Notes on a Pandemic II: Default Mode
I began drafting this the morning after I published last week’s initial foray into understanding the coronavirus crisis. I had graphs, citations, I was going to reread some Wendy Brown to discuss the nature of “sacrificing for the market” as some politicians have come to talk about our lives in relation to profit, but then the relief bill passed.
I’ve seen Republicans disingenuously argue that the American people are “smart enough” to understand that this package isn’t 2008 all over again. Disingenuous not because the American people are dumb, but because this is, of course, a lot like 2008 — yet another wealth transfer upwards in the midst of a crisis. Despite the one time payment of $1,200 in Bernie Bucks, the working people of America are left standing in the cold as companies like Boeing, who can no longer make planes that fly, cash checks valued in the billions.
You can find breakdowns of the relief bill elsewhere, so I won’t get into the nitty-gritty here. Instead, I’d like to juxtapose what just happened with how we’re talking about this crisis. But first I’d like to make a point about a general misapprehension.
In American political discourse, we default to moralism when things get rough. It’s like throwing a blanket over a sawhorse: it gives the whole thing shape. We know who to blame, why their supporters are assholes, and we can plumb the psychic depths of our countrymen. More charitably, no politics can survive without some sort of moral/ethical valence, and when a catastrophe occurs, it’s good to want to adjudicate responsibility and fault.
But that misses what’s happened in America over the last few decades. The government has become less responsible (in the traditional sense) to its people. The victory of the elites has been both legal and institutional and the full flowering of its achievement has blossomed into things like Citizens United and Right to Work laws, which work to firewall economic goings-on from political interference. So when we ask “who’s responsible for this mess?” and “who’s screwing me over” it’s not just enough to drum up a list of names attached to various crimes or corruption. The relief bill worked out this way because our political system has been structured to work that way.
And that’s why the discourse around this moment has piqued my interest.
I’ve noticed a lot of rhetoric about war mobilization, WWII (America’s favorite war), and the government’s need to get together and do what’s best for the American people. This involves everything from the New Deal to industrial policy to a sense of national togetherness.
We’re on the beaches of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan, waiting for Tom Hanks to flash on the screen, because, as Jim Shepard puts it in The Tunnel at the End of the Light, “Tom Hanks has built a career on his persona as an amiably likeable guy with rock-solid down-home values.” But Shepard identifies a key paradox here about Hanks’s character in Saving Private Ryan: “The movie simultaneously tells us he is just a regular guy and he is the greatest guy ever. We swallow the paradox whole, because it’s so deeply flattering to us. Tom Hanks is no different than you or I. And Tom Hanks is truly great.”
This paradox has been part of what I’ve heard described as American victory culture. From Red Dawn (a film about a gaggle of average American teenagers who stave off an invasion from the Soviet army) to Saving Private Ryan to Eastwood’s American Sniper, we believe to be ordinary is extraordinary and vice-versa. Even more importantly, we believe that people rise to the occasion. And we believe it because we want to believe it about ourselves.
But you don’t rise to the occasion — you default to your basic training. Just like me. And like almost everyone else.
And so when we moralize about the situation and when we invoke the last time we were “the good guys” and FDR and all the rest of it, we’re misunderstanding the position in which history has placed us: “rising to the occasion” is structurally impossible. Politics plays out within institutions that affix fetters to political possibilities. They’re the “ceiling” on “rising.” And so, now that these institutions are less accountable to the public, our system defaults to its most basic training: serving the elites to whom it is responsible.
