There’s more than one pandemic ravaging our embattled society

The coronavirus pandemic has pulled back the curtain to reveal a brutal form of capitalism.

We now live in a world that resembles a dystopian novel. We cannot get close to each other, door handles have an air of danger, civil liberties are evaporating, streets are empty, businesses are shuttered, death tolls are climbing, borders are back with a vengeance and fear and precarity become the new norm. We are told endlessly by politicians, health experts and various pundits that we are in the midst of a medical crisis. They are only partly right.

The coronavirus pandemic is more than a medical crisis, it is also a political crisis deeply rooted in years of neglect by austerity-market driven governments that denied the importance of public health, and the public good, while defunding the civic institutions and materials that allowed them to work.

At the same time, this crisis cannot be separated from the crisis of massive inequality in wealth, income and power. Nor can it be separated from a crisis of civic culture, education, climate change and a crisis of civic courage.

In addition, it cannot be separated from the spectacle of fear mongering, racism and bigotry that has dominated the national zeitgeist of so many countries to promote shared fears rather than shared responsibilities. In a society in which individual responsibility is viewed as the only way to address social problems, there is no need to address broader systemic issues and hold power accountable. Nor is their need to protect human lives, provide meaningful work and insure quality health care for all. Under such circumstances, the social sphere and the concept of the public interest becomes an object of either financial exploitation or utter disdain, or both.

Another plague lurks beneath the pandemic. This is the invisible plague of casino capitalism with its privatization, commercialization and commodification of everything. This is a plague marked by fragile financial institutions, creation of a massive army of impoverished workers and the prioritization of profits over human life. All of which point to a disdain for any notion of the social contract that expands the meaning and possibilities of the common good, including the crucial sphere of public health. Nowhere is this more evident than in Trump’s America.

The coronavirus pandemic has pulled back the curtain to reveal a brutal form of capitalism — and its global financial markets — in all of their cruelty. This is a system that has not only eroded the democratic ideals of equality and popular sovereignty, but has also created a political and economic context in which the pandemic puts a severe strain on medical workers and hospitals that lack ventilators and other essential equipment to treat patients and limit the number of deaths caused by the virus. Doctors, nurses and front-line workers now plead for the most basic materials to protect themselves. Nurses make masks out of garbage bags, and in the U.S. governors plead and bid against each other for ventilators. At work here is a failure of public planning and implementation brought about by the dismantling of the protective state.

We live at a time of plagues that have added fuel to the current coronavirus epidemic. For years, the plague of casino capitalism with its mantra of fiscal austerity has waged a full-scale attack on the welfare state and in doing so underfunded and weakened those institutions such as education and public health. As the pandemic crisis recedes, we will have to choose between a society that addresses human needs and provides basic services or one in which a survivalof-the fittest-ethos and war-of-all against-all becomes the only organizing principle of society.

There is no doubt that this crisis will test the limits of democracy worldwide. At the same time, the magnitude of the crisis offers windows of opportunity in which people can begin to rethink what kind of society, world, and future they want to inhabit.

In the words of Amartya Sen, we need “to think big about society.” New conversations can emerge about the meaning of politics, solidarity, mass resistance and democracy. We still have the opportunity to reimagine a world in which justice, solidarity, compassion and civic courage become the basis for a new vision and new forms of collective struggle that deepen and strengthen democracy.

Henry A. Giroux is a widely published social critic and McMaster University professor who holds the McMaster Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar Chair, and is a visiting distinguished university professor at Ryerson University.