newrepublic | For a variety of completely unacceptable reasons, federal and state governments have proven unwilling
to provide adequate relief that would have allowed more Americans to
avoid the more severe impacts of the pandemic. Lawmakers could have paid
workers to stay home, provided ongoing support to industries that
cannot safely open, or offered financial assistance to parents for child
care instead of rushing them back to school.
These sensible options weren’t on the table. After the first round of
paltry relief expired at the end of July, nothing has happened. Like
someone breaking their diet with one extra cookie and deciding they
might as well go HAM on a whole sleeve of Milanos, the nation’s leaders
have blown past their deadline and have thrown up their hands.
They’ve
tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas, man.
As
many have observed, the United States is broken, barely a country
anymore. Tens of millions of people are in truly desperate need of help.
Some need protection from eviction. Others require a rescue from the
dangerous conditions of nursing homes and prisons. Many more just need
the unemployment money that the state owes them. A portion of this
country larger than many European nations has been abandoned to
life-ruining chaos. Less than two weeks since the extra unemployment
benefit expired, lawmakers have quit the scene and the media has largely moved on to covering Kamala Harris.
The
question of why there are not widespread, large-scale protests or riots
specifically about this is worth considering. Perhaps it should be
surprising that no one has burned down an unemployment office. The
elusive detail is that we’re talking about people who have long been
left to wither; many were left abandoned during the last financial
crisis and its aftermath. Millions of ordinary Americans have lived
their lives as the frogs boiling in the water of austerity and
neoliberal neglect. Instead of channeling their rage into a broken
political system that has been unresponsive to their needs, they post
about committing suicide on Reddit.
There
is obviously a major problem in our political system, where the ongoing
disaster unfolding does not necessarily translate into an electoral
threat for the Republicans. As my colleague Osita Nwanevu noted
recently, the Republican Party is insulated from its own mistakes by
the absurdity of the Senate as an institution and their general success
in structuring the political system around their continued victory. Like
the rich boss’s nephew who gets an internship and spends it fucking
around on the internet and harassing his coworkers, the party knows what
it can get away with and by how much. Our democracy has been warped
such that one of the parties in charge in Washington can flamboyantly
embrace the mass death of impoverished Americans, knowing that the
consequences will be too minor to be of any real concern.
