Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Two Current Perspectives on the Challenges Facing a Country in Deep Trouble: Paul Krugman and David Brooks

Yesterday, Thursday, June 25th, two columnists for The New York Times, Paul Krugman and David Brooks, trained their minds upon the manifold challenges faced by the United States in the months ahead, with impressive clarity, intelligence and complementarity. I admit to surprise that Brooks does not directly address the climate crisis; so we are left to imagine the likely fate of that crisis in the context of the political, economic and medical crises described below. Krugman has examined climate change earlier this year, and explicitly chose to focus yesterday on the economic and political issues related to COVID-19, so it's understandable that he reserves the climate for other occasions. I'll keep you appraised.

Rather than summarize Krugman and Brooks, since their columns are relatively short, I am going to give them to you here, with a short paragraph from The Times about their professional accomplishments. Historically, I have aligned my own views more closely with Krugman as a liberal political economist and a fellow Democrat. That is still my view. Brooks has generally been more conservative, perhaps what we used to call a “liberal Republican,” but that phrase over the past decade and more has become increasingly meaningless. I respect and learn from them both. That is certainly true of the columns below, both offering us deeply sobering and plausible indications of where we of the United States find ourselves.

1. Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as an Op-Ed columnist. He is distinguished professor in the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D. program and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York. In addition, he is professor emeritus of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. In 2008, Mr. Krugman was the sole recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade theory.

America Didn’t Give Up on Covid-19. Republicans Did.

Partisanship has crippled our response.

By Paul Krugman

June 25, 2020

Earlier this year much of America went through hell as the nation struggled to deal with Covid-19. More than 120,000 Americans have now died; more than 20 million have lost their jobs.

But it’s looking as if all those sacrifices were in vain. We never really got the coronavirus under control, and now infections, while they have fallen to a quite low level in the New York area, the pandemic’s original epicenter, are surging in much of the rest of the country.

And the bad news isn’t just a result of more testing. In new hot spots like Arizona — where testing capacity is being overwhelmed — and Houston the fraction of tests coming up positive is soaring, which shows that the disease is spreading rapidly.

It didn’t have to be this way. The European Union, a hugely diverse area with a larger population than the U.S., has been far more successful at limiting the spread of Covid-19 than we have. What went wrong?

The immediate answer is that many U.S. states ignored warnings from health experts and rushed to reopen their economies, and far too many people failed to follow basic precautions like wearing face masks and avoiding large groups. But why was there so much foolishness?

Well, I keep seeing statements to the effect that Americans were too impatient to stay the course, too unwilling to act responsibly. But this is deeply misleading, because it avoids confronting the essence of the problem. Americans didn’t fail the Covid-19 test; Republicans did.

After all, the Northeast, with its largely Democratic governors, has been appropriately cautious about reopening, and its numbers look like Europe’s. California and Washington are blue states that are seeing a rise in cases, but it’s from a relatively low base, and their Democratic governors are taking actions like requiring the use of face masks and seem ready to reverse their reopening.

So the really bad news is coming from Republican-controlled states, especially Arizona, Florida and Texas, which rushed to reopen and, while some are now pausing, haven’t reversed course. If the Northeast looks like Europe, the South is starting to look like Brazil.

Nor is it just Republican governors and state legislatures. According to the new New York Times/Siena poll, voters over all strongly favor giving control of the pandemic priority over reopening the economy — but Republican voters, presumably taking their cue from the White House and Fox News, take the opposite position.

And it’s not just about policy decisions. Partisanship seems to be driving individual behavior, too, with self-identified Democrats significantly more likely to wear face masks and engage in social distancing than self-identified Republicans.

The question, then, isn’t why “America” has failed to deal effectively with the pandemic. It’s why the G.O.P. has in effect allied itself with the coronavirus.

Part of the answer is short-term politics. At the beginning of this year Donald Trump’s re-election message was all about economic triumphalism: Unemployment was low, stocks were up, and he was counting on good numbers to carry him through November. He and his officials wasted crucial weeks refusing to acknowledge the viral threat because they didn’t want to hear any bad news.

And they pushed for premature reopening because they wanted things to return to what they seemed to be back in February. Indeed, just a few days ago the same Trump officials who initially assured us that Covid-19 was no big deal were out there dismissing the risks of a second wave.

I’d suggest, however, that the G.O.P.’s coronavirus denial also has roots that go beyond Trump and his electoral prospects. The key point, I’d argue, is that Covid-19 is like climate change: It isn’t the kind of menace the party wants to acknowledge.

It’s not that the right is averse to fearmongering. But it doesn’t want you to fear impersonal threats that require an effective policy response, not to mention inconveniences like wearing face masks; it wants you to be afraid of people you can hate — people of a different race or supercilious liberals.

So instead of dealing with Covid-19, Republican leaders and right-wing media figures have tried to make the pandemic into the kind of threat they want to talk about. It’s “kung flu,” foisted on us by villainous Chinese. Or it’s a hoax perpetrated by the “medical deep state,” which is just looking for a way to hurt Trump.

The good news is that the politics of virus denial don’t seem to be working. Partly that’s because racism doesn’t play the way it used to: The Black Lives Matter protesters have received broad public support, despite the usual suspects’ efforts to portray them as rampaging hordes. Partly it’s because the surge in infections is becoming too obvious to deny; even Republican governors are admitting that there’s a problem, although they still don’t seem willing to act.

The bad news is that partisanship has crippled our Covid-19 response. The virus is winning, and all indications are that the next few months will be a terrifying nightmare of rampant disease and economic disruption.

 

2. David Brooks became an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in September 2003. His column appears every Tuesday and Friday. He is currently a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”He is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. In March 2011 he came out with his third book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, which was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Mr. Brooks also teaches at Yale University, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

America Is Facing 5 Epic Crises All at Once

This is not the time to obsess about symbolism.

By David Brooks

June 25, 2020

There are five gigantic changes happening in America right now. The first is that we are losing the fight against Covid-19. Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.

Second, all Americans, but especially white Americans, are undergoing a rapid education on the burdens African-Americans carry every day. This education is continuing, but already public opinion is shifting with astonishing speed.

Third, we’re in the middle of a political realignment. The American public is vehemently rejecting Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The most telling sign is that the party has even given up on itself, a personality cult whose cult leader is over.

Fourth, a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions. The acolytes of this quasi-religion, Social Justice, hew to a simplifying ideology: History is essentially a power struggle between groups, some of which are oppressors and others of which are oppressed. Viewpoints are not explorations of truth; they are weapons that dominant groups use to maintain their place in the power structure. Words can thus be a form of violence that has to be regulated.

Fifth, we could be on the verge of a prolonged economic depression. State and household budgets are in meltdown, some businesses are failing and many others are on the brink, the continuing health emergency will mean economic activity cannot fully resume.

These five changes, each reflecting a huge crisis and hitting all at once, have created a moral, spiritual and emotional disaster. Americans are now less happy than at any time since they started measuring happiness nearly 50 years ago. Americans now express less pride in their nation than at any time since Gallup started measuring it 20 years ago.

Americans look around the world and see that other nations are beating Covid-19 and we are failing. Americans look around and see state-sponsored violence — rhetorical and actual — inflicted on their fellow citizens. America doesn’t seem very exceptional.

In times like this, you’ve got to have a theory of change.

The loudest theory of change is coming from the Social Justice movement. This movement emerged from elite universities, and its basic premise is that if you can change the cultural structures you can change society.

Members of this movement pay intense attention to cultural symbols — to language, statues, the names of buildings. They pay enormous attention to repeating certain slogans, such as “defund the police,” which may or may not have anything to do with policy, and to lifting up symbolic gestures, like kneeling before a football game. It’s a very apt method for change in an age of social media because it’s very performative.

The Social Justice activists focus on the cultural levers of power. Their most talked about action is canceling people. Some person, usually mildly progressive, will say something politically “problematic” and his or her job will be terminated. In this way new boundaries are established for what has to be said and what cannot be said.

The Social Justice activists sometimes claim that if you don’t like their tactics then you are not fighting for racial equity or economic justice or whatever. But those movements all existed long before Social Justice affixed itself to them and tried to change their methods.

The core problem is that the Social Justice theory of change doesn’t produce much actual change. Corporations are happy to adopt some woke symbols and hold a few consciousness-raising seminars and go on their merry way. Worse, this method has no theory of politics.

How exactly is all this cultural agitation going to lead to legislation that will decrease income disparities, create better housing policies or tackle the big challenges that I listed above? That part is never spelled out. In fact, the Sturm und Drang makes political work harder. You can’t purify your way to a governing majority.

The Social Justice methodology is ultimately not a solution to our problem, it’s a symptom of our problem. Over the last half century, we’ve turned politics from a practical way to solve common problems into a cultural arena to display resentments. Donald Trump is the ultimate performer in this paralyzed arena.

If you think the interplay of these five gigantic changes is going to fit into some neat ideological narrative, you’re probably wrong. If you think we can deal with a racial disparity, reform militaristic police departments and address an existential health crisis and a prolonged economic depression by taking the culture war up another notch, I think you’re mistaken.

Dealing with these problems is going to take government. It’s going to take actual lawmaking, actual budgeting, complex compromises — all the boring, dogged work of government that is more C-SPAN than Instagram.

I know a lot of people aren’t excited about him, but I thank God that Joe Biden is going to be nominated by the Democratic Party. He came to public life when it wasn’t about performing your zeal; it was about crafting coalitions and legislating. He exudes a spirit that is about empathy and friendship, not animosity and canceling. The pragmatic spirit of the New Deal is a more apt guide for the years ahead than the spirit of critical theory symbology.

Bill McKibben: Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues

Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues

 

Bill McKibben

June 3, 2020

The New Yorker

I find that lots of people are surprised to learn that, by overwhelming margins, the two groups of Americans who care most about climate change are Latinx Americans and African-Americans. But, of course, those communities tend to be disproportionately exposed to the effects of global warming: working jobs that keep you outdoors, or on the move, on an increasingly hot planet, and living in densely populated and polluted areas. (For many of the same reasons, these communities have proved disproportionately vulnerable to diseases such as the coronavirus.) One way of saying it is that money buys insulation, and white people, over all, have more of it.

Over the years, the environmental movement has morphed into the environmental-justice movement, and it’s been a singularly interesting and useful change. Much of the most dynamic leadership of this fight now comes from Latinx and African-American communities, and from indigenous groups; more to the point, the shift has broadened our understanding of what “environmentalism” is all about. John Muir, who has some claim to being the original modern environmentalist, once explained that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” He was talking about ecosystems, but it turns out that he was more correct than he knew: the political world is hopelessly (and hopefully) intertwined with the natural world. So, for instance, living in a community with high levels of air pollution impairs human bodies—it raises blood pressure, increases cancer. But so does living in a place with a brutal police force. As one study recently put it:

 

When faced with a threat, the body produces hormones and other signals that turn on the systems that are necessary for survival in the short term. These changes include accelerated heart rate and increased respiratory rate. But when the threat becomes reoccurring and persistent—as is the case with police brutality—the survival process becomes dangerous and causes rapid wear and tear on body organs and elevated allostatic load. Deterioration of organs and systems caused by increased allostatic load occurs more frequently in Black populations and can lead to conditions such as diabetes, stroke, ulcers, cognitive impairment, autoimmune disorders, accelerated aging, and death.

Or, to put it another way, having a racist and violent police force in your neighborhood is a lot like having a coal-fired power plant in your neighborhood. And having both? And maybe some smoke pouring in from a nearby wildfire? African-Americans are three times as likely to die from asthma as the rest of the population. “I Can’t Breathe” is the daily condition of too many people in this country. One way or another, there are a lot of knees on a lot of necks.

The job of people who care about the future—which is another way of saying the environmentalists—is to let everyone breathe easier. But that simply can’t happen without all kinds of change. Some of it looks like solar panels for rooftops, and some of it looks like radically reimagined police forces. All of it is hitched together.

Passing the Mic

Nina Lakhani is the environmental-justice reporter for the Guardian. Prior to that, she was a freelance reporter whose work took her to many parts of the world, including Central America, where she chronicled the sad story told in her new book, “Who Killed Berta Cáceres?” The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Why was Berta Cáceres killed—what fight was she involved in?

Berta Cáceres was murdered after leading a long campaign to stop construction of an internationally financed hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River, in Rio Blanco, western Honduras. The Agua Zarca Dam was among scores of environmentally destructive mega projects in indigenous territories sanctioned by the post-coup government, without the legally required consultation. The Gualcarque is considered sacred by the indigenous Lenca people, who rely on the river for food, medicine, water, and spiritual nourishment. The proposed dam would have diverted the river from the Rio Blanco community, who are mostly subsistence farmers, ruining their sustainable lives and forcing them to migrate to towns and cities—or the U.S.—in order to survive. The community asked Berta, who was the coördinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (copinh), to help them stop construction of the dam through peaceful actions. This unleashed a wave of terror against her and the community, which included harassment, defamation, trumped-up criminal charges, and dozens of threats. But they couldn’t silence her, so they killed her, on March 2, 2016.

Somebody pulled the trigger—but who was behind that person?

Berta was hated by the powerful network of political, economic, religious, and military élites that controls Honduras. We know that a hit squad, a group of poor young men, were paid to murder Berta: a gunman shot her dead in her bedroom, close to midnight; another shot Gustavo Castro, a Mexican environmentalist and dear friend of Berta’s, who was staying at her house. He was injured, but survived by playing dead. Also present was the getaway-car driver and a former special-forces sergeant, who was coördinating the mission at the house. The trial, which took place in late 2018, convicted those four and three others, whom I’d describe as middlemen. Don’t get me wrong—they played important roles. But those who paid for and ordered the murder have not been prosecuted, even though the court ruled that Berta was killed because her actions were delaying the dam construction and costing the Honduran company building the dam, desa, money. David Castillo, the former executive president of the company, and a U.S.-trained former intelligence officer, is the only person so far accused of masterminding the crime. He’s been in prison, awaiting trial, for twenty-seven months. But the evidence strongly suggests that other company executives, who are members of one of the country’s most powerful clans, should be investigated—yet none have even been formally questioned. [desa has denied that Castillo or anyone else at the company was involved in the crime.] The possible role played by any state officials—police, military, judges, prosecutors, and politicians—before, during, and after the murder has never been investigated.

What can we say about the role indigenous communities play in protecting the environment?

Indigenous people across the world mobilize against damaging environmental activities to protect their sacred lands, water, and traditional way of life, and they are involved in forty-one per cent of documented environmental conflicts, according to a new study analyzing nearly three thousand community movements. Across the board, environmental defenders face high rates of criminalization, physical violence, and assassination, but the risk is significantly higher when indigenous people are involved. In my experience reporting from across Mexico and Central America, environmentally destructive projects—such as mining, dams, logging, and tourism resorts—are imposed on indigenous communities without any consultation or compensation, and when they resist investors and politicians try to discredit them as anti-development and anti-green energy. This simply isn’t true. Imposing these environmentally destructive projects, including clean-energy projects, will destroy indigenous communities who could teach us so much about sustainability.

Climate School

• Organized labor is often lumped in with progressive groups as a champion of environmental progress, and, indeed, many unions are engaged in the fight for a Green New Deal. But, as the climate journalist Steve Horn remindsus, in an incisive piece of reporting, other unions have continued to fight for pipelines and other big fossil-fuel initiatives. Some of them are joining with the former Obama Administration Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz in a coalition to back “clean coal,” natural gas, and other fossil-fuel projects. It will be fateful to see which vision carries the day, as the Democrats choose an energy future: the other pole is represented here, by Varshini Prakash, whom Senator Bernie Sanders has named to the joint task force on climate that he formed with Joe Biden. (The chairs are Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the former Secretary of State John Kerry.)
• A new studyfinds that four more years of Donald Trump could delay global-emissions cuts by a decade, since it will not just depress action here but give other leaders around the world a good excuse for inaction.
• Another new study—this one headed by the senators Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, Debbie Stabenow, of Michigan, and Chuck Schumer, of New York—details the decades-long effort to stage a right-wing “capture” of the American judiciary, helping to insure a rising number of court decisions protecting polluters.

Scoreboard

⬇️The number of birds in North America has fallen by a third since 1970, and climate change now seems to be making long-distance migration—always something of a miracle—much more difficult.

⬇️A lot of oil companies are making promises to go “net zero” in emissions by 2050, and this trend has come in for questions and critiques from environmental groups. That’s not a problem for ExxonMobil, though—always the hold-my-beer champion of corporate irresponsibility. At last week’s shareholder meeting, Darren Woods, the chairman and chief executive, said that there would be no such targets for the company. He also told shareholders that there are no plans to invest in renewable energy, because the company has no “unique advantage” in the field. If nothing else, ExxonMobil’s intransigence makes embarrassingly clear the failure of engagement strategies pursued by those who have chosen to work with the company rather than to divest their shares, a group that includes New York State (under the comptroller, Tom DiNapoli) and the Church of England.

⬇️On the world’s short list of truly bad ideas: flying cars, which are apparently now under development at twenty different companies, and which, as Kevin DeGood, of the Center for American Progress, says, would “represent the technological apotheosis of sprawl and an attempt to eradicate distance as a fact of life for elites who are wealthy enough to routinely let slip the bonds of gravity.”

⬆️The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against several big oil companies, sending lawsuits seeking to hold them responsible for the effects of climate change back to California state courts. The companies had argued that damage from global warming was “speculative,” and that, in any event, Congress had urged them to produce more hydrocarbons.

⬆️The United States consumed more energy from renewables than from coal last year—the first time this has happened since the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, those who invested in fossil-fuel stocks have seen their value crater by more than forty per cent in the first four months of this year, while investments in renewable energy grew more than two per cent.

Warming Up

The former Times science reporter Andrew Revkin has been hosting what he calls “Sustain What?” Webcasts, with Columbia University’s Earth Institute, to foster “online conversations and communities shaping solution-oriented policy and personal paths amid wickedly intertwined challenges,” such as covid-19 and climate change. Late last month, he invited the University of Alabama biologist Gui Becker, whom you can hear singing his own composition, “Cataclysmic Chaos,” at 1:17:45 of this YouTube video.

—Bill McKibben

What if there were no George Floyd video? Even when racism doesn't go viral, it's still deadly

What if there were no George Floyd video?

Even when racism doesn't go viral, it's still deadly.

Nicholas Kristof

• There is no video to show that a black boy born today in Washington, D.C., Missouri, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or a number of other states has a shorter life expectancy than a boy born in Bangladesh or India.

• There’s no video to show that black children still are often systematically shunted to second-rate schools and futures, just as they were in the Jim Crow era. About 15 percent of black or Hispanic students attend so-called apartheid schools that are less than 1 percent white.

• There’s no video to show that blacks are dying from the coronavirus at more than twice the rate of whites, or that a result of the recent mass layoffs is that, as of last month, fewer than half of African-American adults now have a job.

 

“There is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night,” Robert F. Kennedy said in 1968 shortly before his assassination. “This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat.”

Health statistics bear that out. A black newborn in the United States is twice as likely to die in infancy as a white newborn and a black woman is as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as a white woman. “Racism is nothing short of a public health crisis,” Michelle A. Williams, the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, told me. “That reality is palpable not just in the scourge of police violence that disproportionately kills black Americans, but in the vestiges of slavery and segregation that have permeated the social determinants of health.

“Racism has robbed black Americans from benefiting from the advancements they’ve fought for, bled for and died for throughout history. That reality manifests in myriad ways — from underfunded schools to the gutting of health care and social programs, to financial redlining, to mass incarceration, to voter suppression, to police brutality and more. And it is undeniably harming health and prematurely ending black lives.”

The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society said in a statement a few days ago, “Structural racism is more harmful to the health and well-being of children than infectious diseases, including Covid-19.”

Sociologists like Orlando Patterson have noted that while whites increasingly have progressive views about race in general, they often still favor public policies that disadvantage African-Americans. For example, they may oppose multi-occupancy housing in their affluent suburbs, reducing affordable housing and perpetuating segregation. Or they may support a broken local funding system for education that results in apartheid school“Confinement to segregated, poorly funded schools interferes with children’s life chances,” said Rucker Johnson, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a book, “Children of the Dream,” about integration. Johnson found that American public schools achieved peak integration in 1988 and have since become more racially segregated.

Structural racism doesn’t easily go viral, but it is deadly. A recent study of insurance records found that when blacks and whites with Covid-19 symptoms like a fever and cough sought medical help, blacks were less likely to be given a coronavirus test.

I wonder about doctors who didn’t get black patients tested — or officials who didn’t allocate tests to clinics in black neighborhoods. I’m sure many were well-meaning and had no idea that they were discriminating. But unconscious racial bias is widespread, resulting in what the scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has called “racism without racists.”

Scholars have found, for example, that professional baseball umpires are more likely to call strikes when they are of the same race as the pitcher (whatever their race, although this mostly benefits white pitchers). Likewise, professional basketball referees are more likely to call personal fouls against a player of a different race.

Much of the research seems bleak, but three things give me hope. First, many metrics show improvement. Second, robust evidence shows what policies would help. For example, a careful study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine last year showed how we could reduce child poverty by half — hugely reducing racial inequality. What we lack isn’t tools or resources, it’s political will.

My third reason for hope has to do with those biased basketball referees. That research angered the N.B.A. and caused painful controversy — which laid the groundwork for progress. A follow-up study found that after the first research was absorbed, those biased calls disappeared. It appeared that once people were forced to have anguished discussions about racial bias, they were able to overcome it.