The last few years have demonstrated the abject failure of major U.S. institutions. From the immediate effects of the COVID pandemic to the looming consequences of climate catastrophe elected officials and once-trusted experts offer dejected shrugs rather than real leadership. On the anniversary of January 6, 2021, when supporters of President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the pillars of the national establishment seem shakier than ever. A poll conducted by The Washington Post and the University of University of Maryland found that 34 percent of those surveyed supported, in the right situation, violence against the U.S. government. One might want to ascribe this statistic to our history steeped in revolution and war, but the Post noted that the number is much higher than in similar polls done by major news organizations for more than two decades. In addition to the compounding crises seen in public health, the environment, worsening inequality, racial injustice, ad nauseam, there is also a crisis of confidence, a belief that we are not just worse off than ever before but that those in power are responsible for our ever-increasing concerns and grievances.
Twice in 2021 President Joe Biden gambled on a simple, direct strategy to defeat COVID: encourage everyone to get vaccinated. Once vaccines became readily available to the general population, the White House rushed to declare Independence Day as also a day marking a “summer of freedom” from the virus. Officials said people could gather in large crowds again. Yet the arrival of the delta variant would lead to a surge in new cases, especially among those refusing vaccination. The solution to this was booster shots, easily obtainable because the U.S. had hoarded so many vaccine doses to begin with. But again, a new variant has led to record cases in the country, with even vaccine recipients becoming ill. Throughout these developments, Biden has repeatedly indicated lockdowns, mandates, and other restrictions are off the table. This is unsurprising, given any impediments on individual liberty (even for the greater good) tend to poll poorly, and Biden—despite his age—has stated he has his eyes on running for another term.
Politics is not alone in outweighing public health considerations when it comes to policy. As omicron has spread like wildfire across the U.S., employers have wailed in despair, not over the loss of human life but at the evaporating labor market. The winter holiday season is usually a windfall for airlines, but with so many workers out sick and others quarantining after exposure, companies had to cancel flights. This prompted the CEO of Delta Airlines to publicly ask the CDC to change their quarantine recommendations, which they quickly did. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci did his charm offensive on the Sunday morning talk shows, explaining the priority of the well-being of the markets over the well-being of the public. As someone observed: “’Let them work sick’ is the new ‘Let them eat cake.’” Instead of independence from the virus, the national strategy has become living with the virus. Already a narrative of “hospitalizations, not cases” is permeating popular media as ordinary people navigate business as usual in completely unprecedented and uncertain times. The U.S. has seemingly surrendered to COVID.
Nowhere is the problem more acute than in public schools struggling to remain open before the latest viral wave. Before COVID, teachers were already buying their own supplies, working in dilapidated buildings, and watching their budgets shrink with each passing year. Now the status quo demands children attend classes in-person, citing a litany of negative educational outcomes from virtual teaching. Teachers, however, are rightfully resisting the assumption they should take on more risks to their health than necessary. It should be obvious that if negative educational outcomes were truly a priority for leaders, then public schools would not be as starved for resources, or teachers forced to degrade themselves in public spectacles for a few handfuls of dollars. In Chicago, teachers voted by a large majority to not resume in-person classes when schools were set to reopen; city officials responded by locking them out of their virtual teaching programs, preferring no school at all to school taught on the teachers’ terms.
Chicago teachers do have the advantage of a well-organized, influential union, so they can make such collective decisions. For much of the U.S. working class, especially those in the retail sector, unions do not exist. As at-will employees, they are forced to go into work, including at essential businesses like supermarkets and drugstores, and contend with rarely-enforced mask mandates and unruly, entitled customers. Capitalism subsists on consumption, and with supply chain issues disrupting the near-instant gratification many Americans took for granted, no indulgences can be made for the safety and well-being of the shrinking retail labor pool. Those fortunate enough to afford it are leaving behind the grueling grind of minimum-wage drudgery, which some economists are terming “the Great Resignation.” So far, however, retail giants have not deigned to offer better wages or improved working conditions. They hope, most likely, for a swift return to the neoliberal ideal of a widely indebted proletariat faced with menial labor or death.
Truthfully, the so-called “Great Resignation” is a phenomenon of well-off white blue-collar workers whose meager savings were supplement by the all-too-brief subsidies offered to ordinary people early in the pandemic. Black and brown working class people have largely remained stuck inside the system designed to trap and control them. COVID has had a disproportionate impact on communities of color, and these impacts are exacerbated by policies that do not adequately mitigate or prevent infections. In almost half of U.S. states, Black and Hispanic vaccination rates lag behind White ones by 10 percent or more. When Biden and others blame surges on “the unvaccinated,” this includes people of color who, given the history of U.S. race relations, have cause to mistrust agencies that discriminated against and abused them before. The CDC in charge of the U.S. response to COVID is the same CDC that infected nearly 400 African Americans with syphilis without their knowledge in order to study the results. Rather than address this racial inequity, or any of those worsened by COVID, Biden remains silent, content to let the scales grow ever more unbalanced as the pandemic persists.
Will ordinary people come to tolerate endemic COVID with the same fatality with which they have come to live with school shootings and medical bankruptcies? For a time, perhaps. In political science, however, the failure of institutions to respond to the needs of the public leads to the erosion of those institutions’ legitimacy. In free and open societies, this can lead to the rise of extremists with bombastic claims of fixing all problems and restoring lost glory. Propelled by populist momentum, they come into power perfectly legally, but then—either gradually or all at once—seize power for themselves. Donald Trump, the insurrection of January 6, and the slide of the U.S. toward right-wing authoritarianism—even outright fascism—pose a political crisis stemming from all those the status quo will not (or cannot) resolve on its own. A majority of the U.S. public may well be swayed to passive fascist supporters if they believe, as was said of fascist Italy, “at least the trains run on time.”
With the flagship concession to left-wing Democrats, the Build Back Better Act, dead in the Senate, the impossibility of bourgeois electoralism to provide the transformative action needed to address the many crises this country—and the whole of humanity—should be readily apparent to all. The struggle for hope and survival will not be fought in the halls of power but in the streets. The contradictions and the failures of the present system to do anything but sustain the economy and market growth will eventually cease producing new billionaires and produce a revolution. The question remains: how many more monsters will be born in the interregnum between the old world and the next, and how many more victims will those monsters claim?
Bakunin Matata! 