Pandemic Journal # 19 set forth Fareed Zakaria’s analysis of the U.S. class conflict over responses to the coronavirus pandemic. This analysis is shared by Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for the New York Times.[1]
Stephens’ terms for the two classes are “Remote” and “Exposed.” “The Remote are, disproportionately, knowledge workers, mostly well educated, generally well paid. Their professional networks, and many of their personal ones, too, are with people who also work remotely” or roughly 37 percent of American workers. The other two-thirds, the Exposed, “include everyone — shop owner, waiter, cabdriver, sales associate, factory worker, nanny, flight attendant, and so on — for whom physical presence is a job requirement. They are, typically, less well educated, less well paid.”
“For the Remote, the lockdowns of the past two months have been stressful. For the Exposed, they have been catastrophic. For the Remote, another few weeks of lockdown is an irritant. For the Exposed, whose jobs are disappearing by the millions every week, it is a terror. For the Remote, Covid-19 is the grave new risk. For the exposed, it’s one of several. For the Remote, an image on the news of cars forming long lines at food banks is disconcerting. For the Exposed, that image is — or may very soon be — the rear bumper in front of you.”
Says Stephens, “The 2020 election will hinge on who decisively wins the vote of the Exposed.” Although the Democrats’ emphasis on containing the virus seems to have more support than the “open up” strategy, Stephens expresses some skepticism. One assumption of the containment argument is “that Covid-19 is containable and will eventually be curable. If it isn’t, what are the lockdowns really achieving, other than delaying the march toward herd immunity while imposing ruinous costs on those least able to afford them?” Another assumption of the containment argument is “that the lockdowns are the economic equivalent of a medically induced coma. But what if they’re really a form of politically induced necrosis, killing jobs and businesses that will never come back?” The third assumption of the containment strategy is “that the balance of public sympathy will rest with the comparatively small numbers of acute Covid-19 sufferers. But what happens when their numbers are dwarfed by those suffering from awful personal hardship?”
Yes, many Democrats believe that they will win the November election because of “Trump’s catastrophic failures in managing the crisis. But Trump’s political stock-in-trade is resentment, above all toward those who mistake their good luck for superior merit, or confuse virtue signaling with wise policy, or who impose policies on others without fully feeling the effects themselves.”
Stephens finds this analysis presciently discussed in a February 2016 Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan, who “made the distinction between two classes of people: the ‘protected’ — that is, the well-off, the connected, the comfortably insulated — and the ‘unprotected’ — everyone else.” She added, “The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.” This larger point, said Stephens, was that Trump was going to win the 2016 election, which was “unfathomable to so many people at the time (including me).” [2]
Conclusion
I am a Democrat who fervently wants Trump to lose the November election. Yet, Stephens, Zakaria and Noonan make persuasive points that need to influence Democratic strategy in the upcoming election.
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[1] Stephens, In this Election, It’s the Remote Against the Exposed, N.Y. Times (May 15, 2020).
[2] Noonan, Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected, W.S.J. (Feb. 25, 2016).
Endorsement of Pandemic Pragmatists
David Von Drehle, a Washington Post columnist living in Kansas City, recognizes the issues posed by Zakaria, Stephens and Noonan, but concludes that “the future will probably be won by Pandemic Pragmatists, who blend and balance both priorities to keep going in the shadow of covid-19. . . [because they understand certain realities].”
“First, the novel coronavirus is, for all intents and purposes, here to stay. Treatments will be found to ameliorate it. A vaccine may be developed to protect against it. But like the various strains of influenza and the human immunodeficiency virus — and measles and chickenpox, for heaven’s sake — it might be tamed eventually, but not soon eradicated.”
Second, “since we can’t hide from it indefinitely, Pandemic Pragmatists understand that we have to find ways to live with it. Lockdowns and quarantines are severe and temporary responses. We might need them in certain places in the months — even years — to come. But they can’t last forever and ideally shouldn’t even last long, given the tremendous shock they send through the economy and the culture.”
“Life will be different, the Pandemic Pragmatists say. But that doesn’t have to mean worse.”
Drehle, The future belongs to the pandemic pragmatists, Wash. Post (May 15, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-future-belongs-to-the-pandemic-pragmatists/2020/05/15/5f79abc4-96de-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html
Drehle, Biography, https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/david-von-drehle/