Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She earned a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. in English from Cambridge University, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She writes for several newspapers and periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Criterion, and Public Interest, and is the author of four books, including The War on Cops: How The New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe and The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
She earned a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. in English from
Cambridge University, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School. She writes
for several newspapers and periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Criterion, and Public Interest, and is the author of four books, including The War on Cops: How The New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe and The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
This appeared here. RK
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on June 18, 2020, for a Hillsdale College online symposium, “The Coronavirus and Public Policy.”
The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on June 18, 2020, for a Hillsdale College online symposium, “The Coronavirus and Public Policy.”
Over the last four months, Americans have
lived through what is arguably the most consequential period of
government malfeasance in U.S. history. Public officials’ overreaction
to the novel coronavirus put American cities into a coma; those same
officials’ passivity in the face of widespread rioting threatens to
deliver the coup de grâce. Together, these back-to-back governmental failures will transform the American polity and cripple urban life for decades.
Before store windows started shattering
in the name of racial justice, urban existence was already on life
support, thanks to the coronavirus lockdowns. Small businesses—the
restaurants and shops that are the lifeblood of cities—were shuttered,
many for good, leaving desolate rows of “For Rent” signs on street after
street in New York City and elsewhere. Americans huddled in their homes
for months on end, believing that if they went outside, death awaited
them.
This panic was occasioned by epidemiological models predicting wildly unlikely fatalities from the coronavirus.
On March 30, the infamous Imperial
College London model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by
September 1, absent government action. That prediction was absurd on its
face, given the dispersal of the U.S. population and the fact that
China’s coronavirus death toll had already levelled off at a few
thousand. The authors of that study soon revised it radically downwards.
Too late. It had already become the basis
for the exercise of unprecedented government power. California was the
first state to lock down its economy and confine its citizens to their
homes; eventually almost every other state would follow suit, under
enormous media pressure to do so.
Never before had public officials
required millions of lawful businesses to shut their doors, throwing
tens of millions of people out of work. They did so at the command of
one particular group of experts—those in the medical and public health
fields—who viewed their mandate as eliminating one particular health
risk with every means put at their disposal.
If the politicians who followed their
advice weighed a greater set of considerations, balancing the potential
harm from the virus against the harm from the shutdowns, they showed no
sign of it. Instead, governors and mayors started rolling out one
emergency decree after another to terminate economic activity, seemingly
heedless of the consequences.
The lockdown mandates employed
mind-numbingly arbitrary distinctions. Wine stores and pot dispensaries
were deemed “essential” and thus allowed to stay open; medical offices
were required to close. Large grocery stores got the green light; small
retail establishments with only a few customers each day were out of
luck. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer notoriously used her red pen within megastores to bar the sale of seeds, gardening supplies, and paint.
It was already clear when these crushing
mandates started pouring forth that shutting down every corner of the
country was a reckless overreaction. By mid-March, two weeks before the
Imperial College model was published, Italian health data showed that
the coronavirus was terribly lethal to a very small subset of the
population—the elderly infirm—and a minor health problem to nearly
everyone else who was not already severely ill. The median age of
coronavirus decedents in Italy was 80, and they died with a median of
nearly three comorbidities, such as heart disease and diabetes. The lead
author of the Imperial College model has admitted that up to two-thirds
of all coronavirus fatalities would have died from their comorbidities
by the end of 2020 anyway.
Three months later, this profile of
coronavirus casualties still holds true. Public health interventions
could have been targeted at that highly vulnerable population without
forcing the American economy into a death spiral.
DISINFORMATION
By now it is impossible to attribute the media’s failure to publicize the facts about the coronavirus to mere oversight.
Every story that does not mention,
preferably at the top, the vast overrepresentation of nursing home
deaths in the coronavirus death count—above 50 percent in many countries
and 80 percent in several of our states—is a story that is deliberately
concealing the truth. Casual readers and viewers have been left with
the false impression that everyone is equally at risk, and thus that
draconian measures are justified.
The media have been equally uninterested in the scientific
evidence regarding outdoor transmission. Coronavirus infections require
what Japan calls the three Cs: confined spaces, crowded places, and
close contact. The fleeting encounters on sidewalks and public parks
that characterize much of city life simply do not result in
transmission. And yet if you briskly approach someone on one of
Manhattan’s broad and now empty sidewalks, the oncoming pedestrian may
lunge into the street or press up against the closest wall in abject
fear if you are not wearing a mask. You may be cursed at.
The public health establishment has been
equally complicitous in creating this widespread ignorance. It has
failed to stress at every opportunity that for the vast majority of the
public, the coronavirus is at most an inconvenience. The public health
experts did not disclose that outdoors was the safest place to be and
that people should get out of their homes and into the fresh air.
Not coincidentally, the experts’ newfound
power over nearly every aspect of American life was dependent on the
maintenance of fear.
While the U.S. death toll from the
coronavirus has been demographically circumscribed and lower than the
previous flu pandemics of 1968, 1956, and 1918 when adjusted for
population, the economic toll has cut across every sector of the country
and every population group. Whole industries have seen their capital
wiped out overnight.
Despite a better than expected employment
report in early June, the long-term effects of the shutdowns and the
continuing mandates to socially distance will prevent a full economic
recovery for years to come. Forty-four million Americans are still out
of work. Supply chains have been thrown into chaos. Fresh fruits and
vegetables are being plowed under and livestock burned uneaten for lack
of access to processing plants and markets. Small businessmen who have
put their life savings into creating a service that customers want have
seen their hard work go up in smoke. Without rent from their retail
tenants, commercial landlords can’t pay their taxes. City budgets have
been decimated. The additional $8 trillion in public debt taken on to
try to substitute for the private economy will depress opportunity for
generations.
And what has been the response to this
economic carnage on the part of our ruling class? Branding strategies!
Politicians have put cute names on what has been a taking of private
property on an unprecedented scale. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo calls
the state lockdowns “New York on Pause,” as if commerce can be
indefinitely suspended and then magically resuscitated with the flick of
a switch.
The politicians’ ignorance about the
complexity of economic life was stunning, as was their hypocrisy. To a
person, every elected official, every public health expert, and every
media pundit who lectured Americans about the need to stay in indefinite
lockdown had a secure (“essential”) job. Not one of them feared his
employer would go bankrupt. Anyone who warned that the effects of the
lockdowns would be more devastating than anything the coronavirus could
inflict was accused of being a heartless capitalist who only cared about
profits.
But to care about the economy is
to care about human life, since the economy is how life is sustained. It
is a source of meaning, as well as sustenance, binding humans to each
other in a web of voluntary exchange. To its workers, every
business is essential, and to many of its customers as well. Even judged
by the narrowest possible definition of public health—lives lost—the
toll from the lockdowns will exceed that of the virus, due to the
cancellation of elective medical procedures, patients’ unnecessary fear
of seeking medical treatment, and the psychological effects of
unemployment.
In May, politicians started inviting a
few scattered sectors of their state economies to reopen, with blue
state governors and mayors being particularly parsimonious with their noblesse oblige.
These blue state officials invoked “science” to justify yet another
arbitrary set of guidelines to determine which businesses would be
allowed to start up again and when. “Science,” we were told, dictated
the timetable for reopening, based on rates of hospital bed vacancies
and new infections.
In fact, the numerical benchmarks,
enforced with draconian punctiliousness, seem to have been drawn out of a
hat—they certainly had no evidence behind them. But even with official
reopenings, many customers will be long reluctant to resume their normal
habits of consumption and travel thanks to the uninterrupted
fearmongering on the part of the media, the experts, and elected
leaders.
Being fantastically risk averse is now a badge of honor, at least among the professional elites. A young tech columnist for The New York Times
wrote an op-ed in May about cancelling a restaurant reservation in
Missoula, Montana. Missoula County had been virus-free for weeks, and
Montana’s case load had been negligible. Nevertheless, the columnist
experienced a panic attack after booking a table, contemplating the
allegedly lethal risk that awaited him in the reopened restaurant.
Rather than being ashamed of his cowardice, the columnist was proud, he
wrote, to have bailed out of his reservation in order to continue
sheltering in place.
The absurd social distancing protocols
make operating many businesses and much of city life virtually
impossible. The six-foot rule is as arbitrary as the “metrics” for
reopening. (The World Health Organization recommends three feet of
social distance, and many countries have adopted that recommendation.)
Keeping customers and employees six feet apart will render a city’s
basic institutions unworkable, from restaurants to concert halls. The
Metropolitan Opera has cancelled the first half of its 2020-2021 season
while it figures out how to maintain social distancing among audience
members and on the stage. Every other performing arts organization will
face the same almost insuperable dilemma.
My 34-story apartment building in
Manhattan, like many others, has imposed a one person per elevator ride
rule, even though the elevator interiors are more than six feet across. I
invite anyone who may also be waiting for an elevator to share my ride
up; no one has ever accepted the offer, even though both I and my
invitee are masked. Nor has anyone ever extended such an offer to me.
Now translate this hysteria to Manhattan’s massive office towers. If New
York City ever fully reopens, a similar social distancing rule for
office elevators will lead to lines of workers around every midtown
block each morning. As long as this fear lasts, city life is not
possible.
FROM COLD WAR TO HOT
Then the cities started burning. What had been a cold war on the economy and civic life became a hot war.
Government officials, having shut down commerce due to
unblemished ignorance of how markets work, now enabled the torching and
looting of thousands of businesses due to the shirking of their most
profound responsibility: protecting civil peace.
On Monday, May 25, a video of the horrific arrest and
death of a black man suspected of passing a forged $20 bill in
Minneapolis went viral. A police officer kept his knee on George Floyd’s
neck for nearly nine minutes as Floyd begged for help breathing. Floyd
was already handcuffed and thus posed a minimal risk. The officer
ignored Floyd’s distress even as Floyd stopped talking or moving.
The officer’s behavior was grotesquely
callous and contrary to sound tactics, and the officer will be
prosecuted and punished under the law. His behavior was not, however,
representative of the overwhelming majority of the ten million arrests
that the police make each year. Indeed, there is no government agency
more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the
police. Nevertheless, within 24 hours, the violence had begun.
On the night of Thursday, May 28, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob
Frey ordered the city’s Third Police Precinct evacuated as the forces of
anarchy descended upon it for a third day in a row. The building was
promptly torched, sending a powerful sign that society would not defend
its most fundamental institutions of law and order.
Soon cities across the country became scenes of feral
savagery. The human lust for violence, the sheer joy of plunder and
destruction, were unleashed without check. Police officers were shot at,
run over, slashed with knives, and clubbed; two current and former law
enforcement officers were killed in cold blood. Police cruisers and
station houses were firebombed; courthouses were trashed. Looters drove
trucks through storefronts and emptied the stores’ contents into the
back of these newly repurposed vehicles of civil war. ATMs were ripped
out of walls; pharmacies plundered for drugs.
Blue state governors and mayors ordered law enforcement to
stand down or use at most (in New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s
words) a “light touch” with the rioters. By the time these progressive
public leaders realized that something more forceful needed to be done,
it was too late. The fire of sadism and hatred could not be contained,
but would have to burn itself out. Belatedly imposed curfews were
universally ignored: why should anyone obey an edict from a government
that refused to protect human life and livelihoods?
Perversely, the rioting exhibited
features of the coronavirus shutdowns in even more literal form. If
before, businesses were boarded up due to bankruptcy, now they were
boarded up to prevent further theft. Small businesses, lacking the
resources to outlast the shutdowns, now saw the final depletion of their
inventories. The fortress mentality in residential buildings from
coronavirus hysteria was replaced by an actual fortress, as building
managements hastily erected plywood barriers over lobby windows and
doors. The hyped-up fear of going outside into allegedly virus-infected
public spaces became a justified fear of leaving one’s fortress and
being sacrificed to the mob. Shelter-in-place became a necessity, not a
product of government overreach. The fall of night became a source of
terror for ordinary citizens and business owners.
Previously, securely-employed public officials breezily
dismissed their constituents’ anguish over unemployment and growing
business failures. Now those same officials, safe behind their security
details and publicly-owned mansions, foreswore the activation of the
National Guard and military. None of those officials owned businesses,
so they faced no loss either from economic quarantine or from physical
rampage.
DOUBLE STANDARDS
One thing did change markedly between the coronavirus
lockdowns and the riot lockdowns, however: elite wisdom regarding social
distancing. The politicians, pundits, and health experts who had
condescendingly rebuked business owners for reopening without official
permission, who had banned funerals and church services of more than ten
people, and who had heaped scorn on protesters who had gathered in
state capitols to express their economic distress, suddenly became avid
cheerleaders for screaming crowds numbering in the thousands.
Most remarkably, public officials overtly admitted to
choosing the forms of assembly that would be allowed based on the
content of the protesters’ speech. Mayor de Blasio explained that
protests over “400 years of American racism” are not the same as a
“store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to
services.” While the store owner or worshipper may be “understandably
aggrieved,” he conceded, their grievances must still be suppressed in
the name of coronavirus safety. Not the grievances of the protesters and
rioters, however. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy congratulated the
Black Lives Matter activists and distinguished them from mere “nail
salon”
entrepreneurs protesting their ongoing business stasis. The two are in “different orbits,” Murphy said.
entrepreneurs protesting their ongoing business stasis. The two are in “different orbits,” Murphy said.
The politicians’ hypocrisy was a mere warm-up for that of the public health establishment. These were the people whose diktats had inspired the lockdowns and whose allegedly supreme knowledge of medical risk was allowed to cancel all other considerations in maintaining a functioning society. Nearly 1,200 of these same experts, including from the CDC, signed a public letter supporting the unsocially distanced protests on the grounds that “white supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”
One could just as easily argue that a global depression,
induced by the gratuitous crushing of trade and the hollowing out of
capital, is a lethal public health issue of at least equal magnitude.
But it turns out that public health is as much about politics as it is
about science.
This shameless reversal should have
torpedoed the lockdowns once and for all. If it turns out that mass
gatherings were now not just allowable but to be encouraged, no
rationale remained for preventing restaurants and stores from reopening.
But instead, once media attention became a little less monomaniacally
focused on the anti-police agitation, the familiar chorus rose up again,
directed at everyone else: Stay socially distanced! Wear your outdoor
masks! No gatherings of more than a few dozen! No entering
“non-essential” stores! The same arbitrary “metrics” for business
reopenings were still in place and still being enforced.
By now, the collapse of government
legitimacy is complete. For three months, public officials abdicated
their responsibility to balance the costs and benefits of any given
policy. They put the future of hundreds of millions of Americans in the
hands of a narrow set of experts who lack all awareness of the workings
of economic and social systems, and whose “science” was built on the
ever-shifting sand of speculative models and on extreme risk aversion
regarding only one kind of risk.
The public officials who ceded their
authority to the so-called experts were deaf to the pleas of law-abiding
business owners who saw their life’s efforts snuffed out. They
engineered the destruction of trillions of dollars of wealth, through
thoroughly arbitrary decision making. And then they stood by as billions
more dollars of work burned down. Public order and safety, equal
treatment under the law, stability of expectations—all the prerequisites
for robust investment have been decimated. The failure to quell the
riots means that more are inevitable. Any future business faces possible
destruction by another lockdown or by looting—which it will be is
anyone’s guess.
***
The coronavirus lockdowns demonstrated
our leaders’ ignorance of economic interdependence. After the riots,
that ignorance has been shown to run far deeper. It is an ignorance
about government’s most fundamental obligation: to safeguard life,
liberty, and property. It is an ignorance about human nature and human
striving.
Property and capital are not soulless
abstractions, easily replaced by an insurance payout, as the rioters and
their apologists maintain. (The Massachusetts Attorney General noted
that burning is “how forests grow.”) Capital is accumulated effort and
innovation, the sum of human achievement and imagination. Its creation
is the aim of civilization. But civilization is everywhere and at all
times vulnerable to the darkest human impulses. Government exists to
rein in those impulses so that individual initiative can flourish.
America’s Founders, schooled in a profound philosophical and literary
tradition dating back to classical antiquity, understood the fragility
of civil peace and the danger of the lustful, vengeful mob.
Our present leaders, the products of a
politicized and failing education system, seem to know nothing of those
truths. Pulling the country back from the abyss will require a recalling
of our civilizational inheritance.
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