Coronavirus hits Authoritarian America

I am no longer quarantining for virus safety/health reasons.

I’m quarantining because every time I leave the house I see masks on chins, under noses, tied on wrists like a scrunchie. I just end up agitated and sad. Nicer to sit in my driveway and read a book. Good luck everyone. pic.twitter.com/qOJAU3DFxv

— Phil Nobile Jr. (@PhilNobileJr) June 30, 2020

When the pandemic first hit I was thrown into a defeatist, fatalistic fugue state after reading Mark Sumner's essay about why America is about to get a godawful lesson in why health care should not be for profit that went point by point why anyone who gets sick is screwed. At that moment it seemed like we were all taking the threat of COVID-19 seriously and wanted to do everything we could to limit the spread and protect ourselves. I never got a chance to fully explore the rural, white authoritarian followers and their astroturf "reopen the economy" silliness. It was pretty clear that the gun-toting "protesters" doing corporate America's bidding were just Tea Party 2.0 but displayed equally clearly how dedicated those white authoritarian followers were to becoming plague rats for doughfacedonny. To this day they are resisting wearing masks out of some insane partisan virtue signaling because donny thinks wearing a mask makes you a wimp or something. Or as Josh Marshall and TPM has been putting it, "we" got bored with the epidemic so "we" are just pretending it doesn't matter.

I put that "we" in quotes because, yes there are a lot of people who should know better but aren't taking social distancing, masks, and hand washing seriously anymore but many are just boomers who think they are immortal. "I can't see it, so it doesn't exist." And many of those boomers are republican meatbags who do what they are told by their authoritarian masters, so "screw you city minorities, my privilege saves me from getting sick." And they got away with it, for a few months anyway.

Now, we really need to  disregard any national statistics on where the epidemic is and is heading. This has finally moved on to hit authoritarian America, Red America, where ignorance, racism, and science-bashing is already an epidemic. A great article from May by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic about America's "Racial Contract" helps explain why doughfacedonny and republicans all decided that COVID-19 was not only not a threat to them but not really a problem for authoritarian, Red America.

The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying

Can you guess? Do I even need to elaborate? There is so much information, analysis, and ideas in this article it deserves it's own full treatment but for now I just wanted to pull out one small aspect of it. The racial contract of white personhood (and perceived innocence) versus nonwhite subpersonhood is and should remain hyper relevant to BLM protests for certain, but extending this awful but undeniable contract, our unwritten constitution if you will, to COVID-19 will help explain the rural, white intransigence about the epidemic.   

The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience. Temporary measures meant to prevent the spread of the disease by restricting movement, mandating the wearing of masks, or barring large social gatherings have become the foulest tyranny. The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that [republican] legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions. In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians. [emphasis mine]

The point of this next quote supports my original idea of trump as a Doughface from right before the loathsome usurper was inaugurated before anemic crowds. TLDR for this term is that before the Civil War, southern Democrats would conspire against the northern wing of their party by nominating northern men with southern sensibilities, making a party in the North that welcomed immigrants, was religiously tolerant, and supported expanding democracy complicit with the slave power. We can read a lot from this previous shameful practice into today's republican party. 

Trump’s administration, in carrying out an explicitly discriminatory agenda that valorizes cruelty, war crimes, and the entrenchment of white political power, represents a revitalized commitment to the racial contract.

But the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.

Again, the cruelty is the point. White cops don't kill black Americans because they want to exterminate the African-American community, they are reaffirming the racial contract of white supremacy and domination over nonwhites. As long as it was black and brown workers on the line, there was no limit for tolerable losses. Now, however:

 

Mobile-phone location data from people who attended President Trump’s Oklahoma rally show most came from outside Tulsa, hailing from at least 44 counties spread across 12 states.

Covid-19 is on the rise in 33 of them. https://t.co/tLPXjUOioc

— Bloomberg Law (@BLaw) June 30, 2020

 "All three states and Oklahoma are seeing rising case numbers. The virus has spiked in Texas, with record new numbers reported in each of the past three days, prompting Governor Greg Abbott to halt the state’s reopening. On Friday, he ordered all bars to close by noon after the state’s positive-test rate topped 11%. Oklahoma also reported a record number of new infections.

Trump supporters expressed varying levels of concern about the virus. Some donned masks when they went inside and acknowledged some anxiety, while others scoffed."

"Too soon to know if this was a 'super-spreader' event" states the accompanying article. But, yeah even a moderate spread from doughfacedonny's 2 minute's hate rally is criminal.

This is not the continuation of the first wave, this is not a second wave of COVID-19, this is the virus jumping from democratic America to authoritarian America. The former was caught off-guard by the arrival of this highly-contagious disease and the majority there has tried to take it seriously. The jump to authoritarian America was expected and more or less inevitable. It will spread like wildfire there because of republican plague rats first, then keep going because of arrogance, ignorance, and blind obedience to doughfacedonny. 

And none of it is your fault. You cannot change the minds of authoritarian followers because they didn't have these ideas in the first place, they cannot defend the ideas implanted in their skulls, but they will stubbornly resist until it is too late because the racial contract says that only "those" people get COVID-19, any outgroup they consider "other". Because these republicans are not our countrymen any longer, they don't count in our unwritten constitution of democratic America. They are simply a burden. I have no sympathy left.