The Zombie Realignment

After President Donald Trump delivered a national address to calm mounting national panic over the coronavirus pandemic, greater panic ensued, to virtually no one’s surprise. Trading futures on Wall Street tanked immediately after the president’s speech and resumed careening downward the morning after, triggering yet another suspension of trading.

And Trump’s response to spiraling market panic is, predictably, still more panicked giveaways to investors and corporate titans getting walloped in the now-official bear market that’s greeted Trump’s feckless handling of the coronavirus crisis. Trump also touted a package of giveaways to industry barons caught out in the downturn, like oil titan Harold Hamm, a longtime Trump confrere who lost $2 billion in Monday’s market dive alone. This latest Trump gambit, writes New Republic staff writer Kate Aronoff, could signal a major step backward for industrial policy and the environment alike.

On paper, the present crisis should play to the strengths of Democratic policymaking, Aronoff writes:

Containing disease requires the kind of big and active government response Trump’s inner circle has been incapable of mustering and will keep fumbling through whatever the stimulus looks like. The country’s biggest polluters are in crisis, and some massive stimulus package—one likely to require approval from the House of Representatives—could be the foundation for charting a path away from fossil fuels that prioritizes investing in public health infrastructure, raising living standards, and reducing emissions along a science-based timeline.

But just as the bailouts engineered in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown yielded mostly symbolic reforms in exchange for oceans of free money for Wall Street, so now it appears that the D.C. policy nexus will produce a lavish subvention of the status quo. Or, as Aronoff observes, “bothparties seem poised to make the worst of this crisis.”

For starters, bailing out the oil sector will serve to prop up operations such asshale extraction that are already reeling from the Saudi-Russian price war. The challenge for such environmentally harmful models of oil extraction is less to bail them out than to wind them down, and to ensure a just transition for the workers displaced in the process. Given that there’s already a glut in supply, Aronoff notes, “paying drillers to produce more could do more harm than good. And there’s little about shale fuel’s house-of-cards business model that seems built to last, with or without the proposed stimulus.”

And failing to produce an alternative to an industry bailout mostly benefittingexecutives presents a significant political risk. Joe Biden, the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination, is closely aligned with oil interests, and disowns the kind of large-scale deficit-backed stimulus the present crisis calls out for. And that could leave Trump positioned as the champion of beleaguered oil workers—on paper, at least—in the critical runup to the 2020general election.

The fallout of the coronavirus ... could make the American right embrace big government and deficit spending more openly than ever before, however haphazard its approach. While bound to fail in the long run—or provide a meaningful answer to the COVID-19 crisis—it could pump temporary life into the industries where Trump’s closest friends are and lend short-term relief to families in need, boosting his chances in November. The Democratic establishment, meanwhile, looks ready to double down on partisan posturing and deficit hawkishness. The result could be a zombie realignment in American politics, propping up the revivified corpse of Joe Biden’s approach to policy and politics in a move that will be as big a disaster for the planet as it is for the Democratic Party.

In other words, some viruses don’t come from intemperate face touching or unclean surfaces, but from terrible failures of the political imagination—something to ponder when you venture out of quarantine long enough to vote.

—Chris Lehmann, Editor