Freedom's Just Another Word For...

The Dismantling Of American Democracy by Nancy Ohanian

Brown County is the fourth most populous county in Wisconsin. Green Bay is the county seat and biggest city. After the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court forced in-person voting on the state, Brown County was hot hard with new COVID cases. The Public Health Department reported another 95 cases Wednesday, bringing the total above 1,600. Wisconsin was headed for a mild pandemic before the Supreme Court ruling which has steepened the curve considerably. Yesterday the state has 1,540 cases per million people; not good but increasing by the day.

The Republican ideologues on the state Supreme Court, led by GOP ideologue Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, seem determined to cause more unnecessary suffering in the state. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported asked "How do you take an already heated Supreme Court hearing on Gov. Tony Evers' stay-at-home order and make it even more explosive?" He responded to his own question: First, you have one justice liken the order closing schools and businesses to 'tyranny' while also bringing up the Japanese-American internment camps from World War II. Then you get Chief Justice Patience Roggensack to dial it up even more by appearing to downplay a flare-up of coronavirus cases at a major meatpacking facility in Brown County. '(The surge) was due to the meatpacking-- that's where Brown County got the flare,' Roggensack said. 'It wasn't just the regular folks in Brown County.'"

In 2016 Brown County voters gave Bernie more votes then either Hillary or Trump. Bernie won 22,471 votes to Hillary's 16,626 and Trump's 18,706. In November, the county went Republican, Trump winning 52.7% to 41.9%. In 2018 the voters split their tickets. In the gubernatorial race, Republican incumbent Scott Walker, who lost statewide, beat Democrat Tony Evers 53.1% to 44.7%. But the county also went for Democrat Tammy Baldwin in the Senate race, giving her a 51.5% to 48.5% win over Republican Leah Vukmir. And in the congressional race (WI-08), GOP incumbent Mike Gallagher won handily over Beau Liegeois. Brown, the biggest county in the district performed at R+21 level.

State Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa said she was "very offended" by Roggensack's statement.

"It's classist, and it's out of touch," said Zamarripa, a Milwaukee Democrat who is also a Milwaukee alderwoman. "It's embarrassing that we have a Supreme Court justice who would say something like that."

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said he was "shocked" by the remark, and Democratic Sen. Dave Hansen of Green Bay accused Roggensack of "elitism and ignorance." He said the statement showed the justice was "unfit to serve" on the high court.

Labor leaders were equally upset with Roggensack, the head of the conservative majority on the court.

Pam Fendt, president of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, said she found Roggensack's remark "divisive." Her group represents 100 local unions with 25,000 workers.

Fendt said those working at meatpacking plants live in neighborhoods, go to church and coach Little League. They are, she said, as much a part of the community as anyone else.

"It is shocking and deeply offensive that Justice Patience Roggensack would suggest that workers in meatpacking plants aren’t 'regular folks' who deserve protection," said the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 1473, which represents 5,000 employees in meatpacking plants in Wisconsin.

Umair Haque also answered a question-- why the world is horrified by the American Idiot. He wrote that "the American idiot is, by now, a figure that’s the stuff of myth and legend across the world. Nobody else is really quite sure: are Americans really like this? This… well… laughable? Yesterday, they were the kind of people who made their kids do “active shooter drills,” meaning masked men burst into classrooms… and pretend… to kill them. What the? Today, they’re the kind of people who happily congregate in parks and on beaches during a global pandemic… when the lunatic fringe amongst them isn’t protesting for “liberation” in the first place. What on earth? I don’t use the term as an insult-- the American idiot. I mean it in a precise way, as I try to remind people. For the Greeks, 'idiot' carried a precise and special meaning. The person who was only interested in private life, private gain, private advantage. Who had no conception of a public good, common wealth, shared interest. To the Greeks, the pioneers of democracy, the creators of the demos, such a person was the most contemptible of all. Because even the Greeks seemed to understand: you can’t make a functioning democracy out of…idiots."

Now, I’m going to generalize. But I don’t mean that all Americans are idiots. I mean that, for example, more or less everyone who wants to carry a gun to Starbucks, deny their neighbours healthcare, make people beg for medicine online, and not let anyone in society ever retire… all of those people in the world, by and large, are Americans. Nobody else-- nobody in the whole world at this point in history-- thinks such things are remotely desirable. Hence, the American idiot. It means: the world’s largest and most hardened subset of idiots at this point, in the Classical Greek meaning of the word, is largely American.

‘Freedom?’ ... ‘More like freedumb.’

...When the world looks at America, it sees the American idiot, and what it tries-- and usually fails, because it’s lost for words-- to express is something like this: can people really be this selfish? This oblivious? This… thankless? Why do they keep voting for less healthcare, retirement, education, income, savings, happiness, trust, year after year-- even the so-called good ones? What kind of people…why are the literally the only people left in the whole world who do that? And then… complain bitterly about not having… the very things… they deny each other? Who can even make sense of this, the bizarre circular firing squad of social suicide that America has become? But all those, of course, are key traits of the idiot. The answer-- sadly, I think-- is: yes, people can really be this way.

Perhaps because they don’t know any other way. Maybe because it’s all they’ve ever been taught or told. That’s not an apologia for the American idiot, by the way. Or is it? Even I wonder. Still, let me try to explain as best I can-- America’s strange and complicated with freedom, one so perverse that freedom became twisted into something very much like its opposite. It has to do with the way Americans think-- unsubtly, narrowly, single-mindedly-- about what freedom is, and means.

About half a century ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided freedom into two categories-- maybe you already know them. Negative freedom, or freedom from. And positive freedom, or freedom to. The theory then went-- and this became the basis of generations of American thought-- that only the freedom from was worth developing and cultivating.

Berlin was a Russian-born dickhead-- actually a Latvian living in St. Petersburg when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1905. Listen to this YouTube of him and you'll want to throw a rotten tomato in his face. You can't; he died in 1997.

The freedom “to,” on the other hand, was vilified as something that only communists and socialists would want. Why? Because my “freedom to”-- say to be educated, or to be healthy-- requires your input, help, cooperation. But American thinking-- which became obsessed with individualism-- couldn’t admit or permit that, because then maybe you weren’t “taking responsibility for yourself” and all the rest of the jargon.

All this dates back, of course, to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the Uberman. It’s not too hard to see why a society that was born in slavery, and continued into segregation, in which horrors like crippling and maiming people for the color of their skin were perfectly alright-- why a society like that ends up prizing freedom from. America’s obsession with freedom from dates right back to the slave-owner’s desire for freedom from government intervention, law, common decency, any tiny shred of humanity-- to have the power to exploit and abuse human beings on an unthinkable scale. There’s a straight line from Nietzsche’s “master morality” naturally dominating the “slave morality” to Berlin’s “freedom from” any restraint on power-- and that straight line is the one American thinking, still backwards, mired in the logic of domination and exploitation, traced.

...Here’s how extreme America’s belief in freedumb-- freedom as the absence of any kind of obligation or responsibility to anything greater than narrow, immediate, infantile self-satisfaction-- has gotten. Americans aren’t just congregating in parks and beaches during a global pandemic. They’re literally the only people in the world who just voted against better healthcare (from Bernie and Liz) in the middle of a pandemic. Think about the scale of such folly for a moment. What kind of people vote for worse healthcare… during a pandemic? John Cleese would struggle to make a face that expressed the surreal tragicomedy of such a thing. But that’s what Americans did… what they do, over and over and over again.

Why? Because they still believe-- even if they don’t think they believe-- in Berlin’s tired, weary, flawed old distinction. Freedom has only come to mean the removal of any restraint-- negative freedom-- on the exercise of individual desire, the satiation of individual appetite. What freedom still doesn’t mean in America is any of the following, good healthcare, retirement, education, and so forth, because what freedom has never meant is any form of collective action.

Let me put that more sharply. What if the only way that I can have decent healthcare is for you to have decent healthcare-- first? What if the only for me to have a decent retirement is for us all to have one, first? You see, that logic-- which is the math of public goods-- makes a mockery of Berlin’s dichotomy. Then, what we don’t need is simple “freedom from” some kind of restraint-- but the “freedom to”… collectively organize, coordinate, take action.

Freedom from can give us liberty as individuals, it’s true, from kings, and even governments. But only the freedom to can give us liberty as societies, groups, classes, nations. These two kinds of freedoms might exist in tension-- but try to have one without the other, and the result is a spectacular collapse. Freedom to without freedom from gave us the Soviet Union. But freedom from without freedom to gave us America, the failed state, the world’s first poor rich country. Gentle Europe, wise New Zealand, humble and kind Canada-- which balance the two-- have found a kind of miracle in that equilibrium.

...Carrying a gun to Starbucks-- so kids have to do active shooter drills. Being able to “choose” between a million health insurance plans, none of which covers you-- so that you don’t have to pay higher taxes to the hated government. Making everyone stand on their own two feet-- even while every force in society is cutting those very limbs away. Never taking any kind of collective action as a society-- that’s socialism! That’s communism!! Those things are bad!! They’re terrible!

No, my friends. Americans will never understand the miracle of European social democracy, of Canadian investment in each other, of New Zealand making a difficult, joyous peace with a broken past. They won’t. Because they can’t? Because they don’t want to? Because nobody teaches them about the gentle and beautiful power in cooperation, in dignity, in respect for the self and others as more than a thing of appetite? Because they’re trapped by a sordid history-- which they secretly care little about overcoming?

Maybe, in the end, it’s just all the above.

Freedom! Here I am, the American idiot, carrying my gun to Starbucks, before I go to Walmart, where I’ll choose between a million different flavors of the Everyday Low Price, and then I’ll dream about being Great Again, while I drive my big car down the big, empty highway, listening to some bellowing mullah of capital and individualism and cruelty telling me to hate and rage a little more. Along the way, so what if I create my very own exploitation, abuse, misery, decline into poverty, despair, degradation, dehumanization? Hey! Don’t tell me any different!

Isn’t that what freedom really is?

What Is "Herd Immunity"? Not What You Think It Is.

A simple graphic illustration of "flattening the curve," spreading out the incidence of disease in an attempt to not overwhelm a country's medical care facilities. "Protective measures" means social distancing, frequent hand-washing, quarantine of known cases and the like. It does not mean vaccination. (source)

by Thomas Neuburger

The phrase "herd immunity" is being used a lot these days to describe how our species will deal with the ravages of disease caused by COVID-19. Most people, I'm afraid, think of "herd immunity" as a process by which "the herd" — us humans — will catch the disease from others, develop the antibodies needed to ward it off in the future, and go on our way knowing we can't catch it again or transmit it to others. Thus, as this immunity spreads society protects itself.

For people who think this way, the main COVID-19 problem is how to "flatten the curve" — to make the spike in serious cases as low and spread out as possible so that our medical care facilities are not overwhelmed while the rest of us become immune. The graph at the top illustrates this concept.

The assumption in this thinking is that the immunity of the bulk of the population will eventually protect the most vulnerable, the one's most likely to become seriously ill and possibly die. Seen in this way, developing "herd immunity" as quickly as is reasonable is our best shield against COVID-19.

Great Britain, under the leadership of Boris Johnson, is banking on just that. As Umair Haque writes, "According to Robert Peston, one of the UK’s top journalists, Britain’s leaders’ brilliant idea is … 'to allow the virus to pass through the entire population so that we acquire herd immunity.' Other journalists have noted the same thing." Summarizing, he adds that "they think that everyone getting sick ... confers resistance on a nation."

In short, according to this thinking, everyone getting sick is a good thing for the country.

Herd Immunity Depends on Vaccination

Unfortunately, this isn't how "herd immunity" works. It actually works this way:

Herd immunity describes how a population is protected from a disease after vaccination by stopping the germ responsible for the infection being transmitted between people. In this way even people who cannot be vaccinated can be protected. For example, the bacteria meningococcus and pneumococcus can cause blood poisoning (septicaemia) and meningitis. In most people the bacteria live harmlessly in the throat and do not causes disease, but sometimes they get into the bloodstream leading to these severe infections. They can live harmlessly in the throat of one person but if they spread to someone who is particularly susceptible (such as a young baby) they can cause severe disease. By being vaccinated an individual is not only protected from being infected themselves but they then also cannot pass this infection onto other people, where it may cause severe disease. However, for herd immunity to work a large proportion of the population need to be vaccinated. [emphasis added]

The following diagram illustrates how a communicable disease passes through an unvaccinated population versus a vaccinated one:

People are shown as circles. Infectious agents (germs) spread between the people in orange, although they do not get severe disease. When the infection reaches people who are highly susceptible (red) they get the disease and can be very sick or die.

In the lower panel, the people in green have been vaccinated. This now protects those in yellow as well, who had previously got the infection and possibly the disease. Although the figure only shows a few people being vaccinated, in reality many people have to be vaccinated for herd immunity to work.

There's another useful diagram here.

In short, many people getting sick doesn't prevent the rest, including most vulnerable, from also getting sick; only vaccination does that. For some diseases, the percentage of population that needs to be vaccinated is large; for others, the percentage of vaccinations can be smaller:

The more contagious it is then the more people need to be vaccinated for herd immunity to work. For example, measles is very contagious. Before the use of the measles vaccine, every person with measles would infect another 10-15 people and so the disease would spread very quickly. To achieve herd immunity for measles at least 90-95% of the population need to be vaccinated. A disease like polio is less contagious, and 80-85% of the population would need to be vaccinated for herd immunity to work. Although this is lower it is still a very high proportion, especially given that some people cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons. [emphasis added]

For many diseases — tetanus, for example — vaccination protects only the vaccinated individual, since tetanus is harbored in the soil and can be "caught" by anyone. Fortunately, COVID-19 is not this type of infection.

Magical Thinking

The conclusion we should draw from all this is that the "wait it out" strategy — get the disease as late as possible so that, if you get really sick, there will be a hospital bed for you — is not much protection at all.

If you get really sick, health care will obviously help, but there really is no cure for COVID-19 at the moment. Health care will keep you from dying of secondary causes — additional diseases you might come down with if your immune system is compromised, for example — but if COVID-19 wants you, the only prevention is to not get sick with it in the first place.

Placing one's hopes, or a society's hopes, in a misunderstood version of "herd immunity" is an exercise in magical thinking. If you're in charge of a society's response and this version of herd immunity is your answer, it's an exercise in malicious thinking.

Vaccine Availability

The second conclusion applies to society as a whole. Allowing COVID-19 to spread through a population in the absence of a vaccine is a death sentence for many individuals; if a person is likely to die if they get it early, they're just as likely die if they get it late. This puts a premium on the speed at which a vaccine is developed — and made available. (A vaccine is no good if it's not available, for cost reasons, for example.)

Which leads to a corollary: There is no neoliberal solution to this problem. The profit system is exactly the wrong way to deal with the threat posed by COVID-19. The minute testing and vaccination is subject to profit constraints, the solution begins to fail, since people are less likely to be tested and vaccinated. That puts everyone — the whole herd, as it were — at risk.

The best solution to this problem is also the most moral — test everyone for free; vaccinate everyone for free. Do it fast and do it now.

The privatizers will try, of course, to get their profit-seeking hands on both the tests and the vaccine. They may even succeed. But if they do, COVID karma, unlike climate karma, will be instant. Deaths won't just rise in a decade or two, or in their grandchildren's generation; they'll rise in earnest immediately, and the dead will have the names of their killers written on their foreheads for everyone else to see — "Thank you, Biologics.com. I died for you."
 

Trump-- Bringing Societal Collapse?

The Constitution allows the president to declare a state of emergency only when "the life of the nation is threatened by war, invasion, general insurrection, disorder, natural disaster or other public emergency" and if the ordinary laws and government powers are not sufficient to restore peace and order. Yet, CNN reported over the weekend that Trump has been floating trial balloons to see if he could get away with declaring a state of emergency over his insistence on building a wall across the southern border than most Americans oppose.

In the video above, shot Sunday with Jake Tapper, Adam Schiff pointed out that Americans sad excuse for a president, "has painted himself into a corner [on the government shutdown over his demands for a wall] and needs to figure out how he unpainted himself from that corner. We need to reopen the government; we need to put people back to work... We can't allow this continual process-- that was really modernized by the tea party-- that 'if I don't get what I want, if I don't get what I don't have the votes for, if I don't get what the country doesn't want, I'm just going to shut down the government.' If you reward the president with that kind of tactic, then we're going to see every year the president shutting down the government and we just can't afford to do business that way."

London-based philosopher Umair Haique has written that the U.S. is in a state of collapse, which he sees as calamitous and worries that it isn't being taken seriously enough. "When we take a hard look at US collapse," he wrote about a year ago, "we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever 'numbers' we use to represent decline --  shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on-- we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the 'human toll.' but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society." He offers up 5 examples of what he's calling "the social pathologies of collapse --  strange, weird, and gruesome new diseases, not just ones we don’t usually see in healthy societies, but ones that we have never really seen before in any modern society."

America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days. That’s one every other day, more or less. That statistic is alarming enough--  but it is just a number. Perspective asks us for comparison. So let me put that another way. America has had 11 school shootings in the last 23 days, which is more than anywhere else in the world, even Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, the phenomenon of regular school shootings appears to be a unique feature of American collapse--  it just doesn’t happen in any other country--  and that is what I mean by “social pathologies of collapse”: a new, bizarre, terrible disease striking society.

Why are American kids killing each other? Why doesn’t their society care enough to intervene? Well, probably because those kids have given up on life--  and their elders have given up on them. Or maybe you’re right--  and it’s not that simple. Still, what do the kids who aren’t killing each other do? Well, a lot of them are busy killing themselves.

So there is of course also an “opioid epidemic.” We use that phrase too casually, but it much more troubling than it appears on first glance. Here is what is really curious about it. In many countries in the world --  most of Asia and Africa--  one can buy all the opioids one wants from any local pharmacy, without a prescription. You might suppose then that opioid abuse as a mass epidemic would be a global phenomenon. Yet we don’t see opioid epidemics anywhere but America--  especially not ones so vicious and widespread they shrink life expectancy. So the “opioid epidemic”--  mass self-medication with the hardest of hard drugs--  is again a social pathology of collapse: unique to American life. It is not quite captured in the numbers, but only through comparison--  and when we see it in global perspective, we get a sense of just how singularly troubled American life really is.

Why would people abuse opioids en masse unlike anywhere else in the world? They must be living genuinely traumatic and desperate lives, in which there is little healthcare, so they have to self-medicate the terror away. But what is so desperate about them? Well, consider another example: the “nomadic retirees.” They live in their cars. They go from place to place, season after season, chasing whatever low-wage work they can find --  spring, an Amazon warehouse, Christmas, Walmart.



Now, you might say--  “well, poor people have always chased seasonal work!” But that is not really the point: absolute powerlessness and complete indignity is. In no other country I can see do retirees who should have been able to save up enough to live on now living in their cars in order to find work just to go on eating before they die-- not even in desperately poor ones, where at least families live together, share resources, and care for one another. This is another pathology of collapse that is unique to America-- utter powerlessness to live with dignity. Numbers don’t capture it--  but comparisons paint a bleak picture.

How did America’s elderly end up cheated of dignity? After all, even desperately poor countries have “informal social support systems”-- otherwise known as families and communities. But in America, there is the catastrophic collapse of social bonds. Extreme capitalism has blown apart American society so totally that people cannot even care for one another as much as they do in places like Pakistan and Nigeria. Social bonds, relationships themselves, have become unaffordable luxuries, more so than even in poor countries: this is yet another social pathology unique to American collapse.

Yet those once poor countries are making great strides. Costa Ricans now have higher life expectancy than Americans--  because they have public healthcare. American life expectancy is falling, unlike nearly anywhere else in the world, save the UK-- because it doesn’t.

And that is my last pathology: it is one of the soul, not one of the limbs, like the others above. American appear to be quite happy simply watching one another die, in all the ways above. They just don’t appear to be too disturbed, moved, or even affected by the four pathologies above: their kids killing each other, their social bonds collapsing, being powerless to live with dignity,or having to numb the pain of it all away.

If these pathologies happened in any other rich country--  even in most poor ones-- people would be aghast, shocked, and stunned, and certainly moved to make them not happen. But in America, they are, well, not even resigned. They are indifferent, mostly.

So my last pathology is a predatory society. A predatory society doesn’t just mean oligarchs ripping people off financially. In a truer way, it means people nodding and smiling and going about their everyday business as their neighbours, friends, and colleagues die early deaths in shallow graves. The predator in American society isn’t just its super-rich-- but an invisible and insatiable force: the normalization of what in the rest of the world would be seen as shameful, historic, generational moral failures, if not crimes, becoming mere mundane everyday affairs not to be too worried by or troubled about.

Perhaps that sounds strong to you. Is it?

Now that I’ve given you a few examples-- there are many more-- of the social pathologies of collapse, let me share with you the three points that they raise for me.

These social pathologies are something like strange and gruesome new strains of disease infecting the body social. America has always been a pioneer-- only today, it is host not just to problems not just rarely seen in healthy societies-- it is pioneering novel social pathologies have never been seen in the modern world outside present-day America, period. What does that tell us?

American collapse is much more severe than we suppose it is. We are underestimating its magnitude, not overestimating it. American intellectuals, media, and thought doesn’t put any of its problems in global or historical perspective --  but when they are seen that way, America’s problems are revealed to be not just the everyday nuisances of a declining nation, but something more like a body suddenly attacked by unimagined diseases.

Seen accurately. American collapse is a catastrophe of human possibility without modern parallel. And because the mess that America has made of itself, then, is so especially unique, so singular, so perversely special-- the treatment will have to be novel, too. The uniqueness of these social pathologies tell us that American collapse is not like a reversion to any mean, or the downswing of a trend. It is something outside the norm. Something beyond the data. Past the statistics. It is like the meteor that hit the dinosaurs: an outlier beyond outliers, an event at the extreme of the extremes. That is why our narratives, frames, and theories cannot really capture it-- much less explain it. We need a whole new language-- and a new way of seeing-- to even begin to make sense of it.

But that is America’s task, not the world’s. The world’s task is this. Should the world follow the American model--  extreme capitalism, no public investment, cruelty as a way of life, the perversion of everyday virtue-- then these new social pathologies will follow, too. They are new diseases of the body social that have emerged from the diet of junk food-- junk media, junk science, junk culture, junk punditry, junk economics, people treating one another and their society like junk-- that America has fed upon for too long.

Economist Umair Haque Uses Twitter To Dissect Conservatism

Most people who know who author and economist Umair Haque is, probably know him for his coverage of modern capitalism at the Harvard Business Review. But he's also a voracious twitter. This (partial) series of tweets yesterday is one of the best uses of Twitter I've ever seen:

It would be great to see Mike Lux put his book on the nature of American conservatism, The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, into twitter form.