The election that is just over
four months away is certainly the most important election in any of our
lifetimes. I know that politics is a very divisive subject and that both
feelings and loyalties run deep. But I would ask you to consider the reasons I
give below for voting the current administration and its enablers out of
office.
First, it is a matter of life and
death for many Americans, and I am not engaging in hyperbole here. I am being
very literal. Let’s look at a few numbers. As of Sunday, June 28, 2020,
according to Worldometer, there have been 502,539 deaths attributed to
COVID-19. Of those deaths, 128,211 have occurred in the United States. What
that means is that the U.S., with 4.2 percent of the world’s population (328.2
million), has experienced 25.5 percent of the world’s deaths. By comparison,
let’s look at a few other countries:
Germany: population, 83 million (1.1%); deaths, 9,026
(1.8%)
Canada: population, 37.6 million (0.5%); deaths,
8,516 (1.7%)
Denmark: population, 5.8 million (0.07%); deaths, 604
(0.12%)
Switzerland: population, 8.6 million (0.11%); deaths,
1,962 (0.39%)
Sweden: population, 10.2 million (0.13%); deaths,
5,280 (1.1%)
Japan: population, 126.5 million (1.6%); deaths, 971
(0.19%)
New Zealand: population, 4.9 million (0.06%); deaths,
22 (0.004%)
South Korea: population, 51.6 million (0.66%);
deaths, 282 (0.06%)
Taiwan: population, 23.8 million (0.3%); deaths, 7
(0.0014%)
There are certainly countries that have intentionally underreported
their deaths, likely Russia and China among them. And there are many Third
World countries where reporting is probably limited due to lack of resources.
But the countries listed above are probably reporting as reliably as they can,
although U.S. numbers are certainly underreported. There are also other
countries that are performing poorly. Brazil, for instance, with 209.5 million
residents (2.7%), has reported 57,149 deaths (11.4%). I can’t help but wonder
if Brazil’s rising death total has something to do with the fact that our South
American neighbor has a Trump-like president who has been leading a coronavirus
denial movement in Brazil. If you add the two countries’ totals together,
Brazil and the United States have 6.9 percent of the world’s population but
have experienced 36.9 percent of the world’s reported coronavirus deaths.
One study from Columbia University
has indicated that if the U.S. had responded just two weeks earlier, we would
have saved 54,000 lives. But during this time, Trump was more concerned about
the stock market and how it would affect his re-election chances than about the
lives of the citizens he was elected to serve. Denial and baseless happy talk
were the order of the day. When he finally came around to recognizing the
severity of the situation, he reluctantly called for social-distancing
guidelines but did not call for the sort of testing and contact tracing that
would have enabled us to shut down the virus as many more prepared nations have
done. He left that up to the states, who did not have the resources to put such
testing and contact tracing into effect quickly and ended up competing against
each other for necessary supplies. What Trump did do was conduct daily press
briefings that looked more like campaign events, at which he rambled on and on,
often spouting nonsense, while the medical experts stood uncomfortably behind
him and tried to keep from cringing. He finally stopped this charade when his
advisors convinced him they were damaging his re-election prospects. Eventually,
after his own administration had issued guidelines for reopening the economy,
Trump was the head cheerleader for states to actually ignore those guidelines
and open prematurely. We are now experiencing the results of this recklessness.
Those states that ignored Trump are still on a downward slope in new cases and
deaths. States that jumped in with both feet, as it were, such as Arizona,
Texas, Florida, and South Carolina, are experiencing a massive surge in cases
and hospitalizations. Arizona’s numbers, in fact, exceed Brazil’s. The experts
have been telling us all along that in order to save the economy, we first have
to contain the virus. Trump has tried to do it backward, and the results are
looking disastrous. Essentially, his words and example have led to
counterproductive behavior on the part of many Americans.
So let’s talk about masks. I’m
sure some of my Republican friends could cite fringe studies showing that mask-wearing
doesn’t have much of an effect one way or the other. But almost all the
evidence points to the benefits of masking up. Let’s be honest. It is virtually
impossible to conduct a randomized, controlled trial (RCT) on wearing face
masks. And, as the Salt Lake Tribune’s excellent COVID reporter Andy Larsen
pointed out, it would probably be unethical to ask a control group to not
wear masks. So we have to look at other evidence, such as the case trends in
states with mask directives as opposed to the trends in states without such
directives. The trends, not surprisingly, go in opposite directions. Because of
the mounting evidence, the medical profession is almost unanimously behind the
wearing of masks. But you won’t find Trump wearing one or encouraging his rally
attendees to wear them. Consequently, the wearing of masks has turned into a
partisan issue. Like global warming, it never should have been.
I am moving my 95-year-old father
from rehab into assisted living this week. He fell and broke his hip four weeks
ago. In preparation for this move, my wife and I took our masks and ventured
out to Walmart to buy several items he would need. I was saddened and rather
uneasy to see that about 70 percent of the shoppers at Walmart were not wearing
masks. And this was one day after Utah set a record for new COVID-19 cases. I
know there are many reasons why people do not wear masks in public, but a lot
of them are political and partisan. I’ve even heard people say, “The government
has no right to tell me what to do.” This is stupid on an order of magnitude I
can’t even describe. I suspect these same folks would not go out and protest
the government-imposed speed limit in the school zone in their neighborhood.
Nor would they drive 60 miles per hour through the zone when the warning lights
are flashing. But they are perfectly willing to give me a dose of the
coronavirus as I do some necessary shopping at Walmart. For some, it’s just an
inconvenience. I have no patience for those who, like Trump, place their own perceived
needs above everyone else’s.
The pandemic, of course, is just
the tip of the iceberg with this president. But it is the most visible evidence
that he is monumentally unfit to occupy the White House, as a growing number of
his former administration officials are testifying (or writing books about).
Anyone who votes for him is voting for another four years of incompetence on a
grand scale and corruption like we have never seen in an administration. After
eight virtually scandal-free years of No-Drama Obama, with Trump we have seen
one major scandal after another, interspersed with an endless parade of minor
outrages. Whether insulting our allies, sucking up to brutal dictators, waging
trade wars that have decimated U.S. farmers, locking refugees in cages,
politicizing the Department of Justice, rolling back pollution regulations,
filing a lawsuit that would end health-care protections for people with pre-existing
conditions, illegally diverting Pentagon funds to build a needless wall that
Mexico was going to pay for (LOL), asking foreign governments to help him get
re-elected, profiteering off his office, or using the military to attack
peaceful protesters, Donald Trump has been a disastrous president, uninterested
in acquiring the knowledge he needs or trusting the experts who have that knowledge
in order to make difficult decisions.
But there are other reasons for
voting both Trump and his enablers out of office. First among them is to save
the Republican Party, if that is even possible at this late date. I am a
Democrat, but I used to be a Republican, before the party took a hard right
turn and went off the cliff. Although I do not agree with many conservative
principles, I do see the need for a strong conservative party based on those principles.
That party started to go astray 40 years ago when Reagan became enthralled with
supply-side economics, and it has gone further astray over time as it has
become the alternative-facts party, the science denial party, the economic
fantasy party, the cruelty party, and the not-so-subtly racist and xenophobic
party.
Republicans, I want you to ask
yourselves what your party’s solutions are for health care. Ask yourselves how
many Germans or Swiss or Danes or Japanese or South Koreans or New Zealanders,
or Italians lost their health insurance due to the pandemic. The answer, of
course, is zero. But how many Americans did? One estimate is 27 million. Add
this to the 28 million who already did not have health insurance and you get a
pretty frightening picture about how “exceptional” America really is. And if
Trump’s lawsuit succeeds, some estimate that another 30 million people with
pre-existing conditions will lose their insurance. All that Republicans have to
offer in return is the argument that Medicare for All would cost too much. But
if every other developed country on earth can offer health care to 100 percent
of its citizens, why can’t we? And they do it at half the cost of our “system”
and get better results.
This leads, of course, to one of
the most popular bogeyman the Republicans trot out every so often: socialism.
Socialized medicine is just the first step on the path to Venezuela or Cuba!
I’ve heard this countless times. Interesting, isn’t it, though, how socialized
medicine did not lead to communism for Germany or Norway or Japan or Great
Britain or South Korea or any of the other countries that enjoy full and
less-expensive health care. In fact, my German friends consider themselves far
more free in terms of acquiring needed health care than we Americans are with
our employer-based, provider-network-restricted, for-profit system of carefully
orchestrated care denial. But since Joe Biden will certainly be accused of
caving in to the socialists in his party, let’s talk about socialism.
A story might help put this
discussion in a realistic context. Back in 1984, five years before the Berlin
Wall came down, my wife and I ventured into communist East Berlin one summer
day. We saw people standing in lines a block long to buy produce. We purchased
a very unappetizing lunch at a state-run cafeteria. We stopped at an ice cream
shop on Unter den Linden and found they were out of almost everything on the
menu by 4:00 in the afternoon. We tried to spend our obligatory 50 Ostmarks at
the largest department store in East Berlin (each visitor was required to
exchange 25 Westmarks for 25 Ostmarks at the border, even though the Ostmark
had a fraction of the Westmark’s value); we failed to find anything we wanted,
except a cheap noodle press and a metric measuring cup. The majority of our 50
Ostmarks we exchanged back into Westmarks when we left, but at the real
exchange rate. We watched poorly built Trabants motor loudly up and down the
streets of East Berlin, belching out foul fumes. Soldiers with automatic
weapons were everywhere. The buildings were rundown, many of them still boasting
bullet holes from the war that had ended almost 40 years before. Needless to
say, we were not impressed with communism, and we were extremely happy to
return to the hustle and plenty of West Berlin. We ate at a small Slavic
restaurant in Neukölln
that evening, and I can still remember how ecstatic I was that my salad came
complete with cucumbers and tomatoes. I could never have gotten a salad like
that in the East, I exclaimed.
But the contrast here was not
between communism and capitalism. It was a contrast between communism and
socialism. For Germany in the 1980s was what Republicans would consider a
socialist country, and it still is today. The problem here is a naïve and
simplistic view of economic systems. In reality, there is not some monolithic
system called capitalism. There are actually a variety of forms we could call
capitalism, although pure capitalism (where all members of society are
capitalists) does not yet exist. What we have are economies that fall along a
spectrum between pure capitalism and socialism. We have various aspects of
socialism in America: street maintenance, police and fire protection, public
education, and Social Security, to name a few. And nobody (at least nobody in
their right mind) would want to privatize all these functions of civilized
society and turn them over to the capitalists. Nobody, including the most
rapacious and cutthroat business, wants a purely free market. Without
consistent and sensible government regulations, the free market would break
down in short order. So don’t fall for the right-wing fear-mongering about
“Socialism!” There are instead many forms of hybrid capitalism-socialism.
Germany’s particular recipe, for instance, is more socialist than ours is, and
it happens to function a lot better in giving its citizens a prosperous and
secure life. Germany has a strong economy with a trade surplus, but with less
inequality and less debt.
Republicans are all in favor of
the health insurance industry. But have they ever considered the principle upon
which insurance operates? Basically, you have a large pool of people who pay
monthly premiums (although often their employers pay the lion’s share). You
also have a smaller number of people in any given month who require expensive
medical procedures or treatments. It’s all a numbers game. Insurance companies
calculate the risks based on past experience and current trends and set their
rates accordingly. And they always factor in a percentage of profit as well as
enough to cover all their administrative expenses. The underlying principle of
so-called socialized medicine is the same. Except you have a much larger pool,
and “premiums” are paid through taxes. Usually, in insurance, the larger the
pool, the better. But in the case of government-run or -regulated health care,
you don’t factor in any profit, and administrative costs are significantly
lower. This is why other countries can offer better-quality health care to
everyone in their countries at a significantly lower cost than we pay in
America. Yes, there are imperfections in any system, and the Republicans always
look for stories to illustrate how bad socialized medicine is. But name one developed
country whose citizens would vote to replace their system with ours.
One of Trump’s main claims for
re-electing him is that he created the “greatest economy” this country has ever
seen. But this is simply not true. Trump rode the coattails of the Obama
recovery from the Great Recession, and if you look at the numbers for Trump’s
first three years and Obama’s last three, they are very comparable, except that
Obama had consistently decreasing deficits, while Trump’s have consistently
increased. We never did see the growth rates Trump boasted he would produce.
According to Forbes magazine,
GDP growth during Trump’s first three years was slightly lower than during
Obama’s last three years. Other metrics show similar results. And Trump’s
numbers benefit from a totally unneeded tax cut for the wealthy that added
trillions to the national debt and did not increase business investment as
Trump promised. Instead, they bought their own stock back. And yet for some
reason, Americans overall think Trump would do better with the economy than
Biden. This is perception based on baseless bragging and misinformation.
Of course, now that the economy
has tanked because of the coronavirus (and America’s economy will certainly not
rebound as fast as other countries that took appropriate measures to control
the outbreak), Trump does not have even a relatively healthy economy to run on.
He has pushed states to open prematurely, and now we are caught not in a second
wave, but in an extended first wave that other countries are not experiencing.
If you look at a comparison of Europe and Canada to the U.S., you can see how
utterly irresponsible our response has been, especially in the red states that
opened far too quickly and carelessly, including Utah. This chart produced for
Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column illustrates the difference.
Trump has always placed his own
interests ahead of the country’s, and this is simply more proof that it is the
wrong approach. Trump is so desperate for an economic rebound to boost his
re-election bid that he has failed to understand that you can’t have an
economic recovery without controlling the virus first. He also does not
understand that in a crisis like this, you score political points by doing the
responsible thing, even if it is painful, and not by being overly and
narcissistically aggressive. The polls bear this out. But is Trump capable of
learning from experience? Or from evidence? No. If we put him in the White
House for four more years, we are asking for a similar response to any other
disaster that comes along. We can’t afford this.
I haven’t mentioned the Black
Lives Matter protests, and I will not go into any detail on this topic other
than to say that here also Trump is so wildly out of tune with what this
country needs that he is simply showing his true colors, which lean racist and
authoritarian. I would ask Republicans to consider this question: Which party
attracts white supremacists and why? The answer is not pleasant, but it needs
to be thoroughly examined and remedied.
Another question Republicans need
to ask themselves is why their party is so involved in both extreme
gerrymandering and voter suppression, particularly suppressing the votes of
people of color. Since the conservative-leaning Supreme Court disemboweled the
Voting Right Act of 1965 under the specious excuse that it’s no longer needed, several
Republican-led states have done everything they can to keep minorities from
voting. As Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts puts it, “With the Act
out of the way, Republicans have unleashed an explosion of measures—purges,
shutdown of early voting, attacks on absentee ballots, closure of polling
places—all putatively to fight voter fraud. But in fixing a problem that
doesn’t exist, the GOP, not accidentally, created one that is very real, making
voting an endurance test for people of color. African Americans now wait longer
to vote, have fewer places to do so and face more obstacles along the way than
they have in 55 years.” Pitts continues, “Kentucky was never covered by the
Act, but perhaps should have been based on its recent primary. The state closed
almost all of its nearly 3,700 polling places, leaving voters with just 170,
supposedly because of the coronavirus pandemic. Louisville, a city of 620,000
people, nearly one in four of them black, had just one polling place.” (See
Pitts’s column here.)
If a political party is secure in the relevance, appeal, and correctness of its
message and policies, it would broadcast these widely and trust that their appeal
would convince voters to embrace them. But if a party has to resort to voter
suppression to win elections, it says worlds about its policies and its
message.
As I mentioned up front, the 2020
election is the most important in any of our lives. You can be as partisan and
tribal as you want and try to somehow persuade yourself that Trump is the
“lesser of two evils,” but on almost any metric, this is absurd. If you value
human decency, moral character, honesty, modesty, or compassion, Biden comes
out way ahead. If you care about the earth and are concerned about global
warming and pollution, you simply cannot vote for Trump. If you want a
health-care system that includes all Americans and costs less than what we
currently endure, you cannot vote Republican. If you want sensible gun laws
(the kind the GOP supported until recent years), you have to vote for Biden
(and no, “they” are not coming to take your guns away—that’s another piece of convenient propaganda). If
you value the Constitution, you cannot vote for Trump, who has undermined and
attacked it almost unceasingly, probing here and there for ways to turn our
system of balanced power into an autocratic system that satisfies his
dictatorial instincts. With a compliant Senate, the firing of five inspector
generals, and the politicizing of the Department of Justice, Trump has shown
exactly how to undermine the Constitution. He wraps himself in the flag, but he
is the most anti-American president imaginable. We cannot afford to embrace
unaccountable power for four more years.
Another bit of propaganda you’ll
hear from right-wing sources is that Joe Biden is old and mentally
incapacitated in some way. They’ll play clips of him making some gaffe or garbling
a sentence. Joe has always been a gaffe machine and has never been all that
glib. But do the honest thing and look up a video of him giving a speech or
granting an interview or participating in a townhall. You’ll find that he’s
perfectly capable of stringing together lots of coherent sentences, something
that Trump has trouble with. He understands the issues and can speak
intelligently on them.
A recent survey offered some
unsurprising information. Republicans, it found, largely trust only one news
source: Fox News, which has a long track record of producing disinformation.
Democrats, by contrast, generally trust five or six news sources. If you are
getting your information solely from Fox News and right-wing radio and blogs,
stop it. The Germans in the 1930s were deceived by the Goebbels propaganda
machine. They had no choice, unless they, like the young Latter-day Saint
Helmuth Hübener,
surreptitiously listened to BBC broadcasts. But we have a choice today. Please
choose to follow numerous unbiased or minimally biased news sources. Get enough
information that you can see the truth.
And please consider that it is not
enough to just not vote for Trump or his enablers. His defeat must be so
convincing that the Republican Party will be forced to disavow everything he is
and has done to undermine conservatism. In other words, you must vote Democrat.
Perhaps it will be only this once. That is fine. But simply not voting for
anyone, or writing in Ann Romney, is insufficient. In this case, silence is
complicity. You owe it to the future of your country and your party to send
this demagogue packing. Don’t be just another of his enablers. Don’t be on the
wrong side of history, because history is not going to be kind to Donald Trump
and his supporters.
I’ll close with the words of
conservative columnist David Brooks: “I know a lot of people aren’t excited
about him, but I thank God that Joe Biden is going to be nominated by the
Democratic Party. He came to public life when it wasn’t about performing your
zeal, it was about crafting coalitions and legislating. He exudes a spirit that
is about empathy and friendship not animosity and canceling.”
