The Gift

“The Rising of the Usurpers and the Sinking of the Liberties of the People” by Thomas Nast, 1889 (Museum of the City of New York, gift of Mrs. Mabel Nast Crawford).

We have been given a great gift. Every day of this pandemic we are living our civic life increasingly unmoored from government regulation.

In other words, we are living the movement conservative dream. The twin Republican policy priorities are privatizing public services while deregulating private industry. We lack faith in our news business since Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, stripping away media consolidation regulations and allowing a sleazy Aussie like Rupert Murdoch to own newspapers, radio and TV stations in the same markets. The assault on unions liberated bosses from the horrors of collective bargaining, so now wages have frozen while profits and shares have rocketed and the gap between wealth and poverty has spread wider than it has been in a century. Now that more people are voting by mail, we are unsure of the promise that our votes count because our US Postal Service has been under attack by Republican legislative majorities since Reagan.

Meanwhile, the whole reason for the strain our ballots are putting on our Postal Service is that our federal government has abdicated its Constitutional responsibility to “provide for the common defense,” punting any coherent federal pandemic response to the states and following it up with presidential tweets urging anti-health protesters to “LIBERATE” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia in particular.