Now that Trump is toast and we have two vaccines in the offing, Andrew Sullivan is ebullient. His latest piece at The Weekly Dish celebrates The Good Times Coming with a historical analogy: the outburst of hedonism in the Roaring Twenties following the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Click on the screenshot below to see the column, though it will do you no good unless you have a subscription (I do, so I’ll quote sparingly):
The Beagle Man can barely contain himself!:
With a new president, a new season, a miraculous set of vaccines, and a booming economy, it will be easier to put Covid behind us than it might otherwise have been. And we can tell ourselves a different kind of story than in 1919. The difference between this plague and every one before AIDS is that it didn’t blow itself out. We put an end to it. The passivity and fatalism that marked many human experiences of plague are, in this moment, avoidable. We can rightly see this turning point as a real scientific breakthrough, with vast implications for tackling plague viruses in the future.
And freezing a society for a while, putting the entire social order on hold, allowing ourselves to think again and reassess where we are and where we were, has consequences, many of which we cannot know at all right now. I explored this theme in an essay earlier this year. Whole industries will be re-imagined; careers will change; people will move; workplace patterns will permanently shift; babies will be born in larger numbers; the younger generation will rise; and the culture itself will throb with renewed energy.
That this future is unknowable is partly why it’s so invigorating. Coop an entire society up for a year, suppress all the human instincts to be together, surround everyone with fear and caution … and then set them all free. The end of this epidemic is coming. We know that now. We can see it in the future. And can almost taste it. So get ready to party. Because 2021 will rock.
I think, when Andrew says that Covid-19 differs from previous plagues in that humans ended it instead of waiting for its natural waning, he’s forgotten about smallpox and polio. But never mind. What perplexes me—and I see this on the news a lot—is the idea that we’ll be better off as a species for having weathered this storm. That’s almost tantamount to saying that in the net, the pandemic was a good thing. I don’t claim that Sullivan is saying that, but he, like many others, seems bent on finding something good emerging from a horrible epidemic.
But what can we expect, or prognosticate, will be the salubrious consequences? Well, we know how to deal with a pandemic better now: we know how to do contact tracing, we’ve developed vaccines—with messenger RNA!—in less than a year, and we know better how to distribute them. Perhaps that will help us the next time the world rouses up its bats and sends them forth to die in a happy city. But that would be about just the same result had we never had this pandemic. We had to learn this sometime! And don’t forget the dead, who will number more than two million when this is over.
As for the other salubrious consequences, I don’t see them. Restaurants will be gone, people will be more afraid of each other, many kids have lost almost a year of schooling, and so on. I think people want to get back to what existed before (I’m excepting the social movements that were already in play when the pandemic started), not engineer a brand new world with no places to eat and where sociality is limited to bumping fists and elbows. Truly, I think it would have been better had the epidemic not knocked us back on our heels. But perhaps I’m wrong—perhaps some readers see a silver lining that I can’t. If so, weigh in below. Will anything good—beyond a better ability to deal with epidemics—come from this plague?
— Mark Thomas (@mt_genes) December 19, 2020
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During the primary I was a big fan of Mayor Pete as a Democratic candidate, even though he lacked experience on the national level. Buttigieg was whip-smart, so he could learn on the job, was eloquent, and was not on the extreme AOC wing of the Left. I guess I thought of him as a white, gay Obama. Now, fortunately, Biden has appointed Buttigieg as Secretary of Transportation, even though Pete was a former rival.
It can only be a good thing that Mayor Pete is now Secretary Pete, as I’m sure he has a big future in politics. And it’s great that he’s a Democrat. But what I didn’t think of is how Buttigieg could strike fear into the Far Left wing of the Democratic Party—you know, the wing that turns centrists into Republicans. And, in his weekly offering, Sullivan quotes Matt Yglesias and then adds his own gloss:
“I hope this is obvious to everyone, but it just can’t be stressed heavily enough that social media performative Pete-hatred is not actually about Pete [Buttigieg]. I’d say most generously it’s about an accurate sense that his existence threatens the young socialist left’s belief that the future belongs to them.
Joe Biden, yesterday’s man, is easy to live with. So is the politically clumsy Kamala Harris. But the prospect of a charismatic, talented, ambitious normie Democrat who’s not going away any time soon is terrifying.
But this is good! Right now Democratic Party politics is largely polarized between an ossified and uninspiring establishment and a group of young, dynamic leftists who are wildly out of touch with political reality. Fresh faces who know how to be interesting while also knowing how to read public opinion surveys are exactly what the country needs,” – Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring, the best new thing on Substack.
That last sentence is very good. And here’s Sullivan’s take:
In our post-Trump attempted return to normalcy, a man like Pete Buttigieg matters. Yes, he’s blandly ambitious in a very Rhodes Scholar way. He’s super-smooth in debate. His precocity is a bit irritating. He offends the Alphabet People because he’s such a normie gay man, threatening to complicate the hard left’s assertion that being attracted to the same sex must be turned into some ideological identity — LGBTQ+ — rather than just being who you are, and finding some path to happiness.
But a successful liberal polity desperately needs fewer Twitter extremists and more pragmatic over-achievers. Like, well, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They turned out to be pretty good for the Democrats, no?
Well, I’m not sure about Clinton, but I won’t argue. You know, sometimes I think that if I were in my twenties now, I’d be further on the Bernie Sanders “progressive” spectrum of Democrats. Have I gotten more conservative as I’ve gotten older? I can’t tell, because I can’t do the experiment of going back in time and presenting the young, hirsute Coyne with today’s Democratic platform (if there is one) to get a reaction. All I know is that the country is deeply polarized and I’m pretty sure that if liberalism is to survive in this climate, it won’t do so by touting “progressivism” (which, by the way, is tainted with anti-Semitism).
There are so many reasons that Trump should be gone, but I think the reason he lost was his non-response and poor leadership for the pandemic. I believe that without the pandemic, Trump might have been reelected and our democracy would fall. I do think there are a few issues that the pandemic caused us to do things more efficiently and remotely but I do not think the pandemic was positive for the country.
I’d love to know how many votes he lost and in which states from his performance in the first debate. Impossible to know, of course, but that must have been the deciding factor for some fraction of a %, anyway.
I am sure he lost some for various reasons, including those that stem from before the pandemic. But a big factor was that the Democratic base was more mobilized than before. The expansion of mail-in voting because of the pandemic was also helpful, I think, since it was more convenient. I don’t know how much his non-handling of the pandemic was a turn-off for his base.
That’s my take as well: few people changed their minds (either from 2016 to 2020, or before & after that 2020 debate), but turnout changed.
This seems likely to explain the “increase” in the proportions of Black and Latino voters for Trump in 2020: that those were not people who voted for Hilary in 2016 and then switched to Trump in 2020; they were people who didn’t vote at all in 2016, but in the expanded turnout of 2020 those small numbers of people sample out to vote for Trump.
I have to chuckle at ” — LGBTQ+ —”. The dashes at the beginning and end almost look like someone’s extending the letter/symbol string as a bit of satire. It isn’t so, of course, but I enjoy it anyway.
Anyway, IMO, he’s wrong about Bill Clinton. I think Clinton was not good for the Democratic Party in the long run.
I hope he is right about the “vast implications for tackling plague viruses in the future.” This prepandemic review suggested a new golden age of vaccine design against viruses and against cancers. The new coronavirus vaccines seem to show that optimism was justified.
Pardi, N., Hogan, M., Porter, F. et al. mRNA vaccines — a new era in vaccinology. Nat Rev Drug Discov 17, 261–279 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrd.2017.243
Similar to the way battlefield experience during hot wars leads to advances in medical protocols for treating traumatic injuries.
But war is hell, as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman said (and so are pandemics).
Which in turn will encourage the development of new machines and procedures for maiming humans. People being people.
Sullivan seems to have forgotten that the Republican Party, even if Trump loses influence, will probably be more rightist than ever. This means that the damage Trump did to the country in areas such as climate change, foreign affairs, and the erosion of democracy will not heal. White grievance will not go away either. So, no, it will be no time to party even with the pandemic gone.
Axios’ Jonathan Swan posted a report about half an hour ago saying that Trump is considering declaring martial law.
No time to party, indeed.
L
Sounds like the Donald is taking advice from disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn again.
What could possibly go wrong with a plan like that?
(And doesn’t Trump, who has all the best words, spell that “marshal law”?)
Swan reports that Flynn is back inside the White House, advising Trump face to face.
He also said that Sidney Powell is there as well.
Scary.
L
But who is going to be infectee and who is going to be infecter?
“White grievance will not go away either.”
Will it ever? When has that even been an inkling of possibility in this country? I’m 51 and pretty sure I’ll be dead before white grievance dies. Especially since there is always going to be burning kindling to stoke the old divisions of these “united” states. So I guess I’m not worried about white grievance not going away since it never has and probably never will. Vast regions and populations of this country are stuck in a perennial state of teenage angst. Looking at you religion.
Recent events like the Troubles in Ulster, the continuing outbreak of total peace between the Muslim and Hindu populations in India (and to a lesser degree in Pakistan and Bangladesh) and the ongoing tension between mainland China and Taiwan, would suggest that the healing time for such population-level disputes is in the range of several generations. The state of peace between enslaved and slave-holders in America might suggest the appropriate timescale is more like 5 or 7 generations.
It’s not all religion. Some of it is religion playing to the strengths of human nature as selected for by thousands of generations of culling.
I’m an adventurous eater, but I’ll be taking a hard pass on wet markets.
As for Sullivan’s Boy Pete part, the Democratic Party is a big tent — a big, noisy, bumptious tent with room enough for centrists and lefties alike.
The centrists and leftists in the Democratic Party commune together under “the big tent” out of necessity, not affection. They stay uneasily united out of a common realization that independently they would stand no chance of successfully opposing the reactionary Republican Party and Trumpism. They would gladly kill each other if they thought it advantageous. Of course, the right wing does its best to keep the schism between centrists and leftists as wide as possible.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party stands for no principle at all save fealty to Dear Leader. I still think Trump may tear the GOP apart for good — the deadenders to one side, those who wish to live on to fight another day to the other.
The closing scenes of Act V never work out well for the mad king and those around him.
As far as I am concerned, “Progressivism” summed itself up with Linda Sarsour & Co. , the Haverford student strikers’ demand for “a framework to deal with problematic professors”, the charade of Seattle’s
short-lived, disastrous CHAZistan. and the transparent idiocy of the cries to “defund the police”. The sooner “Progressivism” returns to Area 51 where it belongs, the better. So yes, a smart, attractive, pragmatic Democratic pol in the FDR/Obama vein is just what we need. Others in this vein beside Pete Buttigieg include Montana’s Steve Bullock, New Jersey’s Corey Booker, Pennsylvlania’s Conor Lamb, etc. .
I cannot read his article but from your comments, not sure I would get much of it. Declaring that 2021 will be good times is completely premature at a minimum. I think this country is in dire times and may be for a long time to come. The country is close to bankrupt with everything to do ahead of it. The climate sure as heck is not getting any better and I really do not see the leaders out there to make it good. The only thing that should be clear to the world at large is, the United States is not what is use to be or even what it pretends. The country has been going south economically since the 1980s with inequality as large as at any time in the past. We are no closer to solving the major problem now than ever. Getting rid of this Trump disease is nothing to go all happy about when we really have no idea how he got here in the first place. The next one may be just around the corner.
Lighten up Randall! Sullivan and others expressing relief for the improved situation, and gratitude for having come through a terrible year, does not prevent Sullivan or anyone else from also working to solve the problems you listed. I agree about the need to address all those problems. But staying in a funk doesn’t solve those problems any more than experiencing relief and happiness prevents doing so.
To think because they have a vaccine is cause to think all of our problems will go away is foolish. We have not yet seen if they can even get this vaccine into the arms of enough people to be rid of it. We currently have close to 3000 dying everyday and Sullivan is ready for the good times. The pandemic is just a diversion from all of our other problems but those do not go away either. As Lou says, many businesses are gone. The aircraft and airlines business is in the dumps. The cold war was over 30 years ago and we spend more money on the military today than we ever did. Who won and who lost?
Who said all of our problems will go away?
Well, ok, but sitting shiva on those deaths and losses will do nothing to make the situation better.
By the same token, Sullivan’s exuberance does nothing to make those things worse either.
But if you’re convinced there’s nothing to be optimistic about then I sure won’t be able to change your mind.
They’ve been dead meat walking since the implications of climate change became obvious back in the late 1970s. That they’re finally starting to fall is just long overdue. The “humane killer” machine was pressed to the industries’ skulls when video confrencing started to become workable a dozen or so years ago.
I shared Sullivan’s commentary with my son and his reaction was similar to yours. But I think you are both “wrong, though right”. There will be problems that continue to haunt us, climate most of all. But keeping in mind that our psyches will no longer be dominated by the Orange Menace and that Covid will be nowhere as bad in the later half of 2021, the psychological reaction is going to be enormous. There will almost certainly be an economic boom that results. Christmas 2021 will be nothing like Christmas 2020.
I feel like you do, Randall. What boom? So many restaurants and hotels are permanently shuttered. Is this healthy for the economy? Only in the sense that bombing a city is good for glassmakers and bricksellers. So many have suffered and lost their entire life’s work.
And the pandemic is NOT over. Today a very interesting mutant strain is spreading rapidly in the UK. It has at least 17 different mutations compared to the common form. Though no one knows for sure, that many mutations may allow it to escape our vaccines. Natural selection is powerful and the virus may still win.
I was thinking about that new strain too. It’s reported that it’s 70% more transmissible than the original strain.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/britain-uk-coronavirus-mutation-strain-spread-covid-19-1.5848800
The flapper parties will have to wait till we’re really and truly past this.
I was listening to one of the Beeb’s science news radio programmes a couple of days ago where the interviewed virologist said that some of these mutations (single nucleotide polymorphisms, I assume, but I didn’t hear that phrase used where I was expecting it, so there may be something more subtle going on) had been seen in strains from other parts of the world, but they weren’t particularly associated with the ACE-targetting “spike protein” which the virus uses to enter human (mammalian? vertebrate?) cells so he wasn’t terribly concerned over a threat of the virus evolving “around” this family of vaccines via this suite of mutations.
Sorry, I didn’t make notes at the time, and have deleted the programme since, so I can’t put a name to the virologist.
@Lou Yes totally agree: those of us who are not sick or not out of work are also not out of the woods yet, and millions of people have lost their lives or their livelihoods. It has all been horrible.
And yes the “glassmakers and brick sellers” argument is totally appropriate.
But we can all mourn and honour those losses while also feeling relief and joy that things are going to get better in 2021 than they were in 2020. Sullivan was just emphasizing the latter in his article, and that seems ok eh?
I feel like I have to model some optimism for my teenagers, while also encouraging them to acknowledge how awful this has all been for so many people.
Mike, I do have a tremendous sense of relief now that vaccines for the current strain are available. But it is way too early to party. Maybe by late 2021, if the virus hasn’t mutated enough to make the vaccines ineffective.
Ha yes that seems about right: relief, but maybe not a party.
Please read the Roolz about dominating threads.
Apologies!
I predict all this more in 2022. 2021 will be when we need to concentrate on getting the covid numbers down and getting vaccinated. Things won’t go back to a celebratory normal until after that and it’s going to take most of 2021 to get there. I will be working from home for all of 2021 but I intend to continue after because I’ve always worked better this way and it cuts down on commuting and parking.
I’m okay if all the good news comes in 2022. A US election year.
Sullivan’s column reminds me of the old Jewish joke:
A poor man tells the rabbi: “Rabbi, I live in a tiny hut with my wife and six children, and the place is so crowded and noisy and messy, I’m losing my mind! What shall I do?”
The rabbi replies, “Buy a goat and keep it in your house.”
“But rabbi! There’s no room for a goat!”
“Go ahead. Trust me.”
The poor man buys a goat, and a week later the rabbi tells him to buy some rabbits to keep in his house.
A week later, the rabbi tells him to buy some chickens, and then some ducks.
At last, when the poor man is almost completely insane, the rabbi tells him to sell all the animals.
After doing so, the poor man visits the rabbi, beaming with happiness: “Rabbi! My house is so clean and quiet and peaceful! What a pleasure!”
Right now, we are all stuck with the goat and rabbits and chickens and ducks, and once the pandemic is over, we’ll be like the poor man who’s sold all his animals, metaphorically speaking.
That being said, I don’t find Sullivan’s comparison to the 1920s all that reassuring. Yes, the Roaring 2020s could be fun, but I’m not looking forward to the Great Depression of 2029, followed by World War III, now with more nuclear weapons…
Have I gotten more conservative as I’ve gotten older? — I ask myself the same question. But, I think it’s more that as years pass and elections go by, we begin to look less at ideology and more at pragmatic politics. We settle into a middle road not because we wouldn’t like faster change, but because we know the proven path is a slow one.
True, we’ve concocted a pair of RNA vaccines and started trials on them in something like 6mos; concocted to rolled-out in about 10mos, but the background work of turning RNA into something injectable – and that would work – required (as I understand itgathered) primarily one person doggedly pursuing that goal. If anyone knows a good summary of that, pls post a link.
True, we have protein-based vaccines at the threshold in nearly the same time, but I think all of those require adjuvants, and some depend on adenovirus vectors.
Whatever the various cases to be made for this or that individual vaccine, there will be many new insights in vacccinology coming out of this.
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Otherwise, to Sullivan’s aftermath, I’ve wondered if one result may be breaking the cycle or this or that bit of tradition / behavior. Will some find that they fared quite well after not traveling great distances for Thanksgiving / Krimmis? That their dick didn’t fall off for not being able to sit in front of a screen watching people throw a ball around in the usual way? And so forth.
I like that Mayor Pete is at Transportation. First, it makes sense that he was not given a foreign policy position. Second, his business experience will be good when he plays a big part in infrastructure week, or whatever they end up calling it. The GOP is likely to block practically everything the Biden administration tries to do but infrastructure may be something that they can still get behind. It’s going to be an important effort. Last but not least, I like that the Far Left hate him. They need to get a big dose of practicality. Bernie and AOC are good at drumming up enthusiasm but not at getting things done. AOC is smart and energetic but she needs some experience. Being forced to deal with Dems in power that are mostly centrists might do her a world of good if she decides to be practical about it rather than confrontational.
An interview with Rick Warren of the Lincoln Project on Deutsche Wella is worth watching. He asks and predicts what will become of the Trumpists as they combat the Biden administration. The McConnell Senate will do everything they can to “train wreck” Joe Biden’s presidency. Will the Trumpists form a new rightist/nationalist/authoritarian political party leaving the Republican Party hollowed out?
Maybe not quite the time to party. Georgia is key.
For me, the legacy of the pandemic, like the legacy of DT’s term in office, is one of decreased faith in humanity. Modern people have to be skeptical and a bit cynical, and I feel a bit more of each than I did before. There is the good side – a great achievement for medical science, but why so many fight so hard to thwart the greater good of society is a question I can’t answer.
“Will the Trumpists form a new rightist/nationalist/authoritarian political party leaving the Republican Party hollowed out?” Somebody at MSNBC pointed out that the mere threat of Trump doing this has been what caused so many Republicans to lick Trump’s derriere for the last four years, Some of them may like the taste, to be sure, but the implicit threat may explain the behavior of a few seemingly upstanding GOP Senators, like Lamar Alexander, Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, etc..
It does not feel like time to celebrate to me. I felt relief after the election ended. I felt relief when the electoral votes were cast. I will feel relief when Congress counts the votes. I will feel relief when following the inauguration. Even greater relief will come when the corona virus vaccine results in the end of the pandemic.
Perhaps President Biden could find a few offices for Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and Michael Flynn. He could call it the Office of Presidential Delusions.
What worries me is that the U.S. electorate remains so split with one extreme calling for the President to use the military to counter the election. It also seems that many of that same portion of the electorate may refuse vaccination. If that portion is large enough then the spread of COVID-19 will continue for some time. 2021 does not look bright to me. When the vaccine becomes available to me I will take it. My family will take it. As long as that immunity persists my life will be better. The lives of friends and family will be better. But I am not sure how far into society that will stretch.
My theory is that most of these vaccine-skeptics will fade away once others in their community get the shot. There are going to be enough in each community that decide they need immunity. Their trust of their neighbors is much greater than their trust in institutions like big pharma, healthcare providers, and government.
Also… when employers require vaccinations as necessary for continued employment, and eventually a children’s version is required to attend school…
Yep. It’s not wholly irrational to have distrust in a new vaccine. Big pharma could certainly make mistakes or fudge the data, though it would probably be hard with the scrutiny these vaccines are receiving from the rest of the world. Of course, those that believe Bill Gates or Jews are using it to embed identification chips in us are just nuts but I assume they’re a tiny minority. Most just don’t want to get it until they know that others they know have gotten it first. They just don’t trust the statistics reported by big pharma and approved by the FDA. It might be worse if Trump had campaigned against the vaccine but he’s busy claiming it as his victory so that’s not going to be a problem.
Then there’s the big gun, for America if not the civilised world, – if you don’t take the vaccine when first offered it, you’ve voided your health insurance and have to find a new insurer.
From what I’ve read of your youth I think young, hairy hippy pre-PCC Coyne if younger today would definitely be on the Bernie Bus! There is conflating data on whether we become more conservative as we age but perhaps we don’t change but the ground changes UNDER us. Wokeland is a new country, sort of sprung on middle of the road leftists like yourself (and me, actually). It works on the other side also: today’s GoP is bonkers right when compared to the Republicans of, say, the Reagan era.
D.A., NYC
Mayor Pete as Transportation Secretary means that there will be less public transportation, instead of more. He doesn’t get public services.