Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
The Manhattan skyline seen from Calvary Cemetery, in Queens, New York. Central Queens, one of the hardest-hit areas in the country, recorded more than 7,000 cases in the first weeks of the coronavirus outbreak.
The novel coronavirus is a pathogen that attacks the body politic as opportunistically as it attacks the body itself. Just as people living with underlying medical conditions are at much higher risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19, so too are people living in nations weakened by underlying pathologies in their economic and political systems. That helps explain why some nations manage to flatten the curve, while others struggle merely to bury their dead.
Tragically, as our pandemic response reveals, the United States is suffering from a crippling underlying condition. The pathogen is neoliberalism.
Four decades of contagious neoliberal ideology—four decades of dismantling government to deliver tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for the powerful, wage suppression for workers, and shrunken and debilitated public services for all—have left our families more precarious, our economy less resilient, and our physical and social infrastructure less capable of mounting an effective pandemic response. It has left us with a federal government so callously anti-government that it has abdicated its role as a protector of public health at home and as a leader and role model abroad.
And it has left us with democratic institutions so fragile that the virus even threatens our ability to conduct free and fair elections.
The emergence of deadly new pathogens is inevitable. But deadly pandemics are not. As was not the case in the influenza pandemic of 1918, today we have the knowledge and resources to track, slow, contain, and ultimately stop transmission of a deadly disease. It is incompetent governance, lack of preparation, and the inability or unwillingness to face facts or listen to science that transform pathogens into pandemics.
Neoliberal ideology has left us with democratic institutions so fragile that the virus even threatens our ability to conduct free and fair elections.
The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen famously observed that famines, properly understood, are not natural disasters, but disasters in governance and organization. The same is true of pandemics. For decades, scientists have repeatedly warned of exactly this scenario. Four years ago, Bill Gates gave a now much-viewed TED Talk titled “The next outbreak? We’re not ready.” Even Hollywood saw it coming—the 2011 film Contagion now looks like a news report. Yet on March 23, five months after a government exercise revealed how terribly unprepared the U.S. was for a pandemic, and two months after intelligence agencies warned the White House that a pandemic was in fact under way, President Trump had the gall to proclaim, “It was nobody’s fault. It just happened.”
Trump’s blundering didn’t occur in an ideological vacuum. America’s neoliberal virus informed (well, misinformed) the president’s decision to disinvest in our public-health agencies—including his fateful decision to dismantle the team of federal experts dedicated to pandemic preparedness and response:
“Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years,” Trump attempted to explain in a February 26, 2020, briefing, when asked to justify the cuts. “I’m a business person—I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
Trump has been fairly ridiculed for failing to grasp the very notion of pandemic preparedness: It’s a job that can only be performed before it is needed, not after. But his characterization of pandemic experts as mere commodities to be purchased or discarded at will demonstrates the most malignant symptom of the American virus: the subjection of all of human society—including government, expertise, and workers—to the vicissitudes of the market, regardless of the individual or societal costs. Toward this end, Trump has sought to run the federal government like a business—a Trump business—and in that, at least, he has succeeded. For like Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, Trump University, and all the Trump-branded casinos before it, Trump America has disastrously failed.
It wasn’t just Trump’s incompetence and lack of leadership, however, that has left America unprepared. Decades of neoliberal policymaking have gutted America’s economic and social resilience. Decades of stagnant wages and Gilded Age levels of inequality have left 40 percent of households unable to handle even a $400 emergency expense, let alone months of self-quarantine. Only 58 percent of full-time service workers receive any amount of paid sick leave, while our growing legion of part-time, contract, and gig economy workers receive few if any benefits at all. Even for those lucky enough to receive full benefits, an employer-based health insurance system that cancels coverage the minute you’re laid off is of little use if you’re one of the 16 million Americans who filed for unemployment in the past three weeks.
Even as the death toll mounted, Americans continued to go to work—not because they didn’t understand the risk (we could all see the tragedy unfolding in Italy), but because decades of anti-worker policies had left them with no realistic option to avoid it. It wasn’t until governors and mayors ignored Trump’s ridiculous denials of reality and responsibility, and started issuing mandatory orders to shut down nonessential businesses, that the pace of transmission started to slow.
Trump’s response demonstrates the most malignant symptom of the American virus: the subjection of all of human society to the vicissitudes of the market.
But it was too late. Thanks to the Trump administration’s failure to aggressively test, track, and quarantine cases early in the outbreak, the pandemic was here, and our hospitals would soon be overwhelmed.
And here, too, neoliberal ideology has been taking a deadly toll. Decades of deregulation enabled a wave of private hospital mergers and closures that has left America with one of the lowest ratios of both hospital beds and doctors per capita in the entire developed world, while a lack of public investment in pandemic preparedness has left us dangerously short of ventilators, protective gear, and other essential medical supplies. We have been left with a private health care system that is simultaneously too expensive and too under-resourced to cope with the sudden spike in demand.
In the United States—the richest country on Earth, the country that spends almost twice as much on health care per person as the other wealthy nations—our doctors, nurses, and orderlies are risking their lives wearing garbage bags and office supplies for want of proper gowns, masks, and face shields. And when New York state needed 1,000 emergency ventilators, it didn’t get them from the U.S. government, it got them from the government of China. (An Obama administration plan to produce tens of thousands of ventilators for pandemic preparedness was allowed to collapse in 2012 after a large manufacturer acquired the government contractor and shut it down because it didn’t produce sufficient profits.)
Trump, ever one for moving goal posts, who one month ago promised the caseload would soon “be down to zero,” now proudly says that a death toll under 200,000 would be “a very good job.”
If America’s “free-market” health care system is guided by an invisible hand, that hand is busy digging our graves.
Our broader economy isn’t proving any healthier. Industries like the airlines—which spent the past ten years devoting 96 percent of cash flow to stock buybacks—are once again depending on government bailouts to stave off collapse. Their CEOs could have kept that money on the balance sheet, saving it for the inevitable rainy day rather than maximizing short-term returns for shareholders. But why would they? In the neoliberal era, the government is always there to socialize losses, which has incentivized nearly a trillion dollars a year of stock buybacks by our publicly traded corporations. The results were soaring corporate profits and executive bonuses—and an increasingly fragile and unequal economy.
Trump insists on referring to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” a xenophobic epithet intended to rile up his base while deflecting responsibility for his own bungled response. But while viruses don’t have nationalities, political ideologies do, so it is only fair to talk of neoliberalism as “the American virus.” Every nation is struggling with the coronavirus today, but America is uniquely ill-equipped to wage that struggle, as the only developed country that views health care as a privilege bestowed by the free market rather than a basic right enjoyed by all citizens.
If America’s “free-market” health care system is guided by an invisible hand, that hand is busy digging our graves.
To be sure, neoliberalism has traveled across borders in recent decades, but nowhere else has the sovereignty of the market gone so unchallenged, and in no kindred country have workers been so unprotected. Nations such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Australia immediately saw the danger to employment that the pandemic presented and acted to guarantee workers’ paychecks, enabling them to “shelter in job” while they also “sheltered in place.” In contrast, the American response has been to bail out the companies while letting them fire workers en masse. When the restrictions are eventually lifted, other economies will restart with their workers largely in place. In the U.S., tens of millions will still be struggling to live on unemployment checks and trying to find jobs in a post-COVID depression.
When it comes to government, there is no clearer articulation of the neoliberal agenda than that of political operative Grover Norquist, an American virus super-spreader of unparalleled reach. “I don’t want to abolish government,” he once bragged to NPR’s Morning Edition, “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” While Norquist and Republican enablers may not have succeeded in completely destroying the government, they did succeed in blocking necessary health care reforms and enacting Trump’s $2.1 trillion tax cut for the rich, leaving average Americans to drown in a collapsing health care system and economy.
Our government has failed to prevent and prepare for this pandemic because our nation has been weakened by a virus of its own—an ideology so sick that its adherents have even called for sacrificing our grandparents for the sake of the market. If our nation is to survive this pandemic and other such catastrophes, we must purge ourselves of a neoliberal virus that values markets and profits for the rich above all else. We can start by reminding ourselves that when markets fail, they usually recover. But for nations, as for people, dead is dead.
