Terminal Case

A former children's clothing store, laid low by the pandemic, the restrictions and subsequent fall-off in shopping. Perhaps, when it is all said and done, a new business will take its place, and its employees will find other jobs, but for the moment, it's a net loss.
 

On the Other Hand

What, in a "perfect world" would the response to the SARS-2 Coronavirus outbreak look like, other than different than it does now? It's one of those questions that "everyone" seems to have an answer to, yet no-one can actually answer.

Every so often, I find myself back at this University of Minnesota page, reading it again. And every time I reach this passage:

But both Ferguson and the authors of the second [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] paper declined to speculate on how useful [nonpharmaceutical interventions] might be in a future pandemic, saying there is no evidence they can hold off infection indefinitely.

... I have a question. What counts as "indefinitely?" When the pandemic restrictions went into effect, I suspect that they were intentionally downplayed. I don't think that there was any real reason to suspect that the outbreak would be over any more quickly than the 1918 influenza pandemic, and as much as the use of nonpharmaceutical interventions (social distancing, wearing facemasks) was played up, the 1918 pandemic didn't end until 1920. But could public health officials really have sold restrictions for the remainder of 2020 starting from late winter? It seems unlikely. Even once masks were recommended, the broad range of what counts (along with the difficulty in getting formal ones) meant that a lot of the cobbled-together coverings people used were more theatrical than anything else. And given how porous the "lockdowns" needed to be in order for people to be able to stay supplied with necessities, how much did they hold off infections?

That's the unknown, and it's likely to stay that way. Critics of one or another government's (local, state/province or national) response like to point to the places where the outbreak was the least severe and claim that with the correct nonpharmaceutical interventions, everywhere could have been like that, but that sort of assessment presumes that all other things are equal, when they often aren't. The United States is criticized for having a death toll unbecoming a "first-world" nation, but the United States has also often been criticized for having a healthcare system unbecoming a "first-world" nation, too. One wonders if the decades that we've dealt with the latter didn't, at least in part, set us up for the former. I'd be willing to lay money on the idea that the general American fear that people who take off from work are malingering plays a large part in the current situation, as does a general Fear Of Missing Out that people bring to their personal lives. It's easier to convince oneself that some cold medication and everything will be fine if the alternative is missing a paycheck or a "once in a lifetime" event.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence in a hypothetical counterfactual, because the very unreality of the situation means that one can paint the grass whatever shade one wishes. Which can be aesthetically pleasing, but poor for real-world comparisons.

It's true that despite the fact that people were writing papers about the topic in 2007, the United States was unprepared to deal with a pandemic. It's been said that the United States doesn't work to prevent disasters, preferring to clean up after them instead. Given that, maybe even if this wasn't our perfect response, like it or not, it was the best we were going to be able to do.

Abnormality

While a lot is being made of President Trump's refusal to concede the Presidential race, this isn't anything particularly unusual. The way the election for President works can be broken down into three phases. Phase One was on November 3rd, the date of the general election. Phase Two is when all of the various state (and D.C.) level elections are certified. Phase Three is when the Electoral College meets and casts their votes on December 14th. And that's when the election official ends.

Looking at the popular vote, and then assuming the rest and starting the transition early is a well-established norm, because of the amount of time needed for the transition. But it's still a norm, rather than a legal or constitutional process, and President Trump hasn't shown much regard for norms in the past. Why expect him to start now?

President Trump is the sort of person who treats norms and other sorts of voluntary limits on one's behavior as self-imposed weaknesses; and he's pretty much been that way. His current actions are in keeping with that. I expect that he'll never willingly concede the race, rather waiting for it to be pried out of his grasping fingers. And in the end, it illustrates the limitations of norms. People might expect them to be followed, but there aren't any baked-in consequences, as there are with laws or regulations. And given that President Trump's base of support cared less about norms than they did about having a champion, it's unlikely he'll feel any heat for it this time.

Cancel Politics

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) fired off a Tweet heard 'round the beltway, calling for people to archive social media and other internet posts of pro-Trump people in the government. The expectation was that they would quickly start deleting "incriminating" materials in order to hide their associations with the Trump Administration in order to retain their roles in government.

In the wake of this call for action, the Trump Accountability Project sprang into existence, with a stated aim of disallowing Trump voters, funders and staffers from profiting "from their experience." It didn't take very long for accusations of "the Left" engaging in the "persecution of wrongthink" to start becoming virtual water-cooler conversation.

But what were people expecting to happen? Okay, the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy ended some 63 years ago, but that's not very long. If he could manage to get a good chunk of the nation behind him in trying to root Communism out of the United States government, why is anyone surprised that Representative Ocasio-Cortez has managed to round up a batch of activists to try and cancel Trumpists in politics?

I always find it weird when people profess to believe that other people hate them, yet don't seem to believe that those same people are willing to do anything more effective than stew in it. Partisanship in American politics is becoming less about different paths to a goal, and more about existential questions of Good versus Evil. In a Pew study from last year, a full 30% of respondents said that Republicans never govern honestly or ethically. Only 12% of self-described Democrats said that Republicans are somewhat honest and ethical. Is is any wonder that the Progressive wing of the Democratic party wants pro-Trump career politicians gone?

Given the degree to which the Democratic/Republican dynamic in the United States openly trades in the demonization of the other party, even committed partisans can come across as woefully unprepared to understand what that would result in.

Strange Fortune

The following came up in a discussion about the results from this week's Presidential election:

Honestly, [the] Democrats got extremely lucky. If it weren't for Coronavirus, Trump would have easily beat Joe Biden.

Grand scheme of things, this is a true statement. While committed Democrats were sure to turn out for whomever the Democratic nominee was, even if it had been the proverbial "ham sandwich," at the margins, it's not at all clear that enough sometime Democrats would have turned up at the polls in swing states without the perception of incompetence and indifference on the part of the President.

But as a figure of American speech, it's a different matter. Thought, generally speaking, is believed to model on language. The whole point of Newspeak in George Orwell's classic 1984 was to allow the party to influence and constrain thought by restricting the language that people had at their disposal. Of course, it's hard to know if such a scheme would actually work; whether "double-plus ungood" would manage to be different from "very bad" or merely a cumbersome semantic substitution is still unknown. But it's not particularly out of left field (to use another colloquialism) to think that there's not much difference conceptually between "The Democrats were fortunate to have a deadly pandemic occur during an election year" and "The deaths of a quarter-million people were in the Democrats' interests." And from there, the idea that the nationwide outbreak is a political hoax, or even that it was intentionally triggered because of the political impacts, isn't that much of a leap.

And that sense, that one of the "silver linings" of a worldwide disaster is the partisan advantage to be gained from it, leads to the idea that the people who lead political parties simply don't care about the well-being of the average citizen. (At best.) The saying "never let a perfectly good crisis go to waste," doesn't help, either. It is, I think, just another manifestation of the idea that people involved in politics are a separate class of people from the populace as a whole, with different, and often mutually-exclusive interests. It may only be one in a myriad of obstacles to a feeling of national unity, but it's no less important for that.