20
THINK HISTORICALLY
The year 2020 was a hard one for most of us. But it was a banner year for disaster profiteers, who wanted to remake our world in their image. The New York governor, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, was praised by the national media early on for his cool-headed stewardship of the state’s pandemic response in the spring. Unlike Trump, he held daily press conferences and took questions from reporters about daily infection and death rates related to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s good to keep the public informed. But not to use their goodwill to push for policies that would, in the long run, do damage to the common good. Cuomo, a fiscal moderate and longtime champion of lean government—dating back to his years as President Bill Clinton’s Housing and Urban Development secretary in 1997 and then as New York’s sixty-fourth attorney general—seized the economic crisis to cut necessary programs for the poorest New Yorkers. Using an unprecedented drop in tax revenue and the lack of federal support as his overarching justification, Cuomo’s 2021 budget plan called for 5 percent cuts to education, social services, and transportation, a $15 million cut for local homeless programs, and a $35 million reduction in state aid to community colleges.1 If New York would only receive $6 billion from the federal government in COVID-related bailout aid, Cuomo explained, it was his intention to cut $2 billion in school funding, $600 million in Medicaid, and $900 million across the board.
When Cuomo came under attack from progressive critics, he retorted that the ultra-wealthy, too, would have to sacrifice. To be sure, the tax hike Cuomo proposed wasn’t exactly burdensome. New Yorkers with incomes of more than $10 million would see their yearly rate inch up from 8.82 to 9.32 percent. And those making $100 million would have to pay a rate of 10.82 percent. But Cuomo wasn’t done with wanting to shake things up. As it became clear early in April 2020 that public schools would shutter their doors and transition to online learning, Cuomo enlisted the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a former Google CEO, whom he described as “visionaries,” to “reimagine” and “revolutionize” public education.2 New York State United Teachers, which boasts a membership of six hundred thousand, went to the heart of the matter in a blistering critique. Why, they asked, would the governor outsource the precious task of public education to billionaires whose stock-in-trade is profit-making and cost-cutting, rather than teaching young people? Why wouldn’t Cuomo, they wondered, make New York a leader in greater federal funding for “social workers, mental health counselors, school nurses, enriching arts courses, advanced courses and smaller class sizes in school districts across the state?”3
Their pleas fell on deaf ears.
But if New York was ground zero for champions of privatization, state legislatures across the nation became a breeding ground for the enemies of representative government. After Trump didn’t concede his seven-million-vote loss in the 2020 presidential election and began tweeting blatant lies about voter fraud on an hourly basis, as well as having his allies file dozens of frivolous lawsuits to try to overturn the election in the courts, Republicans recognized a plum opportunity to do what they’ve been doing for years: restrict the franchise.
The year 2020 saw the highest level of participation in a presidential election ever—158 million ballots were cast nationwide—partly because COVID-19 pushed states to expand eligibility for no-reason absentee, mail-in, and early voting. Republican state legislators across the nation saw the writing on the wall. And they weren’t happy. By January 2021, they had filed a total of 106 bills to make voting harder—triple the number of similar bills the year before. In Georgia, for instance, they rolled back no-excuse absentee voting. And in Maricopa County, Arizona, a heavily Democratic district, they subpoenaed vote-tabulation equipment to scrutinize its use in future elections.
Brian Robinson, a Republican political consultant in Atlanta, says, “The overall purpose of these reforms is to restore faith in our election systems. . . . That’s not to say that [the 2020 election] was a giant failure; that’s to say that faith has been diminished.”4 Carefully scrutinize this logic: Republican voters believe there’s voter fraud, though that is unsupported by any empirical evidence. They take this lie of fraud at face value, and in doing so support politicians who make it harder to vote for other citizens who don’t support their policies. Democracy is hanging on life support with all the various voter-suppression efforts that Republicans have been putting in place for decades. Strict voter-ID laws, the closing of polling places, signature-matching requirements. Then, they say, let’s double down! What’s stunning isn’t Republicans wanting to win by any means necessary. It’s the brazenness with which they think they can justify it.
History has a funny way of repeating itself. But historical consciousness helps you fight back. As the Republican vote suppressors are emboldened again today, remember that southern white supremacists in the aftermath of the US Civil War in the 1890s came up with whatever lies they needed—Black people were stuffing ballot boxes, or were engaged in widespread political corruption—to roll back civil rights. Election officials required literacy tests and poll taxes that all but killed the Fifteenth Amendment’s guarantee that formerly enslaved men had the right to vote.
Every disaster feels new. But it never is. Compare Hurricane Katrina destroying the Gulf Coast city of New Orleans in 2005 to Hurricane Maria eviscerating Puerto Rico in 2017. These were two different storms, twelve years apart. But that’s where the difference ends. If anything, the parallels are eerie, if not predictable. There’s the shocking apathy with which the Republican administration in power, Bush in 2005, Trump in 2017, responded. Then there’s the rush to use public debt as leverage for privatizing everything in sight and pushing steep cuts to social services, meager to begin with. The absence of basic resources like water, food, and electricity for unimaginably long periods of time, for ordinary citizens. And the fortification of segregated ultra-rich communities, who, unlike the poor, have unlimited cash to meet all their needs, and much more.
Now that we’re on the other side of the Trump presidency, it’s the right time to reflect carefully about the state of our nation. After years of being bombarded by media coverage of the Trump years as somehow being outside of history—his presidency was norm-breaking, unlike anything we’ve seen in modern history, and so on—we’ve become desensitized to a long view of things. We’re never living through an unprecedented moment. This is the final lesson of this book. Think historically. And be vigilant about the presence of the past. It’s there, even if you can’t see it. Remember how, after COVID hit, many headlines were pushing the same narrative? The pandemic will change everything forever! We’ll be living in a brave new world! There will be a new normal!
Now ask yourself, today, how much, exactly, has fundamentally changed? Yes, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives. Many of them for no other reason than the grotesque malfeasance of the Trump administration. But so much has remained the same. Inequality is as persistent as ever before: Racism. Xenophobia. Sexism. Homophobia. Climate change. Gun violence. Political corruption. Republicans still hold the poor in contempt and flirt with white nationalism. Democrats still yearn for bipartisanship and cozy up to big corporations who fund their reelection campaigns. Yes, there are more virtual meetings, and people continue to wear face masks. But the deep structures, which have been in place for decades, are still there. Unfortunately.
But there is one major difference between now and when COVID first hit. Today we have a historical archive of resistance since the pandemic began. Think of the nurses striking against bad working conditions in overcrowded hospitals. Black Lives Matter describing racism as a pandemic that has afflicted the US for four hundred years. Amazon workers attempting to unionize in Alabama. Public school teachers in Chicago and New York refusing to return to overcrowded and poorly ventilated schools. Forget, for a minute, about who’s president. Or the latest disaster we just experienced. Resistance is there. Somewhere. Even if you can’t see it. Just as it’s been there since the beginning of US history.
Let this anchor you in dark times. When the next disaster strikes—and it will, tomorrow, a month from now, or five years from now—be ready. Breathe. Compose yourself. Slow things down. You’ll be told that there’s only one realistic way to do things. That if you don’t do it this way or that way, you’re immature. Irrational. Silly. Naïve. They’re wrong. The historical record is in plain sight. Of freedom fighters who didn’t profit from disaster. Who courageously risked their safety so others wouldn’t die by it. Yes, disasters, big and small, will persist. Count on it. But your response matters. Will you be paralyzed by fear, or find solidarity with strangers? Will you organize, or suffer alone? Will you bear witness, or shut your eyes? Express righteous indignation, or wither away in silence? Settle for the possible, or demand the impossible?
In the words of the great American writer James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”5 Keep these prophetic words in mind. If you do, when you face the next American disaster, the world will become both smaller and larger. Smaller because you know what can be done today. Larger because something new is possible tomorrow.