Our sofa was our front and our patience was our weapon. ... This is how we became heroes, back then, during that coronavirus winter of 2020.
- translated from a German Covid ad
This week's featured post is "The Electoral College, the Trump Coup Attempt, the Georgia Run-offs, and Other Post-Election Reflections".
This week everybody was still reacting the election
I combined all my election reflections into the featured post. It's not the well-organized essay I usually intend to write, but is more like a weekly summary devoted to a single topic.
Now that Trump will be leaving office, be sure to plan your virtual visit to the Donald J. Trump Library. Visit the Covid Memorial. Examine the Wall of Criminality (the only wall Mexico paid for).
Somebody put an enormous amount of work into this project, and it shows.
and talking about the exploding virus
Way back in the spring, doctors warned us that there could be another coronavirus wave in the fall. Well, here it is. Three weeks ago we were horrified that daily new-case numbers were reaching the previous records of around 75,000. Friday, we had more than double that number: 177,246. The trend line is still racing upwards, with no signs of a peak.
Hospitalizations are also at record levels. Hospitalizations tend to lag a week or so behind new cases, and they don't depend on the number of tests, which is the usual denialist excuse for why new-case numbers are surging. in general, you get hospitalized because at-home care can't stabilize your fever and/or blood-oxygen levels. It's a serious thing, far from the "sniffles" Trump talks about.
Deaths, which lag about a week behind hospitalizations, are rising more slowly. The current daily average is around 1,200. (That's like four or five major airline crashes every day.) The last two weeks' surge in the new-case numbers wouldn't have shown up in death totals yet. So we're probably on our way to 2,000 deaths per day.
And Thanksgiving is coming. Large numbers of people will travel, spend hours indoors with friends and relatives, and then travel again. If you wanted to spread the virus, you could hardly design something better. By the time we get into the Christmas season, we might be seeing 3 or 4 thousand deaths every day.
Health officials are warning people to be careful this Thanksgiving, and for the most part that just means DON'T. Don't do whatever it is you usually do.
The archetypal Thanksgiving -- smiling faces packed tightly around a table in a warm and cozy dining room, with the family patriarch and matriarch at the center of attention and grandchildren arriving from every corner of the country -- is exactly what you shouldn't do if you want everybody to survive until next Thanksgiving.
The responsible thing is to cancel your plans. My wife and I just told the friends we have spent Christmas with for decades that we can't make the 1,500-mile drive this year. It was hard and depressing, but it was necessary.
and credit/blame for the election outcome
Democratic centrists and progressives are arguing about how to split the credit and/or blame for the election results. This seems to me to be a particularly unproductive way to spend our time.
Here's what I observed myself: Being a Michigan State alum, I spent many hours of the election's final weeks watching Big 10 football on the conference's BTN network. In spite of BTN having national reach, the ads were often aimed at local races in the states whose teams were playing. So I saw a lot of the GOP's closing arguments in states like Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Those ads did indeed target the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and tried to associate moderate Democratic candidates like Iowa's Theresa Greenfield and Michigan's Gary Peters with progressive leaders like AOC and progressive policies like defunding the police and Medicare for All. (I don't remember what they called MfA; probably a more pejorative name.) Clearly, Republicans believed that it was good for them (and not for Greenfield or Peters) if voters associated all Democrats with AOC and the progressive agenda.
So I get where moderates like Conor Lamb are coming from when they say that the outspokenness of progressives made their races harder.
And yet ...
Imagine for a moment that AOC, Bernie Sanders, and the Squad never existed. No one ever said "Defund the Police" or "Ban Fracking" or proposed any trillion-dollar programs. Do I believe that in such a world, Republican attack ads would have nothing to say? They wouldn't dream up some other policies they believed to be unpopular and claim Greenfield and Peters and Lamb supported them? They wouldn't find some other public figure to demonize and hang around moderate Democrats' necks in purple districts? (The ads I saw, in fact, did demonize Nancy Pelosi. I think she's more progressive than many on the left give her credit for, but she's no AOC.)
Lamb et al seem to be assuming that if other Democrats only behaved "better", Republicans would have no way to distort their views. I doubt that.
and the Biden administration
Politico makes its best guesses about a Biden cabinet. It's a distinguished cast, and lacks any of the I-play-an-expert-on-TV types Trump was fond of.
The question is whether Mitch McConnell's Senate (assuming Republicans win at least one of the Georgia run-offs) will let Biden have a cabinet. If I were Biden, I'd be tempted to stretch the Overton window by making one or two nominations Republicans will absolutely hate -- say, Hillary Clinton as attorney general or Al Gore as head of the EPA. McConnell could lead a charge against them and do a victory dance when their nominations didn't reach the floor, but Biden's other nominees would seem tame by comparison and might slide through.
The NYT draws attention to a looming problem: Just as career government officials in the State Department, Justice, the EPA, and several other agencies -- the so-called "Deep State" -- stood against Trump and sometimes frustrated his initiatives, Joe Biden may face resistance from Homeland Security.
To the extent that it's more than just a conspiracy theory, the Deep State consists of career government workers who are more loyal to the mission of their agency (as they understand it) than to their ultimate boss in the White House. So, no matter what orders they get, generals at the Pentagon will drag their feet if they believe those orders endanger national security, public health officials like Dr. Fauci will resist policies that promote disease, NOAA won't lie about the path of a hurricane, and so on.
Well, the Trump Homeland Security Department has accumulated people who believe the southern border is out of control. Many are hostile to asylum-seekers, and for four years their cruelty has been given free rein. That genie is going to be hard to get back into its bottle.
and "religious liberty"
Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito gave a virtual address to a Federalist Society meeting. Most of the media coverage of the speech centered on his statements about the Covid lockdowns, like: "The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty." I think people who lived through rationing, blackouts, and the Japanese internment during World War II might debate that. So might Black people who remember Jim Crow and sundown towns. Or Native Americans who had their children taken away to Indian Residential Schools. But historical myopia and white self-centeredness are not what I want to talk about.
Alito also used Covid restrictions as examples of our problematic emergency laws, and yet somehow managed to ignore the most egregious recent abuse of emergency law: Trump's fake southern-border emergency that allowed him to seize money to build his wall. But that's not what I want to talk about either.
No, Alito spent a big chunk of his speech talking about an entirely phony issue: the threat to "religious liberty" in America. This is something I wrote about in 2013: "'Religious Freedom' means Christian Passive-Agressive Domination".
I expect to come back to this issue sometime soon, but let me just say this: All of the cases he mentions -- Little Sisters of the Poor, Ralph's Pharmacy, Masterpiece Cakeshop -- are examples of Christian passive aggression; there was no threat to actual religious liberty.
Passive aggression is when someone exaggerates a weakness or sensitivity in order to manipulate others and gain power over their choices and actions. Again and again in recent years, conservative Christians have constructed a greatly exaggerated notion of purity, and have used it to insist on an ever-greater distance between themselves and anyone who is doing something they don't like. And the inconvenience this exaggerated purity causes should fall not on the Christian, but on whoever they object to.
Take Masterpiece Cakeshop, for example. There is no tradition in America in which a wedding cake has the slightest religious significance. A baker who refuses to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple is not in any way practicing his Christian religion. He is just acting out his bigotry. Alito complains:
For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom. It's often just an excuse for bigotry.
But in what way is that opinion wrong? Isn't "religious liberty" the primary excuse for bigotry today?
and you also might be interested in ...
Artist Robin French offers this response to the question: "What have you achieved in 2020?"
Michelle Goldberg is less than optimistic about Trump's post-presidency prospects, and outlines the legal troubles he might face.
This week I discovered Blaire Erskine, who has done a series of hilarious wife-of-somebody-famous videos. In this one, she is the wife of Corey Lewandowski, reacting to him getting a Covid infection. A few months ago, she was the daughter of Jerry Falwell Jr., reacting to her parents' sex scandal.
If you repost one, make sure to emphasize that she isn't really who she's claiming to be, because the Lewandowski one is so funny your friends will want to believe it's genuine.
and let's close with a message from the future
An elderly German man recalls how in his younger days, he became one of the heroes of 2020 by staying home and doing nothing.
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