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Dear Friend,
Hope you’re comfortably hunkered down at home and staying well. Now, more than ever, we must be vigilant about not only preserving our health and community but also ensuring our democracy doesn’t collapse under the weight of the White House’s extreme incompetence. To do this, we need to stay informed on a local, national, and global level. We need to think creatively about how to get through this pandemic and rebuild a healthy economic, social, and democratic United States. Every day, The New Republic’s writers and contributors, some of the most progressive independent voices in the country, report on the state of the union and present novel solutions for reimagining who we are, who we should be, and how we can fundamentally challenge the status quo.
Have your read Pulitzer prize-winning author Laurie Garrett’s recent article “Grim Reapers”?
“Trump’s March 11 speech to the nation from the Oval Office showed in no uncertain terms that his administration and his senior advisers on the crisis had failed to adapt in any serious way to a mounting public health emergency,” Garrett notes. “By referring once more to the issue of border security—a key demagogic theme of his 2016 presidential campaign—Trump ignored what was by then an obvious truth of the coronavirus pandemic: National borders mean nothing to a virus seeking host organisms.”
“The Trump administration’s response to the virus was replicating, in all its major outlines, the way that the Communist Party leadership in China had badly bungled its own initial reaction to the coronavirus outbreak in and around the major city of Wuhan.”
Garret goes on to state: “It is tragic and perverse that animosities between two egotistical leaders and their sycophantic circles of advisers have placed the entire world in grave peril.… No reasonable dialogue between the United States and China can transpire unless both sides are willing to start the conversation based on valid science. Neither Beijing nor Washington seems remotely inclined to take on this humbling challenge to the actual legacies of their respective Covid-19 programs.…
“The larger political story of the 2020 coronavirus crisis, in other words, may well prove to be a powerful case study in the way that governments controlled by leaders prone to unilateral decision-making, and the top-down information regimes they rely on to perpetuate their rule, are all but guaranteed to create maximum conditions of public health breakdown,” suggests Garrett.
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