Armageddon is Coming with a Whimper, Not a Bang

Hemingway famously characterized bankruptcy as a condition that comes on "gradually, then suddenly." With a pandemic sweeping the world, more than 100,000 American citizens dead, and protests against the murder of George Floyd turning violent across the nation, it may well feel that we are in the acute phase of breakdown. But when all is said and done, it is all too likely that the relatively "sudden" crises facing us now will prove to have been distractions from the dangers that continue to build gradually. I fear that, in the immortal words of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "we ain't seen nothing yet."

The problem lies in the emerging "whack-a-mole" pattern of the struggle to "flatten the curve" of charted transmission of Covid-19 here in the U.S. Lockdown measures have ameliorated the surge of infections that was overwhelming the health care system in places like New York and New Jersey. But because insufficient efforts were made to map the spread of the virus through testing and contact tracing, or to time the implementation of social distancing protocols correspondingly, new hot spots of infection have begun to form in states such as Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, and Minnesota.

Though Congress has passed extraordinary legislation to deal with the acute economic impacts of the virus, thus far the federal government has not acknowledged that the very nature of a pandemic requires a national strategy, implemented simultaneously from coast to coast (and elsewhere), to hold out any hope of redress. Unless and until we implement such a comprehensive national strategy we will see rolling spikes in infection. The virus will move around the map, circling back to previous hot spots where the curve had been successfully "flattened," as social distancing protocols are indiscriminately tightened and eased from location to location.

Why the White House has refused to lead a national strategy is a question for the ages. The consequences, however, are immediate and clear. In a country of 330 million people who enjoy unlimited freedom and (relatively) ample means of travel and commerce, if only a small percentage of them are failing (or refusing) to take precautions while a virus with an estimated "R value" of 2.0-2.5 (meaning that, absent restrictions, an infected person will infect on average of between 2 and 3 other people) is active, the pandemic will continue to move through American society like a cycling prairie fire.

The solution is not simple or easy, but it is clear. A sustained national campaign is needed. On the one hand, vastly more resources and energy must be dedicated to measuring the scope and tracking the path of the pandemic. Measures to reduce the "R value" of the virus are leveraged by a knowledge of where infections are concentrated, when.

Beyond this, a persistent and forceful communication effort must be made to galvanize the public. Transmission rates for the virus in indoor spaces, for example, can be greatly reduced by the wearing of masks, but because wearing a mask protects others vastly more than it does the wearer, the measure will only be socially effective if it is embraced universally. In a country where people cherish independence and harbor mutual suspicion, convincing a critical mass of individuals to wear masks will require the ubiquitous and unrelenting broadcast of visible, authoritative, and trustworthy messaging. Behavior will only change to an effective degree through disciplined and sustained effort on the part of national leadership.

Unfortunately, no such leadership is forthcoming. The only institution in the nation with the profile and authority necessary to lead the kind of campaign that is needed is the White House, and the President has made it clear that he will not shoulder this responsibility. Indeed, it is evident that Donald Trump is utterly misguided about the current state of affairs. He believes that we face a choice between continued attention to the public health crisis or a return to economic productivity.

This is of course ridiculous. As long as we continue to experience rolling spikes in Covid-19 infection in different localities around the country, the economy will remain paralyzed. A modern industrial economy cannot function without a responsive health care system, and the health care system cannot meet the baseline needs of the economy if it is overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients. Beyond that reality, even in places that are momentarily seeing reductions in infection, economic productivity will be suppressed by fear. Unless and until we inspire people with the confidence that they may re-enter the workplace and the marketplace at very low (and discernible) risk, growth will stall and recede. Creating confidence will require that people be educated in the precautions that will mitigate risk, and be reassured that everyone else has assented to the same, which in turn will require sustained and energetic leadership from elected officials (especially the White House).

There is the rub. We need our President to take certain proactive steps to restore the economy, and he has flatly refused. Much ink has been spilled expressing understandable fear about what Donald Trump might do moving forward, but the distressing fact is that he can potentially do as much harm as any figure in our history simply by doing nothing.

The economic crisis set in motion by the pandemic is enormous in scale. Unemployment stands at 14.7%, GDP is shrinking at an accelerating rate. Congress has moved to use fiscal policy to counter the damage of these declines, but all such measures are grounded in the presumption that the crisis will be of acute duration. We are thus faced with the very stark question: how long can the system hold out? How long before curtailed revenue streams and mounting debts induce panic? How long before confidence in the bond and stock markets collapses?

Leadership could stave off such inflection points, but here in the United States, the earliest we can hope for the necessary leadership is January of 2021. Do we have until then? I would not bet my life on it, much less those of my community, friends, and family. What, then, is the answer? Gandhi's adage perhaps holds out the greatest hope: "[We] must be the change [we] want to see in the world." Fighting our way out of this crisis is going to take citizenship of unprecedented intensity and on an unprecedented scale. We must put pressure on state and local governments to coordinate with one-another in the national campaign that should have been coordinated from above. Beyond this, we must encourage and enlist one-another in the ongoing struggle against the pandemic. If we can support one-another as neighbors and compatriots and lead one another through example and compassionate concern, we can perhaps restore enough of our economy to slow the gradual slide into panic, and avoid a sudden Armageddon. 

An Open Letter to Senators Cory Booker and Robert Menendez (NJ)

Dear Senators Booker and Menendez,

       As your constituent I write to plead for urgent action on your part in response to the Covid-19 pandemic that is ravaging our public health and economy. This is the greatest crisis to impact the nation in my lifetime, and I fear that it will irredeemably damage the prospects for my daughter and future generations of Americans if correct steps are not taken. We need the federal government now like we have never needed it since World War II, and it has yet to rise sufficiently to meet that need.
       The problem is not a lack of policy expertise or competent planning on the part of federal officials. Doctors at the CDC and the NIAID have set effective guidelines and provided intelligent benchmarks for the containment and redress of the threat to public health. Our distress arises not from a deficiency in policy strategy, but from faulty political execution.
        As our medical experts have told us, there is as yet no magic bullet or miracle pill that can dispel the pandemic, to combat it we must enlist the cooperation of tens of millions of Americans. Everyone must be mobilized in the collective effort to push forward testing, contact tracing, the maintenance of social distancing, the universal adoption of preventative measures like the use of masks and gloves, and vigilance in the maintenance of hygiene and sanitary conditions.  Without such a mass campaign, the catastrophic danger to public health will persist, and therefore the deepening economic disaster will continue and intensify.
         The crucial task in mobilizing and coordinating such a campaign is communication. None of the plans of medical experts will succeed without stable, consistent, dispassionate, and credible leadership on the part of elected officials. Moreover, given the scale and complexity of the coordinated effort that will be needed to fight back the pandemic, the White House is indispensable to any such attempt. No other institution has the broad audience or unquestioned authority of the Oval Office. We need an informative, disciplined, persistent, and unified message to emanate from the Executive, otherwise the collaborative power to defeat the threat will not be achieved, and the pandemic will rage on indefinitely.
          Unfortunately, our President has proven incapable of providing the leadership we need. Where credibility, consistency, and discipline are needed, he has provided nothing but lies, evasions, reversals, disingenuous partisan rhetoric, and disinformation. He is manifestly erratic, untrustworthy, and focused on his own political interests over the common defense and the general welfare he swore to uphold. Though it is not realistic to contemplate his removal from office at this late juncture, for the good of the nation he must be replaced as "commander-in-chief" in the struggle against the Covid-19 pandemic. We are locked in a battle that Donald Trump does not have the character or capacity to fight, and if he persists as leader in this struggle the entire nation will suffer profoundly. and needlessly.
           What then, is the answer? Pressure must be exerted on Donald Trump to step aside and give leadership of campaign against Covid-19 to a robustly powerful "Pandemic Tsar." Such a person would have to be well known, widely respected, have bipartisan credibility, and bring to the task a proven track record of managerial success. The ideal candidate would be Senator Mitt Romney, as he is one of the most widely recognized figures in the country and has a well-deserved reputation for integrity and dedication to public service.
              Massive pressure must be brought to bear on Donald Trump to hand over management of the public health crisis to a new Pandemic Tsar. I plead with you to take up this cause in the Senate, and enlist your colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join in the effort to secure the leadership that we need. The moment calls on all patriotic and conscientious Americans to do whatever they can to rescue the nation from distress. We look to you to be bold and forthright in your service of the public trust.
              I thank you for your attention on this matter, and hope that this message finds you well.

                                    Sincerely,


                                      Andrew Meyer
 

The Great Inversion

Historians are going to be kept very busy in years and decades to come, sorting through and trying to explain the strange circumstances unfolding now during the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the most confounding is the contrast between the impact of the virus in the People's Republic of China and here in the United States. The Chinese government obviously exerts profound control on the gathering and flow of information, thus it may never be possible to fully and accurately quantify the impact of the virus on the PRC with total confidence. But it seems highly likely that, when all is said and done, the per-capita rate of infection and mortality in China will be significantly lower than that in the United States, and that this differential may even extend to the total number of fatalities in absolute terms. In other words, China may actually see fewer people die from the virus despite having 4X the number of people than the US. How is that possible?

As I wrote initially, it will take significant time to sort through evidence and causes. But some factors are on full display to see as the event unfolds. What is most surprising (and inexplicable) is the contrast between the systemic response of the PRC government and that of the USA. The gap between the overperformance of the former and the underperformance of the latter is so yawningly wide as to defy belief, much less explanation.

In the abstract, a neutral observer would expect the fundamental principles of the two political systems to be manifest in the practical response to the virus as events transpired. The salient traits of the PRC system are its authoritarian nature and its radically high degree of centralization. By contrast, the USA is a liberal democracy with a much  more decentralized structure. These facts should have given each system different but predictable strengths and weaknesses, respectively.

The great weakness of an authoritarian state is its tendency to let politics override the needs of policy. Because leaders are not ultimately or directly accountable to the people, their first impulse is very often to cover up problems rather than solve them. We saw this in the initial response of the PRC government to the first appearance of Covid-19. Early whistle blowers like the physician Li Wenliang (who contracted the virus in the course of treating patients and died) were ignored or gagged.

But once the facts on the ground demonstrated that the dangers could not be papered over, the CCP leadership switched very quickly to a "policy first" orientation, and began issuing directives at the advice of its medical experts. I remember distinctly the point at which the PRC went into a very severe "lockdown mode" in January, and friends living in China began to post in social media about being confined to their apartments. I thought at the time that this was a typical "overcompensation" on the part of the CCP leadership. That impression, in retrospect, was of course wrong.

At that point, the hyper-centralized nature of the PRC state, which is usually a weakness, proved ironically to be a strength. There is no ultimate division of jurisdiction or authority between the different levels of the PRC government. The local traffic police in Xiamen are effectively an extension of the government thousands of kilometers away in Beijing, which under ordinary circumstances creates inefficiencies and corruption.

But the pressing need in a pandemic is for coordination. Formulating an effective response requires that everyone be given the same information and undertake the same set of priorities simultaneously. This is a state of affairs to which the PRC system is uniquely well-adapted, and once the CCP had shifted toward a policy based in the prescriptions of epidemiologists, the machinery of the PRC state worked smoothly in its implementation.

Where the hyper-centralized structure of the PRC is usually a weakness, the federalism of the US government is usually a great strength. Allowing for differences in power and jurisdiction between different levels of government makes it more responsive to the particular needs of people in each locality and region, and creates checks against waste and corruption. But in a pandemic, where coordination is at a premium, the balkanization of state functions becomes a liability.

This weakness has been mitigated in past by arrogating robust emergency powers to the federal government, enabling it to step in during such moments of crisis and provide needed coordination and coherence. During wartime and natural disasters, we expect the federal government to take up the reins of leadership. The Covid-19 pandemic is an emergency greater than virtually anything encountered in recent memory, vastly eclipsing a disaster such as Hurricane Katrina or the 9/11 terror attacks in impact. Yet federal leadership to meet the scale of the crisis has not materialized. Where a unified national response to the pandemic is critically necessary, each state has been left to formulate its own policy, creating a fragmentary response that has extended and amplified the destructiveness of the disease.

Even more strange than that, what should be the greatest strength of American governance has been totally undetectable in the current crisis. One would expect a liberal democracy like the United States to adopt a "policy first" orientation toward the pandemic from the very outset, especially when so much empirical data about the scale of the threat was available and when clarion alarms had been sounded by seasoned government experts as early as January. But here we are in May, and the White House has been and is still locked into a "politics first" functional routine. Denials and random disinformation are disseminated in lieu of facts, non-essential distractions like "the war on drugs" are spotlighted in public briefings, and partisan attacks are given pride of place over a focus on public health. Almost 80,000 Americans have died, and the United States is seemingly locked into a kind of "Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius," with no end in sight.

No matter how one slices it, the view on either side of the globe makes for a very strange comparison. The Chinese government has effectively overcome its greatest weakness, and converted what is ordinarily its greatest weakness into an extreme advantage. By contrast, the United States has completely nullified its greatest strength and allowed its greatest weakness to metastasize and intensify out of all proportion, essentially crippling the government's capacity to confront the catastrophic threat to public health. We here in the US have fallen into a trap of our own device. For all our sake, I hope that we find our way out of it before the systemic damage wrought by this crisis becomes permanent and irremediable.

An Open Letter to President Donald Trump on the Current Pandemic

Dear President Trump,

        I write to you out of concern for the medical emergency afflicting our nation. With more than a million citizens infected and almost seventy-thousand dead, this pandemic has quickly evolved into the greatest crisis of my lifetime, surpassing even the urgency and impact of the terror attacks that transpired on September 11, 2001. We are in desperate need of leadership that only the White House can provide, and we need it now.

      My purpose is not to cast blame or to make accusations, but to plead for obvious and indispensable solutions. We are faced with a dual threat: the medical peril of the virus itself and the economic devastation that the pandemic brings in its wake. These dangers can not be dealt with separately. There can be no restoration of the economy without redressing the threat to public health, and public health can only be safeguarded by due attention to the maintenance of our collective economic well-being.

       The problem is thus exquisitely complicated. Social distancing has helped "flatten the curve," but can not go on indefinitely without permanently bankrupting the economy. At the same time, though the harmful medical impacts of the disease are currently within bounds that our health care system can manage, until an effective vaccine or treatment is discovered (which may take years), a careless return to "normal" will send infections soaring again and overwhelm our courageous medical professionals, sending us back into an economic tailspin. We are caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Our only hope is a coordinated national mobilization, comparable to the civil campaign that underpinned our effort in World War II.

        On the one hand, everyone (man, women and child) must be enlisted in the effort to reorganize our social and economic life to minimize the risk of infection and slow (if not halt) the transmission of the disease. Everyone must acquire and wear masks (and, when appropriate, washable or disposable gloves). All transactions must be reconfigured to allow them to transpire with as little contact as possible. Activities must be shifted outdoors, into venues that allow for social distancing, or staggered in time to allow for lower density of participants. Businesses must be constrained to and supported in adopting flexible work hours or operating at reduced capacity.

        On the other hand, all of the powers of our government and economic infrastructure must be mobilized to support the public health effort. Production of testing kits, masks, gloves, protective equipment, and therapeutic supplies (ventilators, oxygen concentrators, etc.) must be ramped up to meet demand. Transport networks must be organized. Overflow capacity for hospitals must be prepared and ready to be deployed as and where needed.

      Confronting such a complex challenge requires the persistent broadcast of a coherent national message.  Everyone must be given the same reliable information about the dangers of the virus, the proven methods that can stave off infection, and the necessary measures for the protection of the general welfare. Such information must be delivered credibly and dispassionately, without any hint of evasion or partisan political motive. Under ideal circumstances, given how fragmented we are as a society and how distracted people are by fear and disinformation, it will take weeks of focused and relentless communication to insure that the message penetrates as broadly and sinks in as deeply as will be necessary to meet the task. If people have any suspicion that they are being lied to or manipulated in any way they will simply not listen, and the necessary effort to mobilize the nation for recovery will fail.

        This leaves us with a conundrum. Though the White House is the only institution with the profile and audience expansive enough to get the message out, you, Mr. President, are not a credible messenger. You have traded in too many lies, too much disinformation, and too much disingenuous partisan rhetoric to ever enjoy the confidence and trust of a critical mass of our citizenry. Even if you were to see the error of your ways now, we do not have the time to wait out whatever learning curve would be necessary to bring your style into line with our needs as a country. Again, I do not write this to be gratuitously insulting or hurtful, but because these are the plain facts of a critically urgent dilemma.

         What then is the solution? You could appoint a new, vastly powerful "Pandemic Tsar," someone widely known, broadly trusted, and with a proven record of managerial success. Such a person could become the nexus of the vitally necessary communication strategy that is our best and only hope as a nation. The person who would be the obvious choice for such a position is Senator Mitt Romney. He would have the immediate and total attention of the media and the public, and would be a spokesperson credible to almost all Americans, on all parts of the political spectrum. I know that you and he have had profound political differences in the recent past. But for precisely that reason his elevation to the position of Pandemic Tsar would reflect admirably on you both, and inspire unity and hope in the people who need your leadership so desperately.

      I know that the solution I propose is somewhat radical. I hope, however that you will give it some reflection, and that in any case this letter finds you well. Thank you for your attention on this matter.


                      Sincerely,


                       Andrew Meyer