THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC AND AMERICAN NEOLIBERALISM

ABSTRACT

This essay explores how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the glaring weaknesses of the American neoliberal order. In early 2021, the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, suffered 20% of the world’s covid-19 cases. The paper examines the factors that made the U.S. uniquely vulnerable to the pandemic: hyper-individualism, high levels of religiosity, ignorance of science, generalized distrust of the government, and the fetishization of the market. These forces produced a society with high levels of income inequality, a tattered social safety net, lack of universal health coverage, a large prison population, and vast numbers of the homeless. The health care crisis gave rise to an economic crisis. Low income communities and people of color are particularly vulnerable. The structural deficiencies of American neoliberalism are exacerbated by the corruption, indifference, and incompetence of the Trump administration, which failed to take the pandemic seriously. Lack of testing, pastors defying social distancing guidelines, forcing low wage workers back to work and the touting of fraudulent cures such as hydroxychloroquine illustrate what happens when a conservative society unused to inconvenience encounters an unseen foe that replicates itself with devastating efficiency.

Keywords::

• coronavirus
• pandemic
• neoliberalism
• Trump

In February 2021, with more than 21 million infected people and a death toll from the covid-19 pandemic surpassing 500,000 the United States, with 4% of the world’s population, endured 1/5 of global coronavirus cases. The actual toll may be much higher. As Young (2020) put it, “How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation.” As other countries managed to “flatten the curve” of new infections, in the U.S. the number of cases climbed steadily. How did the world’s only superpower and largest economy, with a formidable set of institutions such as hospitals and research universities, come to such a sad state? The answer lies largely in the uniquely defining features of the country, its conservative political climate, anti-intellectualism, and the incompetence and corruption of the Trump administration (Leonhardt 2020).

This paper approaches the corona pandemic in the United States by emphasizing the unique character of American neoliberalism. Of all the thoroughly neoliberalized societies in the world, the U.S. has arguably most heavily internalized the neoliberal ethos of “free markets,” minimal state intervention. It lays out the argument that the U.S. is uniquely vulnerable to the virus because of structural inequalities and weaknesses in the prevailing political and economic order. The paper opens with a brief commentary on the varieties of capitalism literature, which notes that capitalism, and neoliberalism, are geographically differentiated. It links this notion to the long-standing ideology of American exceptionalism. The second section reviews the dimensions of U.S. society that allowed the virus to make such rapid inroads: distrust of the state and fetishization of markets; high degrees of religiosity and anti-intellectualism; individualism; lack of universal health coverage; high levels of obesity and related problems; the world’s highest incarceration rate and prison population; homelessness; and systemic racism and racial inequality. The third part examines the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, holding that its incompetence and corruption contributed mightily to high rates of excess deaths. The conclusion summarizes the major themes.

Varieties of Capitalism and American Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism, arguably the most potent political force in the globe today, has received enormous scholarly attention (e.g., England and Ward 2007; Wilson 2017; Balibar et al. 2019). Neoliberalism has been defined and conceptualized in different ways (Birch 2017), but its central elements are well understood: its conservative political agenda; emphasis on “free” markets; and withdrawal of the state from social reproduction. All over the world neoliberalism has shredded public safety nets and accentuated social and spatial inequality. Geographers have also studied this topic (Harvey 2005) and examined how neoliberal principles and practices have reshaped geographies at scales ranging from the local to the global (Peck and Tickell 2002; Peck et al. 2018). As an exchange between Richard Peet (2019) on the one hand and Cahill and Konings (2019) on the other illustrates, neoliberalism is open to interpretation, and means different things in different sociospatial contexts.

In keeping with geographical views of neoliberalism, the “varieties of capitalism” approach to political economy emphasizes institutional differences among countries, acknowledging that capitalism means different things in different spatial contexts (Hall and Soskice 2001; Hancké 2009; Hall 2015). With different labor markets, cultures, historical trajectories, technological environments, and government policies, capitalism in, say, France is quite different from that found in China. This view is valuable in refuting simplistic one-size-fits-all theorizations that ignore profound historical and geographical differences.

In the American context, the varieties of capitalism approach meshes conveniently with the long-standing doctrine of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, first proposed by Alexis de Toqueville, focuses on the unique characteristics of American society: the prominent role played by religion; high rates of social mobility; immigration; and so forth. In this view, often widely held by conservatives, the U.S. is a model society unfettered by the normal constraints faced by most countries, a “shining city on the hill” and model of democracy (Lipset 1996; Madsen 1998; Hodgson 2009). The historical path taken by the U.S. led capitalism there to differ markedly from that found in Western Europe. For example, the broad range of public social services often labeled the “safety net” that typify social democracies such as Sweden or France is relatively impoverished in the U.S. Government programs to help and protect workers, the poor, and the disadvantaged originated largely with the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1980s. However, such measures have faced sustained attacks for more than four decades by a Republican Party determined to undo them (Gritter 2018; Dickinson 2019). While the GOP is not alone in its ardent embrace of neoliberalism (the Democratic Party occasionally suffers from this phenomenon too), it does promote neoliberalism as an ideology and set of political practices far more openly than any other party in the Western world (Pühringer and Ötsch 2018), particularly under President Donald Trump (Lachmann 2019). The social safety net has been steadily degraded by design (Abramovitz et al. 2020). Behavioral explanations that blame the poor for poverty, and the fetishization of the market, tend to dominate public discourses about social policy. European-style measures are frequently denounced as “socialism” (Pew Research Center 2019a). As a result, policies and institutions taken for granted in Europe such as workplace protections, unemployment insurance, paid holidays, and unions tend to be relatively weak and underfunded in the U.S. The outcomes of American neoliberalism are not difficult to see. The country has by far the highest level of income inequality among those in the economically developed world (Filauro and Parolin 2019). While unemployment due to the pandemic rose modestly in Europe, in the U.S., by contrast, it soared (Mchugh 2020).

What Explains U.S. Vulnerability to the Coronavirus Pandemic?

Several factors have contributed to the unique vulnerability of the United States in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. In this sense, American exceptionalism has cruelly left the country uniquely vulnerable to the corona pandemic.

Far more than their counterparts in Europe or Japan, Americans tend to distrust their government (Zeleny and Thee-Brenan 2011; Gershtenson and Plane 2015). To some extent this distrust reflects the reality that Washington policy makers are far more responsive to lobbyists and campaign contributors than the voting public. Fueled by a faith in markets and a relentless conservative media assault, many conservatives in particular view the federal government in highly suspicious terms. In its most extreme manifestations this distrust gives rise to conspiracy theories, including ludicrous ones (e.g., Q-Anon). In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, distrust of government led to refusals to follow health guidelines such as wearing face masks and even willingness to take a vaccine if it were created (Bir and Widmar 2020). Especially in the U.S. has the wearing of face masks become highly politicized, with a large proportion of conservatives and Republicans refusing to do so (Smith and Wanless 2020).

Unlike all other industrialized nations, the U.S. exhibits high rates of religiosity. Although organized religion is gradually declining in its popularity (Pew Research Center 2019b), it still remains a formidable force. Americans are far more likely to say that religion is important in their lives, and to go to church or synagogue on a weekly basis, than are Western Europeans (Voas and Chaves 2016; Chaves 2017). Most American Christians pray daily. This religiosity played out with devastating effect during the pandemic. Some conservative preachers denounced the virus as a hoax, claiming that god would protect them (Wilson 2020). Texas-based televangelist Kenneth Copeland claimed he could cure the virus if people watching his show touched their television sets (Niemietz 2020). Some, such as Virginia bishop Gerald Glenn, even caught the virus and died as a result (Brown 2020). More broadly, U.S. religiosity undermined scientific understandings of the virus and rational responses grounded in facts, data, and evidence. As several observers have noted astutely, neoliberalism and religion have long sustained one another (Frank 2001; Moreton 2009; Peters 2018), such as in their mutual naturalization of markets and inequality as well as generalized hostility to progressive forces and ideas. Evangelical Christians in the U.S. have long eagerly espoused free trade and free enterprise as a means of serving god, essentially updating the old Protestant ethic to more contemporary globalized times, an ethos in keeping with the steady commercialization of religion.

The long tradition of American anti-intellectualism (Gore 2007; Jacoby 2008) has undoubtedly contributed to the spread of the coronavirus. Alone among developed countries, the U.S. resists the teaching of evolution (Deniz and Borgerding 2018). Skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is far more widespread in the U.S. than elsewhere (Egan and Mullin 2017). “Experts” are often distrusted as part of some mythical, condescending elite. Increasingly, a widespread distrust of expertise cultivates a climate in which any opinion is as good as any other (Nichols 2017). Under these circumstances, truth simply becomes a matter of perspective. When the decline in objectivity becomes normalized, emotions and affect rise to the fore (Boler and Davis 2018). As waves of fake news and fake science (e.g., climate change denial, anti-vaccination discourses, creationism) wash over the country, it has suffered from what the Rand Corporation has called “truth decay.” The very notion of objectivity has come under question and challenged the Enlightenment notion of reason. This phenomenon has been actively abetted by the Republican Party, which has made distrust of science and scientists a major part of its political strategy (Mooney 2006). The danger in this approach is that just when science is most needed, such as the pandemic, it finds the least appeal. Warnings by public health officials may go unheeded. As Krugman (2020a) puts it,

We’re also doing badly because … there’s a longstanding anti-science, anti-expertise streak in American culture—the same streak that makes us uniquely unwilling to accept the reality of evolution or acknowledge the threat of climate change.

American culture also tends to be highly individualistic, a worldview that stresses individual rights, freedoms, and responsibilities and minimizes social obligations (Levin 2017). At times, this trait can be an advantage, contributing, for example, to high levels of innovation and business start-ups. But social problems cannot be handled individually, they require collective action. Many Americans, particularly conservatives, resent any limitation on their private behavior. With many people obsessed with a mythologized notion of “freedom,” any limitation on behavior is regarded as immoral, unfair, and “un-American,” and individual sacrifice for the common good becomes demonized (Bunch 2020). Hence, wearing face masks has come to be seen by many conservatives as an infringement of their rights, what Lithwick (2020) calls a “uniquely American pathology.” Regular consumers of right wing media, notably Fox News, which have spouted misinformation are particularly likely to dismiss the pandemic as a “liberal hoax,” often believe in unfounded conspiracy theories, take pseudo-remedies such as hydroxychloroquine, and refuse to take preventative measures, making them especially vulnerable (Ingraham 2020; Sullivan 2020). Famed conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh asserted Covid-19 was “just like the common cold.” More broadly, mass ignorance and distrust of science led many Americans to ignore social distancing warnings and engage in reckless behavior, leading to a surge in new cases (Boot 2020).

A prime example of the neoliberal onslaught against social services is the debate over health care coverage. Alone among industrialized countries, the U.S. lacks universal health care insurance. This situation reflects a system in which most health care insurance is provided by private employers, which can be traced back to the wage and price controls imposed during World War II. While the U.S. spends a higher proportion of its GDP on health care than does any other country, its returns for this investment are meager. Medicare and Medicaid provide some assistance to the elderly and low-income families, respectively, but considerable numbers of people lack access to adequate health care. In 2009, 19.5% of the population was uninsured. The passage of the Affordable Health Care (ACA) Act in 2010, popularly known as Obamacare, brought these numbers down: in 2020, only 9% of the population was uninsured. Providing public health care insurance for low-income people, however, drove the Republican Party insane with rage. When Republicans controlled the House of Representatives from 2010 to 2018, they voted to eliminate or replace the ACA 70 times (Riotta 2017). Ultimately, these attempts failed and Obamacare still stands as the law of the land. Nonetheless, even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans continue to wage a legal and political struggle to rescind the act it in a series of legal battles that led all the way to the Supreme Court (Cassady 2020). With widespread layoffs during the coronavirus pandemic, in which at least 40 million people lost their jobs and filed unemployment claims, the number of uninsured rose rapidly (Hellmann 2020).

Another variable contributing to U.S. vulnerability is obesity. Americans are the fattest people in the world (Popkin 2009). In 2019, 42.4% of the populations was technically obese (body mass index of 30 or higher); rates vary among ethnic groups however, including 42.2% for Whites, 49.6% for Blacks, and 44.8% for Latinos (Center for Disease Control and Prevention 2019). Millions more are overweight. Obesity rates contribute significantly to mortality from the coronavirus. Patients with obesity-related preexisting conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, or diabetes are 12 times as likely to die from the coronavirus as those without (Sun 2020). Notably, because obesity rates are highest in the South, the mortality rate there is higher than other parts of the country.

Decades of neoliberal “tough on crime” policies have led the U.S. to have the world’s highest incarceration rate and largest prison population (Enns 2016; Egan and Mullin 2017; Alexander 2020). In 2018, the total number of prisoners incarcerated in state and federal prisons was roughly 1.5 million (U.S. Department of Justice 2020). Prisons tend to be overcrowded, unsanitary, and suffer shortages of personal protection equipment such as masks. Many prisoners share communal toilets, showers, and sinks, and social distancing is impossible. Not surprisingly, prisons have become hot spots in the American coronavirus pandemic: the five largest hot spots in the U.S. are behind bars. By December, 2020, more than 275,000 prisoners and staff had become infected and 1,700 had died (Carlisle and Bates 2020). Testing within them remains woefully inadequate. Attempts to mitigate this situation have been met with bureaucratic dysfunction and sluggishness (New York Times 2020). Not surprisingly, the epidemic in prisons has unleashed widespread fear (Williams et al. 2020). Some have experienced riots and hunger strikes in response. Significantly, prisons are not hermetically sealed, self-contained systems: prisoners cycle in and out, and are transferred among them regularly. Corona infections among prisoners also threaten guards, nurses, staff, and visitors, indicating that the contagion there is unlikely to stay behind bars. Some prisons have reduced their populations by a small percent, but they remain distinct threats to the virus’s persistence and spread. Like nursing homes—another set of corona hot spots—prisons have been underfunded and overcrowded for years.

The United States also has high levels of homelessness compared to most industrialized countries. In a country with a limited social safety net, deinstitutionalized psychiatric patients, vulnerable veterans, impoverished women with children, runaways and former foster care patients, and people squeezed between jobs that pay too little and housing that costs too much, roughly 500,000 people lack a regular place to sleep (Duffin 2020). In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, homelessness is critical: this is a highly vulnerable population (Lima et al. 2020; Tsai and Wilson 2020). Homeless shelters are often known as “hot spots” of covid-19 infections (Imbert et al. 2020). Even worse, the recession brought on by the pandemic led to numerous evictions, swelling the ranks of those living on the streets.

One of the defining dimensions of American neoliberalism is racial or ethnic inequality. It has been widely documented that ethnic minorities tend to have lower incomes and wealth than do whites, suffer higher unemployment, and enjoy fewer opportunities, including access to a good education, jobs, and homes (Bruch et al. 2019). This inequality was reflected in the higher rates of coronavirus cases and deaths among the country’s minority populations (Pirtle 2020). In May, 2020, Latinos/Hispanics, who comprise 15% of the population, constituted 33% of its corona patients; Black people, who are 13% of the population, comprised 22% (Sun 2020). Compared to Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans are 4.5, 4, and 5 times more likely to be hospitalized for the virus, respectively (Sun 2020). The reasons for these ethnic discrepancies in the structural and systemic inequality faced by Latinos and African-Americans (Selden and Berdahl 2020), who tend to be renters living in relatively high-density areas more prone to the virus, including public housing, use public transportation more than do whites, and work in low-income jobs such as retail trade and health care from which there is little refuge from the virus. Black people are incarcerated at much higher rates than whites. In addition, obesity rates among African-Americans tend to be higher than among Whites (CDC 2019), as are rates of smoking, diabetes, hypertension, strokes, and heart disease. The widespread prevalence of such preexisting conditions renders this population more vulnerable. Finally, African-Americans and Latinos also tend to have lower rates of health care insurance than do Whites (Sohn 2017).

The Trump Administration and the Coronavirus Pandemic

American neoliberalism’s inherent weaknesses have been greatly compounded by the incompetence and corruption of the Trump administration. In 2019, before the pandemic began, Trump defunded a pandemic unit at the National Security Council (Reichmann 2020). While epidemiologists sounded the threat, Trump ignored them. Instead, he imposed a travel bans on China, long after the virus had escaped the country, causing a surge of last-minute trips.

Initially, Trump asserted his absolute political control over the pandemic, holding that “When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total” (Sheth 2020). Later, when confronted with a rising number of infections, he asserted “I don’t take responsibility at all” (Dowd 2020). Faced with growing numbers of cases and rising deaths, Trump essentially did nothing, forsaking even the pretense of leadership (Shear et al. 2020). Because the Trump administration effectively abandoned federal attempts to contain the virus, states were left on their own, desperately competing for limited medical supplies.

Rather than invoke the Defense Production Act, which would have mobilized federal resources to procure medical supplies, Trump left it to states and cities to come up with their own strategies, competing with one another for supplies. The result was a patchwork of efforts that reflected local politics and priorities. Some locked down completely, others partially, and yet others not at all. The decentralized governance system that characterizes the U.S. led to lack of unified response; rather, states adopted variety of measures. Because the Trump administration effectively abandoned federal attempts to contain the virus, states were left on their own, desperately competing for limited medical supplies. The result was a patchwork of efforts that reflected local politics and priorities. Some locked down completely, others partially, and yet others not at all. Notably, while the virus claimed most of its victims early in the pandemic in liberal-leaning “blue states” such as New York, it steadily progressed in more conservative ones in the South and Midwest, where refusal to wear face masks became a political statement.

Compounding the problem was Trump’s rhetoric of denial. Viewing the pandemic as a threat to his reelection, he consistently downplayed the risk. “It’s fading away. It’s going to fade away,” Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News (Todisco 2020). He announced that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then called for premature openings of stores and schools. He resorted to racist tropes, calling corona the “China virus” and “Kung flu.” Milbank (2020) helpfully collected a number of Trump’s sayings about the pandemic, which are worth quoting here:

The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We have it totally under control. I’m not concerned at all. It’s one person coming in from China. We pretty much shut it down. It will all work out well. We’re in great shape. Doesn’t spread widely at all in the United States because of the early actions that myself and my administration took. There’s a chance it won’t spread. It’s something that we have tremendous control over. Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. Just stay calm. It will go away. The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. This is their new hoax. Whatever happens, we’re totally prepared. Totally ready. We’re rated number one for being prepared. We are so prepared like we never have been prepared. Taking early intense action, we have seen dramatically fewer cases of the virus in the United States. We’re very much ahead of everything.

For months, Trump refused to wear a face mask, becoming a model for right-wing science deniers who claimed the whole pandemic was a liberal hoax. He repeatedly touted the drug hydroxychloroquine, even though medical studies showed it did not prevent or cure the virus and could cause serious side effects (Qiu 2020). At one point, Trump even suggested that drinking or injecting bleach might help (Rogers et al. 2020), earning him widespread ridicule. He belittled testing for the virus, saying “I personally think testing is overrated, even though I created the greatest testing machine in history.” He falsely claimed that the U.S. had tested more people than the rest of the world combined (BBC News 2020). At a rally in Tulsa, Trump proclaimed “when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people; you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down please” (Abutaleb et al. 2020). When protests against quarantine orders arose in several states, Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!,” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd amendment. It is under siege!”, thus conflating public health measures with gun confiscation. Trump and aides repeatedly ignored advice from health care professionals and epidemiologists, including his own advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, at one point even leading a campaign to discredit him (Mindich 2020). Trump repeatedly called for state economies to reopen, students to return to school, and claimed that large gatherings were safe, all contrary to expert opinion (Baker 2020). In no other country did politicians so openly defy the advice of health experts.

The results of this mishandling and incompetence were catastrophic. By February 2021, with 4 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. had more than 20% of its cases, or 21 million, including 480,000 deaths. Daily new cases rose by more than 200,000, and up to 4,000 people per day died of the virus. Each day of the pandemic rivaled the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in the number of fatalities. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s popularity declined in proportion to the rise in cases, with the majority of people disapproving how he handled it; his failure to manage it contributed significantly to his electoral defeat in November, 2020.

Concluding Thoughts

The coronavirus has seeped into every crack and fault line in American society, exposing deep and long-standing class and racial inequalities. A country that should have been well prepared to combat the pandemic instead found itself hamstrung. Combined with a formidably ignorant public fed a daily diet of misinformation from conservative outlets such as Fox News, many people became impervious to scientific advice and opinion. The tradition of American exceptionalism, which long fueled nationalist fantasies, has worked cruelly against its country of origin. Dismissive of facts and expertise and placing their faith in religious leaders, many Americans willfully denied scientific advice such as wearing face masks. Faith in the market and rugged individualism led many to equate public health measures with slavery or socialism, or both. High rates of obesity play a key role in the pandemic’s mortality rate. Large numbers of the homeless and prisoners likewise formed vulnerable spawning grounds where the virus spread with ease.

Parallel and deeply intertwined with class hierarchies in the U.S. is a racial hierarchy. Decades, if not centuries, of being denied adequate education, employment, and housing left minority populations uniquely vulnerable. Because minorities tend to live in more crowded conditions than do whites, suffer higher rates of obesity and diabetes, are often forced to go back to work more often even under the threat of the virus, and lack health insurance more frequently, they are at greater risk from infection and suffer a lower ability to overcome it. The result, predictably enough, has been that Latinos and African-Americans have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus and died in significant numbers from covid-19.

All of these predicaments were made significantly worse by the Trump administration, whose response to the pandemic have been nothing short of disastrous. Trump officials grossly underestimated the threat that the virus posed, then failed to take decisive actions to combat it. The incompetence of the Trump government exposed the dangers of undermining the social safety net and disregarding the advice of scientists and health care experts. Krugman (2020b) notes that “Trump’s narcissism and solipsism are especially blatant, even flamboyant. But he isn’t an outlier; he’s more a culmination of the American right’s long-term trend toward intellectual degradation. And that degradation, more than Trump’s character, is what is leading to vast numbers of unnecessary deaths.”

Acknowledgments

The author thanks two reviewers for their helpful comments and criticisms.