Trump's war on pragmatism - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...a-9040-68981f488eed_story.html
trump pragmatism strategies pandemic politics
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We Americans have always fancied ourselves practical, can-do people who put old feuds aside when faced with a big collective problem.
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it’s no accident that one of the United States’ great contributions to philosophy is William James’s theory of pragmatism. Our bias is toward ideas that work and innovation by way of trial and error.
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This tradition acknowledges that we often have multiple goals. In the coronavirus crisis, this means beating the pandemic and getting the economy humming again.
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President Trump is failing because he has abandoned our commitments to favoring problem-solving over ideological posturing and to acting nationally in the face of looming catastrophe.
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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.”
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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
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Instead, Trump championed the extremists who continued their marches on several state capitals over the weekend demanding an abrupt and reckless end to the temporary shutdowns that have slowed the virus’s spread
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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
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“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,
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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.
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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,”