There Is No Bottom
A few years ago, I argued that American exceptionalism was dead. It…wasn’t a particularly compelling argument. (To wit: the essay begins with the contention that America was founded “as a bastion of freedom and acceptance for all, regardless of political or religious leanings.” You might recognize this as the kind of empty rhetoric you’d usually hear from a beauty pageant contestant, or Sean Hannity, just before the chyron below his enormous head flashes “ARE MUSLIMS SUFFICIENTLY GRATEFUL TO AMERICA?”)
The notion of American exceptionalism has been a lie since the term entered the lexicon in 1929: Joseph Stalin coined the phrase to ridicule American workers who refused to revolt against capitalism because they believed that America was somehow immune to a revolution. Of course, that didn’t stop us from earnestly adopting the phrase because America is basically the Logan Paul of countries, so lacking in self-awareness that we’ve effectively inoculated ourselves against criticism.
The point I tried (unsuccessfully) to make in that piece is that not only is America incapable of being exceptional, it can’t even keep up the façade of exceptionalism anymore. But I was wrong. Yes, by any quantifiable metric aside from military spending, the United States falls somewhere between “mediocre” and “poor.” But as a nation, we do excel at one thing: rolling with the punches. In fact, you might say we’ve gotten too good at it.
Let’s say something bad is about to happen, like, oh…I don’t know, Andrew Cuomo planning to cut New York’s state Medicaid budget by $1.6 billion in the middle of a pandemic. Or Jared Kushner—who has taken charge of the federal government’s response to the pandemic—deciding that state governments, with their “projections” from “epidemiologists” who “study infectious diseases,” don’t actually need all the medical supplies they’re requesting, so they’re not going to get what they asked for.
By even the most optimistic of estimates, the decisions made by Cuomo and Kushner will cause tens of thousands of preventable deaths. Such wanton disregard for human life cannot be tolerated in a civilized society, so we will kick up a fuss and warn everyone what’s about to happen. We are, of course, powerless to stop it: Cuomo and Kushner have power and the people who will die do not. If they had power, they wouldn’t be sacrificial lambs.
So we’ll yell and scream and insist that what’s about to happen must not be allowed to happen, but it’s going to anyway. And because we’ll have spent so much time thinking about the impending injustice, when it finally does come to pass we’ll have already resigned ourselves to this new, worse reality, because it’s hard to stay angry forever. Maybe the actual event will briefly spark a renewed sense of outrage, but it won’t last. And just like that, what was once unthinkable becomes normal.
But that’s not where America excels; that’s just human nature. What sets us apart is that once that new normal has been established, no matter how horrific it is, we’ll fight like hell to preserve it. We are steadfast in our allegiance to the status quo.
In 2016, Donald Trump was accused of sexual misconduct by 24 different women; Trump insisted they were lying and promised they would all be “sued after this election is over.” The infamous Access Hollywood tape was released on October 6, 2016, less than a month before the election. It was widely believed that the tape would be fatal to his campaign: a presidential candidate boasted about committing sexual assault, and we didn’t hear it from an anonymous source or even a named eyewitness, but from Trump himself on a hot mic. It seemed unfathomable that Trump would be able to recover from that, and yet.
(Side note: Trump also never sued his accusers. Donald Trump once sued a Miss USA contestant for $5 million because she called the pageant—which Trump ran, or runs, who even knows anymore—“trashy” and “rigged” on Facebook. He also sued Trump Nation author Timothy O’Brien for $5 billion for quoting sources in the book who told O’Brien that Trump’s actual net worth was only between $150 and $250 million. In other words, Trump clearly loves lawsuits and apparently desperately needs the money, so a slam-dunk defamation lawsuit seems like the fast track to a big payday. Unless…)
In December 2017, Trump’s accusers once again issued public statements describing his sexual misconduct. A Quinnipiac poll around that time found that 50% of voters—59% women and 41% men—believed Trump should resign from office on the basis of these accusations. Of course, nobody actually expected Trump to resign, even though the allegations are almost certainly true. For Christ’s sake, he bragged about habitually committing sexual assault on tape and he stillwon; as far as he’s concerned, people clearly don’t care about sexual assault. Maybe we did once, but in cases like this we rarely actually do anything to punish the abusers. We just lay the evidence at their feet and trust them to do the right thing. Sometimes they do (see: Franken, Al); most times, they don’t (see: Kavanaugh, Brett). We’ve already adapted to powerful men getting away with monstrous behavior.
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has been credibly accused of sexual assault by Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who worked in Biden’s office in the early 1990s. There’s absolutely no reason not to believe Reade: her claims have been consistent from the outset, they’re supported by people she spoke to around the time of the assault (and well after it occurred), and the person she’s accusing—Joe Biden—has a long and well-documented history of sexually inappropriate behavior, including groping and unwanted touching of pretty much any woman within arm’s reach. (I won’t rehash the whole story here, but if you’re not familiar with all the details, Current Affairs has been providing excellent coverage.)
Reade’s allegations should be enough to convince Biden to drop out of the race (assuming he still knows he’s running for president, which is unclear at this time). Biden is, of course, not going anywhere: if Trump has taught him anything, it’s that if you’re powerful enough, you can get away with almost anything just by digging your heels in and daring everyone to hold you accountable. A sexual predator occupying the White House is no longer a distasteful hypothetical that we can pretend we would wholeheartedly reject—it’s our reality. And because it’s our reality, we’re fighting like hell to preserve it. The bulk of the attacks on Tara Reade’s story, past, and credibility have come from likely the same people who believed Trump should resign from office, the same people who supported Christine Blasey Ford when she spoke out about Brett Kavanaugh attempting to rape her at a party when she was 15. (Not that it should matter, but there is a lot more evidence to corroborate Reade’s story than there was with Dr. Ford’s.) None of that matters: now that that particular Rubicon has been crossed, American exceptionalism dictates that there’s no turning back, because to turn back is to admit you were wrong, and America is never wrong.
On February 12th, two weeks after President Trump told Americans “we have [the disease] under control” and nine days after he said “we’ve pretty much shut it down coming from China,” the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at its highest mark ever: 29,551.42. Over the next month, COVID-19 highlighted what one could charitably call Trump’s misguided optimism. (If one is not in a giving mood, then “arrogance, incompetence, breathtaking stupidity, political maneuvering, Trump’s utter disinterest in anything not directly about him, or some combination of the above” will work just fine.)
By March 12th, the day after the WHO declared that COVID-19 was officially a pandemic, the Dow had fallen to 21,200—a drop of about 28% from its February 12th high. To prevent it from going any lower and to help restore confidence in the markets, the Federal Reserve announced it would inject $1.5 trillion into the banking system. It didn’t work: one week after the injections, the Dow fell below 20,000 for the first time since it broke the mark in October 2016.
Then, when non-essential businesses started firing workers en masse and it became clear that the U.S. was on the verge of a complete economic meltdown, Congress passed a $2 trillion stimulus package to help breathe life into the economy. The stimulus package includes checks for up to $1,200 for every adult—the Tax Policy Center estimates that 90% of Americans will get stimulus checks, but let’s assume that they mean 90% of the 140.9 million Americans who filed a tax return in 2019, so that comes out to about 126.8 million people receiving a check for $1,200 apiece. (Not everyone gets the full $1,200, but not everyone files a tax return, including the working poor and the elderly who don’t meet the minimum income threshold that makes filing necessary, so let’s call it a wash.) The total amount of those stimulus checks, then, is just north of $150 billion, which means…$1.85 trillion is being spent on other things.
So between the stimulus package and the injections into the banking system, the government has spent 21 times as much—roughly $3.3 trillion—on things that don’t directly benefit the average citizen than it has on things that do. Instead of using $1.5 trillion to help the Dow, we could have canceled the $1.51 trillion of outstanding federal student loan debt, which would have directly benefited millions of people who, with an extra $1,000 a month to spare, would likely adjust their spending habits upwards and provide a sustainable long-term boost to the economy. But we didn’t, and on Monday the Dow closed at 22,726, almost exactly where it was in March.
Throwing money at banks didn’t work in 2008, and it didn’t work in March. Obviously, it’s not a good solution. Yet with the exception of a handful of people pointing out that we wasted $1.5 trillion in the few days after it became clear the injection was unsuccessful, I haven’t heard a peep about it since then. We just accepted that 1) that money was available, and 2) it’s gone now.
But I guarantee that the next time a politician proposes canceling student debt the way Bernie Sanders did, the vast majority of Americans—including those with crippling student debt—will oppose the idea. The excuse will be But how would we pay for it?, even though it’s obvious that all this money only exists on paper and if someone really wanted to, they could make it happen.
It’s not rational, but it’s the American way. We’ve adapted to the financial hell of student loan debt. And since fixing it is harder than doing nothing, most Americans will just shrug as they cut a $1,000 check to their loan servicer and say “That’s just the way it is, change is impossible, and I won’t even entertain the idea that things could be different!” Then they’ll sit down to figure out how to scrape together enough money to cover rent and groceries.
In March, 3.3 million people filed for unemployment, the highest number of unemployment claims in a single week we’ve ever seen. The old record was 695,000, set in 1982; even at the peak of the Great Recession, single-week unemployment claims never went higher than 665,000. The new record lasted for all of seven days; the next week, 6.6 million more people filed for unemployment. Ten million people lost their jobs in two weeks, and we weren’t done: 20 million people lost their jobs—temporarily or otherwise—in April. The St. Louis Federal Reserve has estimated that when all is said and done, COVID-19-related job losses could reach 47 million.
It’s not just a matter of lost income, either: a study from Health Management Associates found that 35 million people (including workers and their family members) could lose their health insurance due to layoffs. The idea that someone could lose their job and their healthcare coverage in one fell swoop is insane as it is; that it could happen in the middle of a pandemic borders on criminal. As I’ve argued before, healthcare should be considered a human right, and a single-payer system is the easiest way to provide free universal healthcare.
The fallout from the pandemic has made it abundantly clear that health insurance should be decoupled from employment. You should not have to demonstrate an ability to generate income for a company in order to earn the privilege of seeing a doctor. Yet most Democrats think the solution is not Medicare For All, but (pardon my French) this coagulated puddle of bullshit:
Even in unprecedented times when every possible option should be on the table, we favor minor tweaks to a laughably inadequate system over substantive change. We insist on free testing and treatment for coronavirus, yet bristle when someone says “Well if coronavirus testing and treatment should be free, then why can’t we do the same for cancer?” We could look at this pandemic as all the proof we need that our system needs to be gutted and replaced; instead, we see people who just lost their healthcare and their primary source of income and think Oh, they just need the opportunity to purchase insurance from another carrier.
Our response to the pandemic itself is positively dripping with American exceptionalism. We had years to prepare for, if not COVID specifically, then some as-yet-undetermined pandemic; we did nothing. When the virus spread across China, we had a sneak preview of ways we could possibly respond to COVID when it inevitably reached our shores, along with a month to begin getting things in order; again, we did nothing.
When it became clear that the pandemic was 1) already here and 2) as serious as advertised, we sighed, rolled our eyes and lurched into action like a nation of surly teenagers. We (begrudgingly, haphazardly) stayed at home, a vague and uneasy truce between red and blue states made possible by overwhelming consensus of the medical community. But that truce was never going to hold for long, even as the death toll continues to rise: this is America, we are exceptional, and we’re not about to let no dang virus tell us we can’t go to TJ Maxx.
The stay-at-home orders were never meant to be a permanent solution to the pandemic. They were meant to give researchers more time to study the disease to better understand how it spreads, how it can be treated and how best to prevent it. And they were meant to buy time for federal, state, and local governments to work together to create and enact protocols like that would slow the spread of the disease until a vaccine could be created: testing, contact tracing, and so on. Doing so would give us a better chance of preventing a surge in COVID-related hospitalizations which would overwhelm (and ultimately cripple) our healthcare system.
None of those protocols were enacted—most of the time was spent acquiring PPE or shoring up ventilator supply. (Both of these are valuable, but without widespread testing and contact tracing, they’re only solving half the puzzle.) Mayor Bill de Blasio stripped the NYC Health Department’s control of contact tracing efforts, despite the department’s stellar record and vast experience in contact tracing everything from HIV to Ebola. Some states waited weeks to enact stay-at-home restrictions; other states relaxed or lifted those restrictions well before CDC and WHO guidelines suggested was appropriate. All the while, people kept dying.
Thus far, the global death toll of COVID-19 is 282,000; the U.S. death toll hit 80,000 today. America represents 4.2% of the total global population, yet accounts for 28.4% of all COVID-19 deaths. The latest model from MIT projects that the death toll will reach anywhere from 105,000 to 118,000 by the end of this month. At best, the stay-in-place restrictions temporarily slowed the spread of the pandemic, but the numbers are still rising. So naturally, Americans are clamoring for the restrictions to be lifted so they can go back to work. (Or, more accurately, to force other people to return to work so the people protesting can get haircuts or shop at Target or whatever.)
Sure, South Korea (population: 51.64 million) limited its death toll to 256 people, or 0.00049% of the population, but guess what? They had to give up their freedoms to do it. Sure, our mortality rate may be 49 times higher, and sure, new cases in the U.S. (25,562 as of Friday) only going to keep rising while new cases in South Korea have effectively leveled off (18 new cases on Friday), but that’s just because we have freedom! No government bureaucrat is gonna tell us what to do! Let’s go outside and get the stock market up! And if anyone tells you to wear a mask, go ahead and murder them.
Our best chance to get things under control is slipping away. Slowly but surely, we’re adapting to this new reality that prioritizes the economy—one that apparently cannot survive more than 4 weeks without the labor of the working class who are permitted to keep an infinitesimal amount of the wealth they’ve generated for others—over human lives. Once states reopen for business, we’ll have decided as a nation that a pandemic is no excuse not to go to work. We’ll have decided that we cannot, must not let a little thing like mass death keep us from our obligation to create value for shareholders. Americans dying in numbers equaling that of 9/11 every two days will just be how things are now. A necessary sacrifice to the gods of capitalism.
There are two Americas. There’s the one everyone believes in, which has never existed and will never exist. This fictional America is exceptional, a “shining city on a hill.” In this fictional America, two diametrically-opposed political parties can hash out their differences and find a mutually agreeable solution because in the end, they all want what’s best for the country, and that’s what’s most important. This America keeps the world safe, and all the other countries are grateful for its leadership. This America won World War II! This fictional America holds its leaders to a higher moral standard, and our leaders willingly accept this standard because to behave in a manner unbecoming of a leader would be to tarnish America’s reputation, and our leaders would sooner die than cast a stain upon Lady Liberty. This is the America people believe in, the one we’re just a few minor course corrections away from seeing again.
Then there’s the real America. In the real America, the poor are placed in a socioeconomic vise at the moment of their birth and squeezed until they either miraculously slip out or until nothing remains and their husks are discarded to make room for the next generation. In the real America, a black man going for a jog gets shot by two vigilantes who decided he was a burglar, or gets shot by the cops for wielding a baseball bat—(which, much like every other baseball bat, does not shoot bullets) in a Wal-Mart while in the midst of a mental health crisis, or gets shot by a cop—even though he’s naked & obviously unarmed—while clearly suffering from a severe mental health crisis, or gets shot by a cop for no reason at all.
In the real America, people hold up Ronald Reagan as an exemplar of political leadership, instead of as a pudding-brained C-list actor who dedicated himself to inflicting as much suffering upon the most vulnerable members of society as possible. In the real America, John Hinckley didn’t finish the job. In the real America, Elon Musk is considered a genius.
In the real America, a pandemic-induced lockdown only lasts for six weeks before armed-to-the-teeth freaks start storming state houses to demand that the governor reopen Golden Corral. In the real America, people think COVID-19—which has killed over 260,000 people worldwide, 76,421 of whom are Americans—is a hoax. Real Americans don’t care if a rapist is in charge, as long as the rapist is on their side.
Our fanatical devotion to the myth of American exceptionalism is, ironically, the only exceptional thing about us; an argument could be made for the citizens of Jonestown, though we’ve got them beat in total lives dedicated to the cause. The America of our imagination is not coming back because it never existed in the first place. Even if it did once exist beyond the boundaries of a shared delusion, we’re no longer capable of bringing it back. We’ve gone feral.
There is no bottom. If there is, I only hope I’m dead and buried by the time we reach it.