The failure of the liberal imagination
By There are days when the fecklessness of our supposedly “woke” academics throw me into a slough of despond. Look, ye mighty, upon this sociological effusion, and despair [gift link]:
The very different people I spoke with that year [2020] all had one thing in common: a feeling that in the wake of Covid, all the larger institutions they had been taught to trust had failed them. At the most precarious times in their lives, they found there was no system in place to help.
Nearly four years later, the situation is, if anything, worse.
Nursing homes across the country, where poor labor conditions were linked to higher Covid mortality levels, remain understaffed, leaving old, frail residents more vulnerable than they should be. Hunger and food insecurity remain wrenching emergencies. Students haven’t fully returned to school. Congress passed the Child Poverty Reduction Act of 2021, one of the most effective antipoverty measures in decades. Then a year later, Congress ended it, pushing some five million young people back down into extreme financial need.
When everything was uncertain and everyone’s future was on the line, we walked right up to the precipice of a moral breakthrough, and then we turned back.
Yes, Prof. Klinenberg, “Congress” decided in 2021 to give food and medicine to America’s poor children, and then, inexplicably, “Congress” decided to take these things away just a year later! What could possibly explain such grossly inconsistent and cruel behavior on the part of our most important governmental institutions? It is indeed a great and terrible mystery why “we” were on the verge of a “moral breakthrough,” but then “we” turned our backs on the poorest and most vulnerable among us.
The whole thing is like that.
I’m trying not to rant here, but 1.5 MILLION MORE Americans died between 2020 and 2022 than would have died in those years if not for the Covid epidemic and its various effects. 1.5 MILLION American lives lost.
But Klinenberg, who I assume perhaps wrongly is not actually a fascist, given that he’s an NYU sociology professor, frames the governmental response to this disaster as some sort of massive overreach, that understandably produced deep distrust of “the government” among his informants!
The French say that to understand everything is to forgive everything, but it would be more accurate to say that to forgive everything is to misunderstand everything.
I can’t even any more.