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As we write, the country is stale from uninspiring political conventions that were held under the auspices of what Warren Beatty has appositely referred to as “the two accounting firms we call our major parties.”
Why stale? Americans are heartily sick of war, as they were in 2008 and 2016, and equally sick of scandal, just as they were in 2000.
This is another of those times when people would like to feel safe in immediately turning to the rear of their metaphorical daily newspaper, to read box scores and play-off summaries, rather than feeling obliged to start at the front section’s seemingly endless yet shocking repetition of the incompetence, unfitness, and corruption in our politics.
But we can’t simply turn to the sports pages with confidence. There is violent agitation, and it is happening in the streets of places far-distant not only from DC but also from Afghanistan and Iraq: the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. And those play-off summaries are themselves interrupted by athletes who are no longer prepared to accept the devaluing of black lives. As LeBron James explains, “we are scared as Black people.” Unlike the Olympic protests of 1968, African-American stars are being joined by many white teammates and by leaders in sports such as baseball that have only minority black representation.
The scandals and the brutality highlighted by Black Lives Matter show that we urgently need reform. And there are demands not only for changes to our policing, but for big corporations to be regulated and broken up, for an end to the private financing of elections, and numerous other changes in terms of protecting the lives and furthering the life chances of African Americans and many other minorities.
Will such changes come about?
This may be a turning point as a consequence of Black Lives Matter and the pandemic.
Black Lives Matter is having an epic impact not only nationally, but abroad as well. It raises the physical, psychological, political, and monetary inequalities of our society and explains how they relate to doctrines of white supremacy, both implicit and explicit.
And the pandemic brings into sharp relief the fault lines of inequality that divide the world between and within nations, compelling near-universal fear and suffering.
COVID-19 is a limit case, an emergency of cosmic proportions that can alert us to the limitations and failings of the current conjuncture, specifically in the elemental field of health.
How should we reconstruct our societies, environments, cultures, and economies in the anticipated wake of COVID-19—in a world "after" it?
Might there be an end to market-based health care, a reallocation of resources away from pharmaceutical corporations and insurance companies and towards health as a universal public good?
To ponder such possibilities, let’s go beyond the usual media platitudes and coin-operated thinktank nostra. Let’s consider some history.
During the Second World War, with the Depression still wreaking havoc on everyday life, industrialized democratic states effectively said the following to young proletarian men: “We are asking you to get yourselves killed, but we promise you that when you have done this, you will keep your jobs until the end of your lives.”
Economic reconstruction from 1945-73 developed the welfare state across Western Europe and the United States, alongside expanded unions, wages, and civil rights. Wealth was redistributed downwards and the state maintained demand and manipulated interest rates to keep the economy buoyant. Full employment was a mantra.
The specific emergence of healthcare as a right derived from the twin suffering of the Depression and the War, and it produced, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, socialized health services across wealthy countries. Apart from one.
But all that economic success was predicated on a seemingly endless and cheap supply of energy and the willingness to pollute the environment at any cost. Once oil prices leapt following cartel action from the Global South in 1973, unemployment and inflation soared across the Global North. Corporations took this as an opportunity for governmental action to control wage increases and redistribute wealth upwards.
It has been thus ever since. For five decades, a deregulatory fervor has underpinned government economic policy in most of the world, stimulated by the oil shocks, the waning of state socialism in Europe from 1989, and the emergence of a massive reserve army of labor in China since 2000.
The accompanying lust for market conduct extended to a passion for comprehending and opining on everything from birth rates to divorce, from suicide to abortion, from performance-enhancing drugs to altruism. In short, a desire to govern all things while opposing democratic control of them.
The 2008 financial crisis rocked this discourse because deregulated financial sectors collapsed. But the investments in it by intellectuals, corporations, states, and international agencies were so intense that the crisis was resolved via a familiar formula: socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.
Huge bailouts of major capitalist enterprises by states restored the system, at the same time as it plunged governments into debt and legitimized subsequent reductions in social services and increased taxes on ordinary people. Bankers were bankrolled, homeowners evicted.
Yet elements of socialism for all remain—pesky, insistent monuments to sharing risk and cost in the collective interest. So free education K through 12 is still a right. Railway termini, post offices, telephone exchanges, freeways, and electricity stations stand alongside those public schools as physical and intellectual monuments to socialism. Unemployment and disability are compensated.
We can build on that imperfect, incomplete heritage of care to forge a brighter future. And health care, which is both at the cutting edge of struggling with COVID-19 and the latest and most universal index of our failures, offers a way forward.
The fact that black lives have suffered disproportionately from the pandemic is just another reminder of the wholesale changes we need, starting with race relations. Environmental justice, economic justice, and racial justice are part of the same struggle. They can bring wellbeing to all.
