Plague Journal (47): Sunday in Pandemic-land

When the death count for the Coronavirus reached the "more than Vietnam" threshold, the fact was noted so repeatedly by critics of the Trump administration that you could be excused for thinking they had been waiting for that moment with bated breath, just itching to be the first to say it. 

My first thought was that it was an apples-to-oranges sort of comparison. It doesn't actually tell you much. Does the reaching of this threshold (58, 319) mean that the death-count for the virus is now officially too many? You can make the case that different responses on the part of the government would have resulted in fewer deaths, but you have to rely on a lot of presumptions to make it, and it strikes me as tricky to write an alternative history of the viral-spread, one that is far rosier than our perceived reality, and then criticize the government for not making reality conform to your speculative fantasy.

But in another way, the comparison to Vietnam is quite apt. For many white Americans, Vietnam was the end of the myth of American competence (most people of color had already figured that out). Politics in America since Vietnam has been a rivalry between competing visions about how to reconstruct that myth, to make Americans believe in America again. But what COVID-19 is showing us (or showing some of us) is that the myth deserves to remain in its grave. 

You might think that several decades of failed military adventures would have prompted most Americans to realize, we ain't all we're cracked up to be! Maybe this pandemic will provoke a humble reshaping of how we see ourselves as a nation. Instead of the omnicompetent bastion of freedom, we seem to be Italy, only bigger. Sprawling, constantly at odds with ourselves, swinging from one optimistic cure-all plan to another every 4 or 8 years (each cure-all obtaining about 50.1% support), while shifting the blame (and the cost) always to others. 

These thoughts have been prompted by Umberto Eco's 1995 essay, Ur-Fascism. I haven't nearly finished reading it yet, but it was Charles Sykes at The Bulwark who led me to it. Sykes nicely synopsizes Eco's message. Here's are the common threads of all "ur-fascism."

What follows is a list of those attitudes and “features,” including a “cult of tradition,” the rejection of modernism, a streak of irrationalism, which “depends on the cult of action for action’s sake,” and intolerance of dissent, because “disagreement is treason.”

Ur-Fascism exploits “fear of difference” by making “an appeal against the intruders.” It feeds off of “individual and or social frustration,” so it makes an “appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

To people who “feel deprived of a clear social identity,” Fascism says “that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country,” Thus Hyper-nationalism. He goes on to identity the belief that life is always about fighting, because “life is lived for struggle.” Fascists also advocate a kind of “a popular elitism,” which includes “contempt for the weak.”

In Eco’s description of Ur-Fascism, the populism is always highly selective. Presciently, he wrote back in 1995:  “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

Food for thought on a Sunday morning in pandemic-land.