THE CONTINUING ASSAULT ON SCIENCE

"Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute—one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside? Or almost a cleaning?"


Since the coronavirus pandemic began around January, tt seems that each new day brings another embarrassing moment from our commander in chief.  From downplaying the threat at first, to his cheerleading the use  of hydroxychloroquine (which his own FDA has said could actually be dangerous), to the truly insane quote above in which he clearly seems to be suggesting that injecting disinfectants can quickly kill the virus, it seems that there is nothing the president won't say in his desire for a quick cure for the virus.
And this latest insanity will follow the pattern that we've seen over and over again since he first announced his candidacy: his people will say his was misquoted or misunderstood, he will blow it off as a joke (he claims he was being sarcastic) and his lackeys in the right wing media will defend him and find a way to make his insanity seem reasonable.  And then in two days he'll say some new idiotic thing and it will start all over again.  Meanwhile, around forty percent of  the country will still support him, because they stood by him after his bragging about sexually assaulting women and defending white supremacist protesters, why should this latest craziness be any different?
Should we expect anything different from the  modern Republican party?  I recently blogged about how the presidency of Ronald Reagan still casts a shadow over America in how much it moved the country to the right.  I was mostly talking about his economic policies, but he also completely changed the Republican party when he decided to join forces with the Christian Fundamentalist movement.  While not all Republicans are Fundamentalists, almost all Fundamentalists are Republicans.  Today's  Republican party has basically split into three groups: Christian Fundamentalists who oppose abortion and equal rights for LGBT people,  white blue collar workers who respond to race based arguments against non white people (especially immigrants), and rich people  who want more and more tax cuts and roll backs of environmental regulations for the companies they often run. (There is, of course, some overlap between the three). 
This alliance can seem odd at times: consider that the Fundamentalists refuse to believe in fossils as evidence of the earth being billions of years old.  Meanwhile, oil executives have gotten rich selling a product that is itself a fossil! But at the end of the day, they can all agree on one thing: they hate science. 
 A 2009 pew poll of scientists in America found that only six percent of them were Republicans.   Such an overwhelming number should be a surprise, but is it really?  Republicans are the only major political party in the entire world to deny the existence of climate change, but then, why is it hard to deny climate change when for decades they have fought against teaching evolution in schools?  They loved it decades ago when  Reagan  appointed James Watt to the secretary of the interior, even after Watt once testified to congress that "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns" while discussing national preservation.  Why would Trump be any different to them?
Trump's continuing (and confounding) popularity with the Republican party shows that he has been able to play to all three wings of the party: appointing conservative anti abortion judges here, rolling back environmental regulations there,  while also making  some racially charged statements,  and passing a huge tax cut that favored the rich, achieving the kind of crazy triangulation that means that the party will never turn on him, even when he suggests that people should inject bleach! 
If there's any kind of upside to this, it's that even Trump's people realize that his words could actually be dangerous and are considering cutting back his daily press briefings.  Given that those briefings have become nothing more than another chance for Trump to brag, lie, and bully reporters, that should be for the best.  But the only real hope that Trump can do no more damage is for him to lose and lose decisively in the upcoming election.  America has to put this mistake behind us and start trusting science over a blustering egotist and the extremist party he leads.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM?

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to tear across the globe, it has ripped away the thin veneer of our modern American society and revealed the ugly oligarchy underneath.  As the mortality rate of African Americans hit much higher rates than that of white Americans, as our unemployment systems have been overloaded by the tens of millions of people now out of work, as millions of low paid workers have had their jobs ruled as "essential", necessitating their returning to work in potentially life threatening positions, the virus has shown the notion that America was the best country in the world for anyone other than the rich was nothing but a lie.   Instead we are the country with the highest number of coronavirus infections in the world (although to be fair, we do not have the highest per capita), and we are the country with a leader who wildly flails around for someone else to blame, from former president Barack Obama, to China to the World Health Organization.
Yes, it's easy to point the finger for this terrible outbreak at president Trump, and while I certainly think that's understandable, our country's poor response to what is a national crisis has its roots in  a fundamental shift that took place decades ago.   Back in the late 1970's, when Ronald Reagan first decided to run for president, he was perceived by many as too extreme.  Even George Bush, his eventual vice president, once dismissed his economic policies as "voodoo economics," while his infamous blaming of air pollution on trees was widely mocked.  Reagan, of course, not only won, he shifted both the Republican party and the entire country to the right politically.  Before him, the Republican party didn't care about abortion either way, (the last Republican president before him, Gerald Ford, was a pro choice supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment!)   but he permanently linked the party to the Christian Fundamentalist movement, making it the party opposed to gay rights along with abortion.
But it was Reagan's economic policies that really  have had a huge lasting impact:  when he took office, the top income tax rate on the wealthiest Americans stood at seventy percent.  By the time he left office it was under thirty percent.  Although it has gone up slightly since then,  it still stands today at only around thirty eight percent.  He also cut the tax on capital gains, which  similarly benefited  the rich.  The sad result of this is that we have now had several generations of rich people in this country who see their low tax rates and decadent lifestyles as a normal thing.  And the Republican party has gotten so extreme on this issue that they have been pushing to completely eliminate the estate tax, which is only used against the wealthiest two percent of the population!



This creation of a super rich upper class in America  has a devastating effect: although we are told that hard work, talent and ability are the keys to success in this country, the real advantage truly comes from being born to a family of enormous wealth and privilege.  Our last two Republican presidents have shown that you can spend the first forty years of your life being a lazy drunk (like George W Bush) or declaring bankruptcy multiple times (like Trump) without suffering ill effects because they've always had their daddy's money to bail them out.  Neither of them are an example of hard work and perseverance; quite the opposite, they're more like American royalty.
So what has this got to do with the coronavirus?  Well, when the voodoo failed and those tax cuts for the rich did not bring the increased revenue that was promised, the Reagan administration began gutting as many federal government programs as possible.  The philosophy of that administration was that any federal spending that didn't go to the enormous  defense budget was money wasted.   This had repercussions that were both immediate (a huge surge in the homeless population) and long term (a general degradation in branches of the federal government that weren't part of the military).
And what are the long term results of this defunding of the federal government?  Crumbling infrastructure, a wildly unequal public school system in which the best schools are only in the richest neighborhoods, a partially privatized prison system that has helped lead the country into having the largest prison population on the planet, an equally privatized healthcare system that has left tens of millions of Americans without any healthcare,  and a federal government unable to deal with a national crisis like the coronavirus because of decades of defunding groups like the Center for Disease Control.  Consider that after Ronald Reagan first proposed his ridiculous Star Wars nuclear missile defense program back in the eighties, the government wasted billion upon billions of dollars on it, without it ever coming close to working.  Billions more have been spent on different nuclear missile defense programs since then, without one of them ever proving successful.  Imagine if those billions had been spent on healthcare, infrastructure, or yes, some kind of pandemic response team.  It's depressing to consider how much money has been thrown into the gaping maw of defense spending in the past few decades when just a small amount of spending elsewhere could have made the country much better off.
As I previously stated, part of this mess is certainly because of the incompetence and single minded focus on the stock market that is found in the Trump administration, but another important part is the decades of conservative thought that funds our defense spending and nothing else.  A change may soon be coming: as terrible as this pandemic is, it may cause Americans to start realizing that having a healthcare system built around employer providing healthcare is utterly flawed, especially when tens of millions of Americans lose not only their jobs but also their healthcare after being laid off through no fault of their own.  Not to mention the fact that the younger generation of Americans now understand that socialism, done properly, is not a terrible thing.  The fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were recently able to inject left wing ideas like Medicare for all and a wealth tax into the  political mainstream shows that we may soon see a sea change into a more just society and a rejection of Reagan's "greed is good" legacy.  Personally, I don't think that it can come soon enough.