It seems that anytime we have serious domestic disasters, we have the government-hating Republicans running the government, and so we have 9/11, Katrina, the 2008 financial meltdown, and now the Corona pandemic. The severity of this pandemic in the U.S. remains to be seen. But if you're worried, you have good reason to be.
This much is real: While the vast majority of people will be seriously affected, the real problem is overwhelming the existing, inadequately prepared healthcare infrastructure so that people who are seriously ill, whether they have Corona Virus or not, will not be adequately treated. That's what justifies the extreme steps local governments are taking, and they are right to take them.
It's very likely that, despite these steps, we will be Italy in a week or two, and so you better hope that you or anyone you care about doesn't get sick–with anything requiring a doctor's care.
Because whenever we have Republicans in charge, we have people who are ideologically incapable of dealing with social complexity, which guarantees that their response will be incompetent–either absurdly inadequate as with Katrina or massively wrongheaded as in the invasion of Iraq after 9/11. It remains to be seen whether what we are in the midst of now will eclipse even the worst negative effects of the Bush/Cheney insanity.
Republicans have become the party of ignoramuses elected by Americans who vote for reasons that have little to do with competency and almost everything to do with cultural resentment. And the result has been the gradual destruction of the institutions that are designed to provide a minimum of social stability and fairness, and in their destruction have created conditions of social chaos that liberate the predators to do as they please. This liberation of the predators is brought on the other Bush/Cheney fiasco, the financial meltdown of 2008.
The Bush/Cheney administration should have delegitimized Republicans as a governing party for a generation, and yet they thrive. And we have now in Trump and McConnell two human beings who are utterly unmatched for the challenges that confront us. Trump has turned the country into a banana republic characterized not by the rule of law, but by the law of the jungle. And the question is whether Americans will keep putting people like him in office because of their Liberal hatred and cultural grievance.
The Republicans have good reason to worry in the short run, but they shouldn't in the long run. They have every reason to trust in the naïveté and ignorance of so many Americans who will come back to them once the dust settles, which, if the Dems sweep in November, it will. Nevertheless, it wouldn't surprise me if the Trump/McConnell cabal use the pandemic to try to call off the elections this fall. Don't think they're not talking about it. It's what the leaders of banana republics do.
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