Catastrophes of Our Own Making
In today’s New York Times there were three articles with no seeming relationship, yet each seemed to be piece of the same picture. The first was an editorial by Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist who harbors a distinct dislike for our President. Stephens described our nation as undergoing an “unprecedented national catastrophe.” He follows by saying that the catastrophe of which he speaks is not the pandemic or an economic depression, or killer cops or looted cities, or racial inequities.” Instead, he says we are being led by a man who so completely inverts the spirit of what President Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address: to wit: “With malice toward none; with charity toward all.” Thus, what seems to trouble Stephens the most is the way our President chooses to communicate with his fellow citizens.
To Stephens, it is not that our President lacks the eloquence of Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt or Kennedy or that he never bothered to master English grammar or speaking in complete sentences. It’s that he “debases” political speech which Stephens asserts should be designed to “elevate” his followers. Instead, Trump’s principal mode of communication is via tweets, which Stephens describes as being designed for “provocations and put-downs.” He points out that much of what the President communicates in his tweets is not intended to buoy the hopes and desires of his supporters, but rather to “cultivate their resentments, demonize their opponents and validate their hatreds.” I did mention that Stephens really doesn’t like our President. That having been made clear, Stephens seems to give the President a free pass for his handling of the civil unrest that has arisen out of the murder of George Floyd, the pandemic and the economy.
Instead, he concludes that President Trump is nr more responsible for the death of George Floyd than President Obama was responsible for the death of Michael Brown at the hands of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department. That’s not a particularly fair or even a relevant assertion. President Obama took immediate action to quiet the resulting protests and to prevent future similar future events by establishing a program within the Justice Department to obtain consent decrees that would bring about reforms in police departments that used excess force and otherwise discriminated against minorities. In addition, President Obama put an end to selling military equipment to police departments. President Trump not only trashed both of these programs, but actively encouraged police officers not to be respectful of persons they take into their custody, but to treat them like thugs.
Next, Stephens criticizes the lockdown strategy utilized by New York’s Governor Cuomo and New York City’s Mayor de Blasio to which he attributes the nation’s current economic woes. While the actions of both the Governor and the Mayor were not without flaws, the biggest of which was that they did not act soon enough and thereby allowed the virus to gain a substantial foothold before they could prevent its further spread. While this was a grave mistake, it was a somewhat understandable one with the President muzzling the efforts of the public health officials at the CDC to broadcast the danger posed by the virus and his own assurances that the virus would vanish just as quickly as it had appeared.
As Stephens has written in prior Op-Ed articles, he feels that by having tried to first contain the virus, we have allowed “the cure to be more painful than the disease.” Let’s start with the fact that without efforts to control the virus the death toll in this country was projected to be between 1 and 2 million Americans. This, raises the question of just how much much damage to the nation’s economy would be worse than the loss of 1 million Americans? Let me put this issue into perspective. Even after New York State locked down its economy for over two and a half months this nation is now projected to lose the lives of approximately 135,000 Americans. That’s more deaths than this nation lost in World War I and more deaths than it has suffered in all of its wars since World war II. If New York State had not taken that action, the U.S. death toll might have even rivaled the 405,000 lives it lost in World War II.
Accordingly, what Stephens presumably had in mind was that New York should have taken measures that would have slowed the spread of the virus, but short of closing non-essential businesses. This view, at best, seems to represent an exercise in hindsight as no one knew in early March what lesser efforts, if any, would have even slowed the spread of the virus or the effect those measures would have on the state’s economy. As it turned out, New York City by taking these actions was just barely able to reduce the spread of the virus before it completely overwhelmed its healthcare system. Thus, there can be little doubt that lesser measures would not have prevented such a catastrophe; and Stephens has been careful not to suggest what actions, if any, he would have recommended to address the spread of the virus.
Of course, very little was known about the virus by mid-March of this year and we are still learning more each day which brings us to the second article based upon a study of virus cases in New York City. That study concluded that a more selective approach to preventing the spread of the virus would have been more effective than simply calling for the closure of all non-essential businesses, a strategy which had been first employed to curb the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 and was then being used in China, Italy and Spain. At the time New York imposed its lockdown, it was not understood how the virus spread; and it was generally believed that transmission principally occurred through personal contact. It has now become accepted that most transmissions of the virus are the result of droplets expelled from the mouths of infected persons and not from touching objects bearing the virus. Thus, critical to the spread of the virus is how close and how long a person comes in contact with someone already infected by the virus. Knowing that, researchers have used cell phone data to determine in which locations and businesses the virus is most likely to be transmitted.
Notwithstanding the fact that the actions of Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio were both in accordance with the advice of the CDC and reasonable in terms of the potential public health dangers, Stephens still contends they were not justified in terms of their adverse impact on the economy. The problem is that we still don’t know the actual impact of those actions on the nation’s economy or whether the nation’s economy would have remained vibrant in their absence. The only experience that we have to draw on is what happened during the Spanish flu pandemic in which those nations that terminated their social distancing restrictions too early experienced more damage to their economies than those which waited until the pandemic was under control before doing so. While we know much more about both viral diseases and managing the economy than was known in 1918, there is nothing that supports Stephen’s assertion as to the causes of the nation’s current economic woes. In short, his allegation is simply an unsubstantiated effort to attribute those woes to someone other than our President.
While it’s easy to understand the President’s motives for being willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of Americans lives to bring enough life back into the nation’s economy before the fall elections, Stephen’s motivation is less clear. He simply assumes that Americans will be better off with a stronger economy, no matter the number of lives that need to be sacrificed to achieve that end. This is a theme that I first heard as a child when Charlie Wilson, then the Secretary of Defense and a past CEO of General Motors, expressed what has essentially become the Republican philosophy: “What’s good for General Motors” is good for the country.”
That brings me to the third article appearing in today’s New York Times. It reported what was happening at Raytheon Technologies, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors. In response to the pandemic, the salaries of thousands of employees were cut by 10%. At the same time, the company restructured the stock-related income of its senior executives so they wouldn’t be penalized by the drop in the price of the company’s stock. If this was a unique event, I would have overlook it. Unfortunately, it has been a common practice among the nation’s major corporations to simply grant their executives new stock options when economic conditions cause a collapse in the price of the company’s securities. This is done on the theory that it was not the the executives’ performance that caused the price drop in the company’s securities. In short, it is a “heads, the executives win; tails, the workers lose” situation. Giving Stephens the benefit of the doubt, he seems to be married to the idea that working class individuals will necessarily benefit if the economy rises, even though the experience of the past 40 years does not support that conclusion.
Lastly, Stephens also expressed doubt that Hillary Clinton would have handled the pandemic any better than President Trump. I understand that Stephens does not hold Mrs. Clinton in high regard, but there is no basis for his views as to how she would have handled the pandemic. Admittedly, like President Trump, Mrs. Clinton is not a medical doctor, an epidemiologist or a public health expert. But unlike President Trump, she doesn’t suffer under the delusion that she knows more than the medical experts who would have advised her. Nor is there any indication that she would have disbanded the Global Health Security & Biodefense Unit within the National Security Council or would have trashed the pandemic response plan formulated by the Obama administration. Mrs. Clinton, as Secretary of State, worked closely with Susan Rice who established that unit and would have likely taken its advice seriously. Thus, there is good reason to believe that she would have acted promptly to stop the spread of the virus. As a recent study postulated, this would have saved the lives of tens of thousands of Americans. Therefore, to contend that Mrs. Clinton would not have dealt with the pandemic any better than the President requires the conclusions that she has the same disregard for human life as our President.
Stephen’s began his article discussing the language of the President and characterized the President’s style of communicating as a “catastrophe”. I normally think of a catastrophe as an act of God we must simply reconcile ourselves to live with. On the other hand, a “disaster“ is something that our nation, having once suffered, rolls up its sleeves and takes actions to make sure it does not reoccur. In President Trump, we are not faced with a “catastrophe,” but a “disaster.” In retrospect, Stephens has written an article in which he has used harsh language to describe our President, not for the President’s major failures which Stephens tries to either downplay or attribute to others, but rather for the President’s mean-spirited nature which the members of his party have shown a willingness to tolerate. In this way, Stephens tries to demonstrate his seeming objectivity while staying clear of anything that might offend his fellow Republicans.