preventable, avoidable deaths, now that science and the federal government have provided us with free vaccines—are continuing to rise across large swaths of vaccine-resistant Trump country.
This is not a tragic mistake but a calculated choice by many Republicans who have made vaccine resistance synonymous with resistance to Biden and the Democrats. The current average of more than nineteen hundred dead a day means that a 9/11’s worth of Americans are perishing from covid roughly every thirty-eight hours. To my mind, this is the biggest news of the Biden Presidency so far, and it has nothing to do with Afghanistan, or the fate of the budget-reconciliation bill, or Bob Woodward’s new book.
America spent twenty years fighting wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East because of 9/11. The 2001 attacks reordered American foreign-policy and national-security thinking for a generation. Does anyone believe that something comparable will happen as a result of the pandemic’s catastrophic death toll, which is far vaster than that of any other crisis in the modern era? It’s hard to imagine, especially because the continuing loss of life is a result of G.O.P. political strategies that intentionally undermine the success of Biden’s policies. How can this President, or any President, reset from that?
Glasser is political establishment royalty. The fact that she’s on the record with such a stark statement says something about where the conventional wisdom is right now. Will it last? I don’t know. But what’s bleak about this is that the political establishment seems to be throwing up its hands and just … watching it happen. It’s a slight improvement from the Clinton and Obama years when it was just accepted that the Democrats were a bunch of feckless hippies and the Republicans were the adults in the room. (That was wrong — the GOP has been the extremist party for 30 years at least.) But they seem helpless in the face of this and that’s not a good place to be.
I wrote this morning about the Enabling Act of 1933 in which Hitler seized dictatorial powers. He did this despite a political establishment that knew what he was. There were some who were happy to go along with the program but a large number simply couldn’t think of a way to deal with it.
We have a party that is, as Glasser says, killing large numbers of Americans, for political purposes. I don’t know who’s going to stop them.