Trump’s war on pragmatism
We Americans have always fancied ourselves practical, can-do people who put old feuds aside when faced with a big collective problem.
There’s an element of myth in this, since political and personal interests never go into complete hibernation. But it’s no accident that one of the United States’ great contributions to philosophy is William James’ theory of pragmatism. Our bias is toward ideas that work and innovation by way of trial and error.
This tradition acknowledges that we often have multiple goals. In the coronavirus crisis, this means beating the pandemic and getting the economy humming again.
President Trump is failing because he has abandoned our commitments to favoring problemsolving over ideological posturing and to acting nationally in the face of looming catastrophe.
His own words last week underscored both deficiencies.
Instead of rallying the resources required for a nationally organized testing program, Trump told the nation’s governors that the federal government will “be standing alongside of you.”
The relevant word here was “standing,” an admission of passivity. And the man who is not doing his own job had the nerve to tweet on Friday: “The States have to step up their TESTING!”
Having thrown the burden of resolving the crisis on those governors, Trump might at least have encouraged his own supporters to back off their reflexive opposition to a gradual and considered approach to economic recovery — precisely the path his own national guidelines, inadequate though they are, envisions.
Instead, Trump championed the extremists who are marching on state capitals demanding an abrupt and reckless end to the temporary shutdowns that have slowed the virus’s spread.
Why? “They seem to be protesters that like me,” he said gleefully. He continued to egg on partisanship and cultural warfare Friday with his “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” tweets. Rep. David Price, D-N.C., noted that the current distribution of COVID-19 spread happens to overlap roughly with red-blue divisions, so there’s little hope that Trump will relent.
Considering this lack of leadership, what would a William James pragmatist do?
Virtually everyone except for Trump and his apologists understands the obvious: Reopening the economy requires, first, a national commitment to a robust testing program fully backed by the federal government. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has proposed $30 billion in new emergency funding for a national testing strategy and he called on Trump to use the Defense Production Act if that’s what’s needed to mobilize the private sector to produce the required tests.
Massachusetts’s Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has created an expansive contact tracing program to track the virus’s spread. It could become a national model. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Drs. Howard Bauchner and Joshua Sharfstein suggested giving the nation’s 20,000 incoming medical students a year off, with pay and health benefits, to contribute both to care and testing efforts. The Americorps program could also be mobilized for this labor-intensive work.
What pragmatists know is that railing against formal distancing rules does nothing to solve the underlying problem. As several economist colleagues I contacted noted, the economy will not fully revive until Americans are given good reason to put aside their fears of infection. Yelling at governors won’t get us there.
“Even if the government-imposed social distancing rules are relaxed to encourage economic activity, risk-averse Americans will persist in social distancing, and that behavior, too, will restrain the hoped-for economic rebound,” Gary Burtless, a Brookings Institution economist, wrote me.
“Will customers return in-person to the retail or leisure/hospitality businesses anytime soon?” asked Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “Not if they feel unsafe, and not if their personal finances have been constricted by the downturn.”
Those who shout for opening the economy in the name of freedom don’t think much about the freedom of workers to protect themselves from a potentially deadly disease. And employers do not want to find themselves facing legal liabilities for infected employees.
If the economy is substantially reopened without adequate testing, said Thea Lee, president of the Economic Policy Institute, the most vulnerable would include “low-wage workers, women, people of color, immigrants, and the elderly.” They are “concentrated in the riskiest jobs, with the least financial cushion, and the least likely to have employer-provided benefits or protections,” she said.
“Give me liberty or give me death” is a fine rallying cry in a war against freedom’s enemies. It’s is a perilous guide to policy during a pandemic. Pragmatists may be short on stirring slogans. But when the choices are hard and the problems are daunting, they’re the ones we should want in charge.