Virus Beats Bernie
I can't prove any of this--I'll just reflect how it feels. I think there is an authoritarian right-ward shift afoot in the US. And I am not talking about the obvious (the appearance of the explicit nazis in government, including the head of it, nor the mind-boggling right-ward shift of the "mainstream" of the DNC). Not even the coming-to-prominence of the extreme-right among Big Capital behind both political "parties."
I am talking about the sudden shift by the voter to the absolutely farthest right of their party. The GOP was already there with Creep1. With the Democrats, my sense is that the vast majority of people with access to the voting booth, i.e., the varied assortment of people misidentifying theselves as "the middle class" (gowd, how Max Weber would scoff at this trite abuse of his critique of Marx!) are actually scared by the obvious threat of a pandemic. Most of them probably feel, even if they can't quite put it into words, let alone argue or reflect upon it, that this virus will seriously threaten their lives.
And of course they are right about that.
There are two basic fears. First, the fact that they are personally scared, for themselves, their immediate family, friends, etc. The second is that they also feel they do not have adequate overall social protection anywhere in sight. There is no safety net to fall back upon. In other words, they actually see what Bernie Sanders has argued for decades now. And I am not talking about people who have no, or only substandard health insurance. I am talking about people with what is considered, in the US, good health insurance.
They, too, feel two absolutely crucial fears: they are fully insured only as long as they have their relatively safe jobs. A major viral infection can, in many situations, easily destroy such jobs. Second, they understand that the health care system, organized as it is today, is completely under-equipped / maladjusted to the requirements of handling a pandemic. In a situation in which ten, twenty, thirty percent of the population is going to be patently sick with a virus that has a 1 to 3 percent mortality rate, people coughing, gasping for air from pneumonia, what you need is NOT reasonably comfortable little offices of isolated, highly specialized physicians whose class position is fully contingent upon their ability to charge the health insurance companies the unreasonable, ridiculous fees that they do. When your child is coughing blood from pneumonia, what you need is not yet another criminally overpaid CEO browbeating the public on prime time about the public's moral obligation to keep financing private pharmaceutical research done in secret in their labs.
What you need is effective measures to contain the disease. That requires a level of social organization that US society has not even heard of. A society that is self-disciplined enough not to loot / hoard supplies or engage in violence in public. A government that understands its rationing obligation and the requirement that health care must be dispensed with irrespective of class, 'race', ethnic origin, gender, citizenship, etc. We haven't even started talking about this yet. The media is woefully, catastrophically unprepared to handle social requirements, let alone the complexities inherent in a challenge such as "do not hoard", "wash your hands", etc.
My sense is that the voter is shifting to the right not because s/he does not understand that the US might become a better place with a Sanders presidency. S/He is running to the right because s/he sees, feels the inadequacies of the social organization of health and profoundly mistrusts the political system. The voter is deeply convinced that the US society and its governments, on all "levels", cannot possibly handle the challenge of a real epidemic. The "middle class" voter understands that s/he will be left completely alone by the government, once the health crisis hits. . .
. . . And, hence, s/he turns to the "Democratic" party's candidate who
- has a link to the feel-good-iest of all previous presidents,
- is supported by Big Capital, ergo the one that
- can be expected to deliver the reasonably good life to "the middle class"
on a completely unfair, non-egalitarian, privileged basis. This is basically the logic of the looter. The "middle class" voter, in his/her profound mis-recognition of her/his class interests (essentially: "identifying upward") is betting on the old boy network to deliver--well, obviously not to "the entire nation", but at least to the voter and his/her family. In other words, the vote against Sanders in the primaries, as it happened in the aftermath of the onset of the COVID2019 epidemic, is an expression of lack-of-trust in the system, and a refusal to entertain the possibility that a candidate urging society to work together for collective public good could actually succeed.
It is an anti-social symptom. And I think that is the saddest social fact of the 21st century thus far.
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