A Different Pandemic

n a o k o s h i b u s awa A Different Pandemic* *For constructive criticism and feedback on drafts of this essay, I’m grateful to Betsy Colwill, Geneveive Clutario, Anne Foster, Cindy Franklin, Candace Fujikane, Petra Goedde, Lili Kim, Andy Lohmeier, Brian McNamara, and Mari Yoshihara. 1. It appears that the homeowner bought the sign from this website started by a couple who created the “Stop the Donald” message after Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016. See: “STD,” last accessed August 26, 2020, https://stddonald.com/shop/. 2. Alan Dundes, Cracking Jokes: Studies of Sick Cycles & Stereotypes, 30th anniversary edition, (New Orleans, LA, 2017 [1987]). 3. On June 29, 2020, there were 10.2 million confirmed cases and 505,145 confirmed deaths according to the Coronavirus Dashboard, last accessed June 29, 2020, 9:54 am, EDT, https:// ncov2019.live/data. 4. On August 10, 2020, there were 20.07 million confirmed cases and 734,779 confirmed deaths according to the Coronavirus Dashboard, last accessed August 10, 2020, 10:00 am, EDT, https://ncov2019.live/data. 5. Marisa Iati, “Florida fired its coronavirus data scientist. Now she’s publishing the statistics on her own,” Washington Post, June 16, 2020, last accessed August 13, 2020, https://www. washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/12/rebekah-jones-florida-coronavirus/. C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford Diplomatic History, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2021). V University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. doi:10.1093/dh/dhab025 611 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 A lawn sign I saw while canvassing last fall said: “STD—Stop the Donald 2020: Don’t Let the Infection Spread.”1 It had a logo of an orange ball topped with two waves symbolizing President Trump’s artificial tan and bald spot-covering, sweeping hairdo. No doubt the lawn sign was meant to be snarky with its double-entendre comparing Trump to a venereal disease in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Humor, after all, is a way to deal with what’s deadly serious.2 At the end of 2019, few could imagine that COVID-19 would be so devastatingly infectious and engulf the entire world so quickly. By late June 2020, the disease had infected ten million people worldwide and killed a half million people.3 By mid-August, over twenty million had been infected and nearly three-quarters of a million had died.4 These were the confirmed numbers; vast undercounting was likely, due to the lack of adequate testing, political suppression of the statistics, willful or unintentional mis-categorization of coronavirus victims, and other factors. Americans widely suspected China of undercounting COVID-19 fatalities—though without firm evidence at this writing— while in Florida, whistleblowing exposed undercounting in order to support Governor Ron DeSantis’ desire to open up commerce.5 After the pandemic’s onset, social and traditional media sent a relentless stream of alarming and depressing news about how the pandemic has sparked unrest, worsened a crisis, and/or exposed structural inequalities. Stopping the Donald/stopping the infection thus became twinned priorities for roughly half the nation. 612 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y Metaphors of disease have long been used before the COVID-19 pandemic to describe a range of social and political “ills.” The viral metaphor was especially resonant during this crisis because actual pathogens are involved in causing or intensifying the global upheavals. But what has allowed the pathogens to magnify such profound suffering has deep-seated roots. Stopping the Donald Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 Figure 1: Photograph taken by author, August 20, 2020. A Different Pandemic : 613 6. Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, trans. James Membrez (New York, 2004), 7. 7. Geographers examining the relation between reduction in global atmospheric CO2 and agricultural land use recently posited that 55 million Indigenous peoples, or ninety percent of the total population, died by the early 1600s. It is important to remember, however, that the mass deaths, which undeniably occurred, resulted also from social and political factors as well as pathogens. Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13–36; David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2003): 703–42. 8. Amin, The Liberal Virus, 7. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 has not ended the pain, but understandably, millions of Americans were looking forward to his ouster as much as they looked forward to the development and wide distribution of a safe and effective vaccine against the coronavirus. Now, after Trump’s defeat, I continue to worry that too many Americans still trust that electing liberal Democrats to office will solve current and impending disasters. I think we need to reflect on how liberalism is foundational to both of the major U.S. political parties. Postcolonial scholars have recognized that liberalism is the thinking responsible for today’s extreme material inequality. The French-Egyptian political economist Samir Amin (1931–2018) likened liberalism to a virus in order to highlight how its insidious spread by European imperialists led to lasting, devastating effects. The “liberal virus,” he explained, first emerged in the “Paris-London-Amsterdam” triangle around the sixteenth century and then “traveled over the Atlantic and found a favorable place among those, who, deprived of antibodies, spread it. As a result, the malady took extreme forms.”6 Amin therefore dated the virus to the origins of the Enlightenment and compared liberalism to the successive pandemics in the centuries after contact.7 Population collapses and related traumas weakened Indigenous peoples’ abilities, time and again, to resist both the invaders and their ideas. Thus “extreme forms” of the malady took hold in the Americas: the forced removal of Native populations from their lands and their replacement with enslaved Africans and/or white settlers. In his extended metaphor, Amin pointed out that the “symptoms that the disease then manifested” in northern Europe not only “appeared harmless,” but also struck men more so than they did women. In other words, the world of the early Enlightenment was patriarchal, and the musings of early Enlightenment thinkers—e.g., Rene Descartes on rationalism, Francis Bacon on empiricism, Thomas Hobbes on the social contract, and Hugo Grotius on law—were not deleterious per se. The men, moreover, “developed the necessary antibodies” to the liberal virus so that they not only survived, but also thrived.8 Amin thus asked his readers to imagine liberalism as a sickness that rationalized capitalism and imperialism. The power of liberalism came not only from its spread via European imperialism, but also from the confidence that its principles were universal. Likewise, liberalism’s primacy on the individual left open whose individual rights would be honored. With no intrinsic definition of whose rights 614 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y 9. In contrast, scholars have linked liberalism to current inequalities. See, for example, Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA, 2016). 10. Dean Baker, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (Washington, D.C., 2016); Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It (New York, 2020); Zephyr Teachout, Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money (New York, 2020). 11. David Hume’s Political Discourses (1752) influenced Smith (as well as Marx) and has been recognized as a foundational work about the political economy. Available online through Project Gutenberg, last accessed January 5, 2021, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/59792/59792h/59792-h.htm. 12. Smith also used “free trade,” but never said “capitalism” because the word was coined in the nineteenth century. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books I–III, edited with an introduction by Andrew Skinner (London, 1999 [1776]); Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books IV–V, edited with an introduction by Andrew Skinner (London, 1999 [1776]); “capitalism, n.2,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, last accessed January 5, 2021, https://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/27454?rskey¼qZu046&result¼2&isAdvanced¼false. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 counted and should be protected, liberalism was inherently vulnerable to manipulation by those with the power to determine who counted as fully human: property owners over non-owners; men over women; slaveholders over the enslaved; settlers over the Indigenous; colonizers over the colonized; whites over nonwhites; and so forth. Most Americans, however, do not associate the word “liberal” with Indian removal, slavery, or current miseries.9 So we can say that what Amin called the liberal virus created a foggy state of comprehension, particularly in the United States. For Americans who self-identify as liberal, being liberal means caring about the welfare and rights of minoritized peoples. It means embracing the right to personal, open-minded expression in speech, art, dress, manner, and love. It means fighting against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and other harms. Yet American liberals do hear the word “neoliberal” tossed around as a pejorative. And many American liberals may agree that neoliberal ideology’s insistence on unfettered markets has caused calamitous mass inequalities and understand that the vaunted “free market” is often not a “fair market,” but rather one “rigged” to preserve the privileges of economic giants.10 It is more difficult for them to understand, though, how neoliberalism is a form of liberalism that cannot be easily extracted from it. Since neoliberal unfairness appears so at odds with liberal notions of justice, it may appear that this market orientation is not truly embedded in liberalism. This idea is not without merit. Early Enlightenment thinkers centered humans, not the market, in their inquiries. Arguably, ideas about the market became incorporated and intertwined in liberalism in the eighteenth century, particularly with the writings of Adam Smith.11 In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith argued against mercantilist protectionism and in favor of what he called “the freedom of trade.”12 We should note, however, that Smith’s ideas about the economy sprang from the humanist side of liberalism. Before Smith penned The Wealth of A Different Pandemic : 615 13. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th ed., with introduction by Amartya Sen and edited with notes by Ryan Patrick Hanley (New York, 2009 [1790]), kindle loc. 558. 14. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books I–III, 107. 15. Amartya Sen, “Introduction”, in Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, kindle loc. 146. 16. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books I–III, 11–12; Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books IV–V, 26–27. 17. This statement by a fictional character played by Michael Douglas has resonated, reflecting what many have believed to be the ethos of Wall Street, including those promoting the financial industry. For example, see: Robert Pagliarini, “Greed it Good: Why You Need to Tap Into Your Inner Gordon Gekko,” Moneywatch Blog, CBS News, June 2, 2011, last accessed October 9, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/greed-is-good-why-you-need-to-tap-intoyour-inner-gordon-gekko/. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 Nations, he published what he considered his magnum opus, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), a text that he continued to revise until shortly before his death in 1790. In his preface to the last, much expanded sixth edition, Smith stated that his decades-long effort to lay out “the general principles of law and government” remained incomplete. He thought he covered these principles as they related to “police, revenues, and arms” in his Inquiry concerning the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, but confessed that his “advanced age” would likely prevent him from offering a satisfactory explanation of how governance should relate to “justice” and “whatever else is the object of law.”13 It may surprise some self-avowed disciples of the so-called father of capitalism to know that it was Smith, not Karl Marx, who stated that when government regulation “is in favor of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favor of the masters.” Smith’s concern for labor fairness came from a recognition that employers held more power than their workers and could withhold fair, honest payment.14 Ignored or unbeknownst to most today, Smith’s concerns about moral behavior underlay his treatise on market behavior. Instead, Smith has been rendered “the guru of selfishness” through a narrow reading not only of Smith’s writings, but also of The Wealth of Nations itself.15 Well-known are Smith’s pronouncements that self-interested behavior motivates work for the greater good, but they are taken out of context. The famous quote about the butcher, baker, and brewer being spurred by “self-love” was Smith’s attempt to explain why individuals would be motivated to trade. It was not an axiom about all behavior, or even all economic behavior. Likewise, the famous phrase about an individual being “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part his intention” referred specifically to why individuals would support a domestic market as part of a larger argument against tariffs. Adams posited an individual did so in order to keep a closer eye on his “capital,” rather than to promote the nation.16 This was not a blanket statement about all individual market activities working magically in tandem to produce benefits to the greater society. The liberal virus has thus led to the hallucination that, as Gordon Gekko put it in the 1987 film Wall Street, “greed is good.”17 Not only has liberalism justified a selfishness that could ignore the welfare of others, but also it could also 616 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y 18. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books I–III, 12–13. 19. David Ricardo, Marx acknowledged, advanced Smith’s insights, particularly about determining what constituted “value,” but Marx believed that Ricardo also remained ahistorical. Geoff Pilling, Marx’s Capital: Philosophy and Political Economy, reprinted edition (New York, 2009 [1980]), 9–66. 20. Friedrich Engels, introduction to Karl Marx, Capital: Critique of Political Economy, vol 3, edited by New Left Review with introduction by Ernest Mandel, trans. by David Fernbach, reprinted edition (New York, 1991 [1981] [1894]), 103. 21. For Marx’s attempts—not wholly successful—to go beyond Eurocentrism see: Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, 2nd, enlarged edition (Chicago, IL, 2010). For an explanation of why Marx’s stadial philosophy of history, historical materialism, was not historical predestination, see: Ernst Fischer, How to Read Karl Marx, rev. ed., with introduction by John Bellamy Foster and commentary by Paul M. Sweezy, (New York, 1996 [1970]), 89–99. 22. Quotation in reference not only to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), but also the subtitle of his Capital vol 1 (1867), vol 2 (1885); vol 3 (1894). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 overlook existing hierarchies. Those most active in spreading the virus have developed immunities that have provided them with a degree of protection from the harms caused by self-serving, fever-induced delusions of goodness. The notion that self-interestedness somehow automatically leads to a greater public good has been highly contagious because its progressive features could serve to mask more regressive ones. Again, it’s important to notice the desire to do good, or at least appear to be doing good, at the basis of this greed. In other words, it’s crucial to understand that liberalism draws its power from its progressive, humanist origins. Could it be said, then, that liberalism needs to be truer to the tenets that its philosophers intended? Smith, after all, cared deeply about inequality and pointed out that socialization—“habit, custom, and education”—created the differences between, say, a “philosopher and a common street porter.”18 But while Smith understood theoretically that “all men are created equal”—to quote his U.S. contemporary—he did not investigate how inequalities developed over time and became structurally embedded in the society that he examined. Why were there, for instance, more porters than philosophers, and why could philosophers command higher wages than porters? The flaw in Smith’s theorization, Marx pointed out, was a presentism that presumed the worldviews and categories of the eighteenth century to be timeless.19 Admittedly, Marxists have been accused of the same, but as Friedrich Engels explained, Marx did not intend his definitions to be categorically definitive or “valid for all time”: they were to serve as starting points for further investigations. Marx’s critics “rest on the misunderstanding,” Engels wrote, “that Marx seeks to define where he only explains.”20 For nearly a half century, Marx himself continuously revised and fine-tuned his understanding of political economy as he continued to learn about more parts of the world.21 A major aim of Marx’s “critique of political economy” was historicizing and understanding how labor came to be valued and rendered as wage labor.22 He also opposed the liberal logic that the “only bond between men is natural necessity, need and A Different Pandemic : 617 23. The quote comes from a section in which Marx critiques the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1791) in an essay responding to Bruno Bauer’s writings in 1842–1843 about the possibility of Jewish emancipation in Germany. Marx disagreed with Bauer that Jews (and Christians) had to give up their religion to be treated equally by the state, and he went on to stress that human emancipation requires more than simply political rights. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1844) in Marx, Selected Writings, edited with introduction by Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis, IN, 1994), 17. 24. Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York, 2009). 25. Jurgen Reinhoudt and Serge Audier, The Walter Lippmann Colloquium: The Birth of NeoLiberalism (Cham, 2017), 4. 26. Dara Orenstein, Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism (Chicago, IL, 2019); Patrick Chung, “Building Global Capitalism: Militarization, Standardization, and USSouth Korean Relations, 1950-present” (Ph.D. diss, Brown University, 2017). 27. Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT, 2010). 28. The second paragraph of this extended metaphor refers to neoliberalism, with the now “mutated” virus returning to Europe with dire results. Amin, Liberal Virus, 7. 29. Amin, 9. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons.”23 To Marx, liberalism’s narrow focus on individual rights failed to recognize that a just society must always consider human relationships within communities. Yet the power of liberalism lies in the fact that its progressive side has never been completely subsumed and has co-existed in uneasy tension with its more regressive side. In different eras, one side may be more predominant than the other. For instance, during the Great Depression, New Deal policies placed safety nets in the United States in order to protect human livelihood, albeit unevenly, from the ravages of the joblessness, crop failure, and financial ruin. But over the next half-century, these safety nets became frayed as capitalists and their allies tugged and wrestled against restrictions to profit as freely as possible, without much attention to human welfare, as they did before the 1930s.24 Neoliberalism was coined by those who advocated this return to a pre-Great Depression prioritization of market-oriented liberalism.25 Moreover, late twentieth-century technological and infrastructural innovations allowed capitalists to come nearer to achieving their dream of a globalized market free from the impediments of tariffs and labor demands.26 Indeed, the innovations allowed the offshoring of jobs to diminish domestic worker power in favor of a cheaper labor force with no direct voice in U.S. politics.27 Neoliberal triumph also conquered the imagination. Riffing on Amin’s metaphor, we can say that by the end of the twentieth century, the liberal virus had consumed the earth, nearly snuffing out the ability to envision other possible ways to organize societies. “There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher often intoned.28 Since the 1970s, we have been reared with the pipe dream that “economic efficiency measured by capitalist profitability” is what ensures a good, effective society.29 Thatcher’s authoritarian refrain has been tempered 618 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y 30. Water Mignolo has described liberal modernity in terms of sorcery, not a pandemic. See Walter Mignolo, “The Enduring Enchantment: (Or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here),” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 927–54. 31. Calculated on June 1, 2020 based on world population, 7.8 billion and the number of billionaires cited by Forbes and statistics on combined wealth by Oxfam’s REPORT on 2019. The exponential amassing of wealth since the pandemic would make this statistic even more skewed. See: “Forbes World’s Billionaires List: The Richest in 2020,” last accessed June 1 2020, https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/; and, Max Lawson, Anam Parvez Butt, Rowan Harvey, Diana Sarosi, Clare Coffey, Kim Piaget, Julie Thekkudan, “A Time to Care: Unpaid and Underpaid Care Work and the Global Inequality Crisis,” Oxfam International Policy Paper, January 20, 2020, last accessed June 1, 2020, https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/ time-care. See also: Dominic Rushe, “Making billions v making ends meet: how the pandemic has split the economy in two,” The Guardian, August 16, 2020, last accessed August 16, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/16/us-inequality-coronaviruspandemic-unemployment. 32. Bezos’ wealth went from $145.5 billion to $147.8, according to moments of access at “The World’s Real-Time Billionaires” list, accessed May 29 2020 and June 1, 2020, https:// www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#6ca0ac073d78. Between mid-March and early August 2020, the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires increased $685 billion based on this same Forbes data. See: “Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers,” Billionaire Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 with an alluring vision that tax cuts to the rich would create more jobs.30 A rising tide of wealth would supposedly “lift all boats.” But neoliberal globalization helps explain today’s staggering inequalities. Not nature, but liberal nurture, has enabled the world’s richest 0.000027 percent (i.e., billionaires) to siphon off more wealth than the total wealth of sixty percent of the global population.31 Those of us who have enjoyed fairly comfortable lives have not been “incentivized” to question our upbringing. That so many who did not, could not, benefit from the neoliberal policies nevertheless believed so earnestly in the hallucination speaks to the grip the virus has had on minds, particularly in the Global North. Those in the Global South have been somewhat less susceptible to such feverish hallucinations. Along with Indigenous peoples the world over, they were the ones on the more repressive receiving end of liberalism in the form of western imperialism. Yet the massive protests in cities across the United States during 2020 suggest that more Americans have developed immunities against the liberal virus. In contrast to those who have survived and thrived on liberalism, they are beginning to protect themselves from the hollow promises of liberalism. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Americans were recognizing that they could no longer expect generational upward mobility. Even with steep investment in college education, children will not necessarily “do better” than their parents. Others—particularly African Americans and the Indigenous— have long realized that they do not have much of a stake in a society that continues to be unjust and racially unequal. After all, it’s a society in which one man (Jeff Bezos) can see his personal wealth increase by $2.3 billion dollars over a weekend (May 29-June 1, 2020), while another (George Floyd) can be kneed in the neck and suffocate to death for allegedly trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill (May 25, 2020).32 It’s a society in which a white liberal female pet owner— A Different Pandemic : 619 Bonanza 2020 Updates Blog, Inequality.Org, Institute for Policy Studies, posted August 6, 2020, last accessed August 10, 2020, https://inequality.org/billionaire-bonanza-2020-updates/? emci¼c0ca28e7-2edb-ea11-8b03-00155d0394bb&emdi¼00a63e8e-37db-ea11-8b03-00155d03 94bb&ceid¼7300740. 33. Nylah Burton, “It looks like Amy Cooper, the white woman in the viral Central Park video, is a liberal. That’s important,” The Independent, May 27, 2020, last accessed June 1, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/amy-cooper-central-park-racist-dog-walker-trumpa9533581.html. 34. Heidi Shierholz, “Nearly one in four workers has applied for unemployment benefits: Congress must do much, much more,” Working Economics Blog, Economic Policy Institute, posted May 21, 2020, last accessed June 1, 2020, https://www.epi.org/blog/nearly-one-in-fourBen workers-has-applied-for-unemployment-benefits-congress-must-do-much-much-more/; Zipperer and Josh Bivens, “16.2 million workers have likely lost employer provided health insurance the coronavirus shock began,” Working Economic Blog, Economic Policy Institute, last accessed June 1, 2020, https://www.epi.org/blog/16-2-million-workers-have-likely-lost-employer-provided-health-insurance-since-the-coronavirus-shock-began/. 35. “Why Eviction Matters,” Eviction Lab blog, last accessed July 1, 2020, https://evictionlab.org/why-eviction-matters/#affordable-housing-crisis. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 who has donated to Democratic presidential candidates, including Barack Obama and, most recently, Pete Buttigieg—feels entitled to weaponize the police against a Black bird-watcher (Christian Cooper) for asking her to abide by the law.33 It’s a world where a Black jogger (Ahmaud Arbery) can be murdered simply for getting fresh air and exercise. Where a Black woman (Breonna Taylor) can be murdered by police where she should be safe, in the comfort of her bed late at night. It’s a nation where a Black father (Jacob Blake) can be shot seven times in the back by police in front of his three young sons. It’s also where a four-year-old Black girl already knew how to comfort her mother (Diamond Reynolds) after they both witnessed the mother’s boyfriend (Philando Castile) fatally shot by police during a traffic shop. Floyd’s murder tipped off a national wave of protest because of the structural inequalities in the neoliberal era that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated. By late May, nearly twenty-five percent of workers had applied for unemployment benefits; over sixteen million Americans were estimated to have lost their employer-provided health insurance since the pandemic began.34 Even if a great proportion of that unemployment represents temporary furloughs, the United States will still face a monumental employment crisis in the coming years. Automation through artificial intelligence will deprive good incomes or a living wage to millions of workers doing routine jobs in retail, trucking/delivery, clerical tasks, accounting, computer programming, financial services, legal work, and medicine. No job means no income to pay rent. Already, the poorest Americans have been devoting half their incomes to rent and utilities, with a quarter of them using seventy percent of their income for housing costs.35 Within weeks of the initial lockdowns, news outlets and local officials across the nation—and around the world—began warning about an impending “eviction tsunami.” In the United States, low-income, non-white 620 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y 36. “Why Eviction Matters.” 37. Ian Shapira, “White supremacists made Charlottesville a symbol of racism. Black residents say it still is,” Washington Post, August 11, 2020, last accessed August 12, 2020, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/local/white-supremacists-made-charlottesville-a-symbol-of-racismblack-residents-say-it-still-is/2020/08/11/7455df10-da61-11ea-809e-b8be57ba616e_story.html. 38. A seventeen-year-old white male crossed state lines from Illinois with an assault rifle, killed two and injured others at an August 25, 2020 protest about the August 23, 2020 shooting of Jacob Blake. Three years earlier, a twenty-year old white male from Ohio drove his car into anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 mothers—particularly victims of domestic abuse—will suffer the most from this unnatural disaster.36 The liberal solution of ensuring that Black or other non-white people are placed in positions of power does nothing to address anti-black racism unless the material inequalities of racism are addressed. In Charlottesville, Virginia, three years after the 2017 “Unite the Right” racist uprising, Black residents say that systemic racism persists even though they now have a Black mayor, police chief, and city manager/chief executive officer. Gentrification continues to push out low-income Black and Afro-Latinx residents from their homes; the school system has failed to close achievement gaps between Black and white students; the city police persist in stopping Black people at a disproportionately high rate; white supremacists still feel emboldened to harass anti-racism activists.37 Or, kill them, as the latest news at this writing has shown once again.38 So when protesters proclaim “people over profits,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Defund the Police,” they are arguing that their governments, institutions, and companies should institute either laws and/or policies that prioritize the well-being of people over things, people over the ability of the wealthy to accrue even more wealth. Many are aware that the structural inequalities are the ineluctable consequences of capitalism, a political economic system oriented towards the limitless accumulation of profit. The youthful critics of racial capitalism in particular have been inoculated from a younger age—and mostly through peer networks—against liberal misdirection that socialism will inevitably lead to authoritarianism. Cold War liberal red-baiting no longer has the leverage it once did. These young people were born or came to consciousness after 1989, and the notion that history “ended” just after or before their birth makes little sense to them. As they face a very uncertain future, young people seem to more easily question the neoliberal deception that capitalism is the only morally responsible political economy that can exist. Ironically, those who disdain “liberals,” the self-identified conservatives, are those who exhibit less resistance to the liberal virus. Their belief in liberal promises of capitalism is why they feel betrayed and furiously blame “big government,” the “liberal media,” and other, usually more disadvantaged, workers. White privilege no longer provides access to better jobs and income as it once did. As W.E.B. DuBois pointed out nearly a century ago, poorly paid white workers “were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage” A Different Pandemic : 621 39. W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Towards a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, reprint with introduction by David Levering Lewis (New York, 2007 [1935]), 700–701. 40. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA, 2019); John Gramlich and Katherine Schaffer, “7 facts about guns in the U.S.” Fact Tank: News in the Numbers blog, Pew Research Center, October 22, 2019, last accessed June 2, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/22/facts-about-guns-inunited-states/. 41. NewTmrw, Twitter post, March 21, 2020, quoted in Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves, and Rodrick Wallace, “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital: New York to China and Back,” Monthly Review 72, no. 1 (2020): 2. 42. Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (New York, 2011). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/dh/article/45/3/611/6311874 by guest on 05 March 2022 of racial superiority.39 Today, after four decades of stagnated real income and job insecurity in the United States, the “wages of whiteness” have been bankrolling an energized white supremacist movement as we saw on January 6, 2021. Adding to this volatile situation is the fact that in 2019, forty-two percent of U.S. adults live in a gun-owning household, and that many of the unemployed are or will be former military personnel with firearms.40 After the outbreak of the coronavirus, we saw these Americans insist on a liberalism that emphasizes individual liberty over collective safety as it applies not only to the second amendment, but also to the refusal to wear masks. A March 2020 tweet that Amin would have surely appreciated stated, “Coronavirus is too radical. America needs a more moderate virus that we can respond to incrementally.”41 After all, liberals are reformers in the sociopolitical sphere. A tenet of liberalism is a faith that flaws in the system do not need radical change, but are self-correcting.42 But with the planet on fire—socially, politically, climatically—we do not have the luxury of time. As this essay goes to press, we are finally seeing the widespread distribution of a safe, effective vaccine for the coronavirus. But it will take much longer and more effort to continue to build and circulate resistance to the liberal virus.