Is the United States up to the challenge?

In Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, economic historian Adam Tooze picks up where Crashed, his wide ranging account of the Great Recession and subsequent financial imbroglios, left off. He acknowledges that this story of the pandemic's impacts is in medias res, possibly premature, and unfinished. But there's a big story here; in this volume Tooze adds to his apparent ongoing enterprise of shifting accounts of our economies out of the realm of abstruse statistics and into understandable narrative history. The book is audacious in its project and very readable.

It would be beyond me to summarize thoroughly,  so I'm not going to try. But I do want to write a little about how Tooze's account confirms and amplifies a disjunction that has seemed to me obvious but not universally incorporated in our understanding of U.S. political and economic life in this century. We live in a country where the places that generate the national wealth often cannot take the reins through the constitutional political system. If we take seriously that big money rules, that's bizarre. Here's a simple numerical description from Shutdown:

Biden won only 509 counties, but they were home to 60 percent of America's population and generated 71 percent of national output. Trump was left with the rest. In the 2547 counties that voted for Trump, blue-collar jobs outnumbered white-collar. In Biden's counties, white-collar jobs clearly predominated. Of the hundred counties in the United States with the highest percentage of college degrees, Biden took 84 to Trump's 16. As recently as 2000, Bush had managed 49. Back in 1984, 80 percent of the most educated counties in America had gone for the Republicans.

That's not what one might expect from a polity in which the logic of so-called "free market"capitalism is trumpeted, usually by both political parties. The pandemic has highlighted this contradiction between generation of wealth and who governs.

The general crisis of neoliberalism in 2020 thus had a specific and traumatic significance for America and for one part of the American political spectrum in particular. The vision of American government crafted by successive Democratic administrations starting with Woodrow Wilson and FDR gave American liberals tools with which to respond to the coronavirus challenge. Even the new generation of American radicals led by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez could find things to like about the New Deal. 

By contrast, the Republican Party and its nationalist and conservative constituencies suffered in 2020 what can best be described as an existential crisis, with profoundly damaging consequences for the American government, for the American Constitution, and for America's relations with the wider world. 

This culminated in the extraordinary period between November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021, in which Trump refused to concede defeat, a large part of the Republican Party actively supported an effort to overturn the election, the social crisis and the pandemic were left unattended to, and finally on January 6, the president and other leading figures in his party encouraged a mob invasion of the Capitol. 

As the constitutional storm clouds gathered in 2020, American business aligned massively and squarely against Trump. Nor, as we shall see, were the major voices of corporate America afraid to spell out the business cost for doing so, including shareholder value, the problems of running companies with politically divided workforces, the economic importance of the rule of law, and, astonishingly, the losses in sales to be expected in a civil war. This alignment of money with democracy in the United States in 2020 should be reassuring, up to a point. ..

Tooze reminds us repeatedly that this alignment might not have survived if the choice had been between Trump or Bernie Sanders (he ignores the also-dangerous Elizabeth Warren). He goes on:

As far as corporate America was concerned, 2020 confirmed its unease with the political culture of the GOP, a tension that first became clear in 2008 with the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate. America's corporate leaders were always of two minds about Trump. They like the 2017 tax cuts and his agenda of deregulation. Some maverick billionaires continued their support, but few senior business leaders wanted Trump's reactionary cultural politics. The owner of a small business might set the tone how he or she pleased. The vast majority of them were solidly pro-Trump. Conversely, it was well nigh unthinkable to run a large corporation in the United States in the summer of 2020 while simultaneously denying the seriousness of the pandemic and the cause of racial justice. What corporate America wanted was not civil war and a Darwinian push for herd immunity, but social peace and an effective containment of the epidemic.

CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Blackrock, and Goldman Sachs threw themselves into pressing a peaceful transition of power when Trump lost the election. The Chamber of Commerce was part of the chorus against Trump's Big Lie. Tooze credits these forces with enabling established institutions to hold against the Trump coup attempt.

The U.S. military refused to have anything to do with the Trumpists... For all the furor over the transition, in the weeks prior to January 6, America's political class had already reached a basic compromise to stave off the actual threat of the moment -- the looming collapse of the country's fragile welfare system. [In December, for each party's own reasons, Congress had approved new stimulus checks.] ... A polity that could agree on practically nothing else did in the end agree on people's need for money. ... It was this that accounted for the jarring juxtaposition on January 6. Even as the mob cavorted in the congressional chambers on live TV, the S&P 500 surged. ... What boosted the markets on January 6 was the knowledge that even if Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues were sheltering for safety under armed guard, one thing was now clear: the fiscal taps were staying open.

I like to think there was more to this moment than Tooze reports, that there were pro-democracy actors outside the capitalist class. Many of the forces in the dangerous transition period were part of a large, democratic (small "d") rabble that had organized itself over the anxious months before the election. I think particularly of Barton Gellman's September 2020 article The Election That Could Break America which raised the alarm among the high-attention reading public, as did Rosa Brook's Transition Integrity Project among journalists and pundits.

But there was also preparatory work among the more activist segments of the Democratic base. I was astonished in the run-up to November 3 to attend mass Zoom meetings of union staff and activists preparing for an attempt by Trump to steal the election. The usually sclerotic AFL-CIO leadership shared a visual description of the steps involved in moving from Election Day to Inauguration -- TV networks "calling" the states based on tallies, state certifications of the results, Electoral College acceptance of state certified results, and confirmation by Congress of the Electoral College outcome on January 6. People don't come born knowing this stuff--it is (was) pretty arcane. Union leaders meant to create a disciplined mass of leaders and members who could understand what was happening and be roused to turn out to defend the process. 

A less centralized and coherent, but no less significant, collection of community-based civil society organizations that had worked to replace Trump with Biden also prepared to oppose a coup attempt. In late January 2021, Alexander Burns reported on their careful preparations:

At each juncture, the activist wing of the Democratic coalition deployed its resources deliberately, channeling its energy toward countering Mr. Trump’s attempts at sabotage. Joseph R. Biden Jr., an avowed centrist who has often boasted of beating his more liberal primary opponents, was a beneficiary of their work. 

... Worried that Mr. Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3. In a year of surging political energy across the left and of record-breaking voter turnout, one side has stifled itself to an extraordinary degree during the precarious postelection period... 

Interviews with nearly two dozen leaders involved in the effort, and a review of several hundred pages of planning documents, polling presentations and legal memorandums, revealed an uncommon — and previously unreported — degree of collaboration among progressive groups that often struggle to work so closely together because of competition over political turf, funding and conflicting ideological priorities.

For once, the nonprofit activist sector resolved not to hang separately. If you want to feel better about the ungainly mess that is the broad progressive coalition, read Mr. Burns' article.

Adam Tooze ended his snapshot of the pandemic's effects in April 2021. He sees trouble ahead for the Biden presidency and for the country. Our contradictions have not weathered the pandemic well.

... as 2008 demonstrated and 2020 confirmed, the GOP is no longer a party with a vision of government either in the long or even the short term. It has revealed itself as a vehicle for the undisciplined pursuit of particular interests and the expression of affect rather than considered national policy. 

There are, of course, massive modernizing forces at work in the United States. For better and for worse, they are aligning increasingly unambiguously with the Democratic Party. As they have demonstrated in successive presidential elections, the Democrats are majoritarian ... [but thanks to constitutional systemic distortions] the grip on power of this modernizing coalition is frustratingly weak.... The Biden presidency's first order of business is to attempt to restore coherence ... For all the enthusiasm surrounding the early months of the Biden administration, the haunting question remains: is the United States as a nation-state capable of responding in a coherent and long term fashion to the challenge ...? 

... If our first reaction to 2020 was disbelief, our watchword in facing the future should be: "We ain't seen nothing yet."