The humbling of America - five months and counting

This is excerpted from Sree's Sunday Note, my weekly newsletter produced w/ Zach Peterson (@zachprague). Please check out and subscribe here: https://sreenet.substack.com

The last 150 days have seen the humbling of America. The wars in Vietnam and Iraq stand out as colossal failures on so many levels, but nothing like that has happened in my lifetime.

The United States is a pariah state. This morning, on my #NYTReadalong, Elaine Sciolino (@ElianeSciolino), former NYT Paris bureau chief, reminded me no Americans are allowed into France. I was vaguely aware, but hearing it directly like that was jarring.

This piece from David Leonhardt and Lauren Leatherby paints a remarkably depressing—in fact, deadly— picture of a crisis that, while likely not completely avoidable, certainly didn’t have to come to this.

There is so much in here to chew on and be angry about, but it really boils down to a pretty simple thing: Expertise and how to use it.

In no other high-income country — and in only a few countries, period — have political leaders departed from expert advice as frequently and significantly as the Trump administration. President Trump has said the virus was not serious; predicted it would disappear; spent weeks questioning the need for masks; encouraged states to reopen even with large and growing caseloads; and promoted medical disinformation.

The failure of political leadership in Washington, DC, is just part of the picture. We are also witnessing the failure of leadership in multiple states, cities and towns. And no public rebukes - let alone resignations - from leading members of this administration.

Several catastrophic failures are converging at once:

• The failures of “big tech.” I don’t mean all the VCs on Twitter who, for the last two decades, have pronounced the end of all things bad because of some sort of tech solution. I’m talking about the fact that the major platforms aren’t firmly tackling the spread of misinformation online. Twitter actually does seem to care, but they are still lagging.
• The failures of the media. This is more complicated because there is a wealth of truly outstanding journalism right now. But there remains an underlying urge to normalize Donald Trump’s behavior — and the behavior of the vast majority of GOP politicians who act either in concert with him, or, somehow, manage to be actually worse than him. There is, of course, no single thing called “The Media,” as Prof. Jon Marshall of the Medill School at Northwestern explained to me yesterday on “Coping w/ Covid19: A Helpful, Hopeful Call-in Show,” my weekly radio show on WBAI, 99.5FM in NYC). But, collectively, too many media outlets have added to the confusion - and the death toll - as explained in a Sunday Note from April.
• The failure of systems. There was a breakdown in basic systems - emergency preparedness, healthcare, finance and more - we needed to stay safe and keep the economy afloat.
• The failure to take care of essential workers. Frontline workers, first responders, healthcare workers, teachers, food and produce workers, logistics….the list goes on and on. There have been countless tragedies, but we have failed the people who risked it all to go to work to save lives, keep food on the shelves, and teach our kids as best they could. The ways we are failing them - by not wearing masks, going out as if it’s all better, underpaying them, and under-insuring them - make me mad.

America votes in 86 days. I believe the future of the planet is at stake, and we have less than three months to get our act together and vote the administration out of office. I’m not one of these people who thinks that electing Joe Biden will be a cure-all; in fact, it likely won’t be. But, in terms of Covid19, I have the utmost confidence that a Biden White House would have a robust strategy for testing, mask policies, medical bills, rent control, unemployment benefits and more. I think they would take it seriously, work with other countries, and actually acknowledge the toll the virus has taken on America.

We are years away from normalcy no matter what happens on November 3rd, but re-electing this president would be a disaster that would reverberate all over the world.

- Sree

Rest of the newsletter is at https://sreenet.substack.com/p/sunday-note-the-humbling-of-america