Populist ideology causes coronavirus #94*

The new petty bourgeoisie (Journalist Tendency) is still working on its major ideological themes, but they are looking tired already. The familiar broad link is established early on in this article by N Malik: 

There’s something profound about the irony. The world’s highest coronavirus death tolls [so far] belong to two countries whose leaders came to power promising the restoration of greatness and control – the United States and Great Britain...The similarities are striking, the conclusions unavoidable

Two nations that prided themselves on their extraordinary economic, historical and political status have been brought to their knees. Their fall from grace [!] is the outcome of a damaged political culture and distinct form of Anglo-American capitalism....

In an inevitable focussing of the theme:

reckless political decisions were justified by subordinating reality to rhetoric. The cost of leaving the EU would be “virtually nil”, with a free trade agreement that would be one of the “easiest in human history”. Imaginary enemies were erected and fake fights confected as both countries pugnaciously went about severing their ties with other nations and international institutions.... All the Tory government needed to do was Get Brexit Done, no matter how slapdash the job. In the US, all Trump needed to do to maintain his supporters’ loyalty was bark about a wall with Mexico ...Hollow triumphalism about making America great again and Britain taking back control becomes more and more likely in such a system.

A bit more promising here, maybe, but a ridiculous final sentence

By the time Covid-19 hit their shores, the UK and US were lacking not just the politicians but the bureaucracies required to respond effectively. Prior to the crisis, Trump repeatedly attempted to defund the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the UK, the pandemic inconvenienced a Tory cabinet embroiled in a feud with its own civil service. The intellectual and practical infrastructure to deal with facts had been vandalised.

The Cameron Cabinet and the Remainer Civil Service good at 'facts'! Longer term:

 After the 2008 financial crisis, when this system came within “48 hours” of the “apocalypse”, two centre-left leaders, [not populists then?]  Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, chose to shore up the infrastructure that had brought their economies to the brink, recapitalising the banks and revitalising the markets, opting for more regulation rather than fundamental reform....Just as the financial crash was treated as the malfunctioning of a particular unsupervised bug[ danger! metaphor ahead!]  in the system rather than as a feature of it, so is the failure to grapple with the pandemic being cast as an unforeseen, exogenous event, rather than a result of an ideology that enables the state to scramble unprecedented resources to save banks but not lives.

We  have already deconstructed (to coin a phrase) the claims implict in the term 'highest death tolls', but that might complicate the blossoming of the theme: ideology causes virus:

J Harris takes a differnet tack, still a familiar one, attacking the outmoded ruling class by citing working class interests, but with the peculiar skilled attack on words, characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie:

 Last week was the first time I felt my anxiety about the crisis being superseded by anger. Johnson’s latest bursts of triteness – suggesting that Covid-19 is like a “mugger”, and then comparing the crisis to an “alpine tunnel” – were still rippling through social media. Then, on Wednesday, the front page of the Times carried a story about a “senior government source” suggesting that workers who had been furloughed were in danger of becoming “addicted” to the scheme, and Matt Hancock’s striking use of the verb “wean” as an expression of how people might be removed from it...Here was a familiar Tory voice of impatience and condescension, once again breaking through the patina of solidarity with the public... after a decade of austerity we went into this crisis in a state of disastrous social fragility; and the innate Tory distrust of collectivism and state intervention – which Johnson shares, whatever his rhetoric – has surely been a big part of the reason it has been so badly handled.

A bit of class hatred of inherited privilege:

So too has been the classic officer-class trait of inattention to detail. As George Orwell put it back in 1941: “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

Then the inevitable:

Britain was led into the disaster of Brexit by people successfully sowing the ludicrous idea that subjecting ourselves to self-harm would somehow awaken the Blitz spirit and revive past glories. Amid Friday’s juxtaposition of the 75th anniversary of VE day and a deepening sense of national crisis, as well as solemn remembrance, there was inevitably some of the same stuff. These things play into deep elements of the English psyche, shot through with the lingering traces of deference and always ready to be manipulated by Tory politicians....For the last week or so, I have been rereading England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage’s history of both punk rock and the social malaise of Britain in the mid-to-late 1970s. 

We cannot go on like this, with deep inequalities of race and class constantly exploding before our eyes, the need for food banks extending into the distance, and voices at the top willing us back towards the very social and political dead end that ensured the virus has had such a disastrous impact.

Broad brush stuff about the national psyche, as exposed by -- Jon Savage's book. That could be depressing for liberals if it is  so 'deep' (and a basis for their hatred of working class deferentials as well). Nevertheless, somehow, there is still a culture war to be won, cultural leadership to assert

In the great surge of spontaneous collective action that has greeted Covid-19, there are the seeds of something better, but we should not underestimate the obstacles in the way: nostalgia, mythology and the banalities of politicians desperate to manipulate such things in their own interests as their failures become inescapable.