As the dystopian narrative of the Days of Our Coronavirus Lives continues to unfold, the response that the U.S. and its Führer have given are in keeping with the country’s strangely intact sense of denial (yes darling, pretend a surgical mask alone is going to save you) after the events of the 2016 election. In 2020, the election, once again, plays into everything that’s going on at the moment as well, with most any Democrat or general “liberal” one talks to overtly favoring a win from Bernie Sanders, and yet, somehow the dark Catholic horse that is Joe Biden has come out of the woodwork as a stronger contender. If the 2016 election was any indication, this is likely making many who were formerly very skittish about the prospect of socialism on American soil feel at least slightly more at ease, just as they were vaguely more content to have Hillary as the Democratic nominee in 2016. Because, yes, Biden is yet another corporate Democrat, even if he comes from the hallowed vas deferens of Obama and his perhaps overly exalted administration (particularly now that we’ve seen what has come after it).
Everyone, too, was convinced then that Trump could not possibly win. Even the Orange One himself wasn’t taking it that seriously until it actually happened. Yet what some might deem the biggest fluke in modern history was a long time coming. For it was Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, that essentially tells of the exact events that have transpired since Trump took office. Granted, at the time Lewis was writing it, it was his fear of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini leading up to the inevitability of World War II that inspired him to create the character of Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip (along with Louisiana politician Huey Long), a demagogue promising a return to economic and national “superiority” by reverting to values of a more “traditional” nature. Obviously, this means anyone not white and sans penis is fucked. Yet while fascism was, at that time, the primary concern (just as it is now), it isn’t only conservatism that can lead to this form of demagoguery.
Certainly that’s why George Orwell wrote Animal Farm in 1945, a response to Russia’s 1917 revolution and subsequent formation of the Soviet Union. It is in this “fable” that Orwell describes the animals being convinced that they can all be equal, overthrowing their present dictator only to make things worse with a new one. As with all socialist leaders (and corporate ones), Sanders has that cult of personality thing going for him. Unlike most of his fellow Democrats (mainly because he really isn’t one), he has insisted, “I think that countries like Denmark and Sweden do very well. I think it depends on what we mean by socialism. If we mean socialism is what the old Soviet Union was, that’s not my thing.” But that could be a slippery slope as far as American culture is concerned if he ends up taking office, and the fact that he even alludes to the Soviet Union is somewhat unsettling–especially since most of his supporters seem too “head up their own ass” to bother with familiarizing themselves with history (precisely why is it forever doomed to repeat itself). In any case, Americans have never been interested in adopting European values and politics. This is, in part, why their forebears fled Britain, among other countries. Socialism (nor oligarchism) of any kind is simply not what the U.S. is into, even if they think they might be “intrigued by certain elements” of it in the form of “universal” health care and “free” education.
What no one seems to believe is that many “golden gooses” of the middle class are going to end up being gutted for this, try as Sanders might to insist these “rights” are going to be funneled from the top tier of America’s wealthy. Sanders included, who is now a millionaire. Resultantly, he conveniently seems to mention siphoning from millionaires’ pockets a lot less and instead has started targeting billionaires, as he is not one (yet). Alas, not only would you have to pry that wealth from the cold, dead hands of these richies, but this entire model promotes a new kind of unfairness, even to the working class who has already clawed tooth and nail for what they have.
Like Macron in France with his attempt to retool the entire country’s pension system, Sanders favors the falsely idealistic notion of “Medicare for All” via a single-payer health insurance structure. Despite being a “champion for the worker,” for many unions, this feels like more of a punishment than a blessing. After all, they’ve spent decades negotiating Hoffa-inspired benefits and pay raises with their employers. For Sanders to gut it all in favor of a “for all” system doesn’t exactly sound utopian, so much as like a prime example of a socialistic nightmare. Puppeteered by a hypocritically affluent man who still tries to make himself believe he’s at one with the average American.
In the meantime, Trump might be making his chances all the worse for re-election (though if impeachment didn’t dissuade his followers, it’s difficult to imagine anything that will–all going back to his infamous quote, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”). Chiefly with his response to the coronavirus and appointing Mike Pence as the so-called Person In Charge, particularly if it results in more deaths on a mass scale (for a few olds in Seattle isn’t enough to get people rattled). That he, as usual, walks out in the middle of press conferences that are supposed to offer potential comfort and real information to the public, but instead, aim to create all the more chaos and confusion, does not bode well for what might happen in America if the virus escalates.
Of course, just what the Jewish people needed was another stigma about somehow being “unclean” in the eyes of the white supremacists that abound when the second case arrived (surprisingly late, considering this city liking to believe it’s a trailblazer) in New York. A fifty-year-old Jewish man who went to Miami and ostensibly had no contact with anyone that might be “diseased.” His two children, in turn, were punished with the humiliation of having their schools shut down as a preventive measure. These are all things, mind you, being spearheaded by Governor Cuomo and Mayor De Blasio, not Trump, who thinks himself an honorary member of NY’s local government. And, to be sure, it’s just another reason people can feel “obliged” to point a finger at Jews, including Bernie. Yet no one seems to want to with this latter Semite. He has been elevated to too much of a god-like status…eerily enough, just as his diametrically opposed foil, the Nazi-esque Trump.
Which is why it’s so laughable that Americans tend to think, even still, that they are immune to the “forces of (governmental) evil” that “the rest of the world” has already been dealing with for centuries. What’s more, just as demagogic fascism can take place (and has already, in fact, despite some people’s denial) in the U.S., so, too, can demagogic socialism. It ain’t just for Russia and Europe (much like the coronavirus, though America might have briefly thought it was insulated from such “impossibilities” on their soil). And honestly, it feels like just another choice between shit sandwich or shit cereal, all stemming from the fact that the shift of the pendulum swing in American politics is as extreme as respective coastal love for L.A. or New York. Really, how is this a country that has ended up going to the most extreme right to the most extreme left (by U.S. standards, anyway)? It’s a phenomenon as cracked out as the nation itself. One that will never seem to fathom, even at this point after years and years of proof, that a middleground candidate is the only way to sustain stasis in a country so massive in population and land size, therefore hopelessly varied in opinion.
