The COVID-19 pandemic has expanded the spectrum of imaginable futures and political possibilities, writes EricLevitz
A family of undocumented Bostonians. Both parents lost their jobs in recent weeks. Neither will receive any aid from the bill Congress just passed. Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe via Getty Images We were in crisis before this crisis. When a novel strain of coronavirus made its presence felt in Wuhan in December, global carbon emissions were hitting record highs.
There’s good news for progressives who like politically affirming bad news.
Finally, the pandemic has raised awareness of the profound social value that grocery-store clerks, warehouse workers, and deliver drivers create — and the failure of markets, as currently structured, to adequately compensate such labor. This development has not merely earned service-sector workers a former president’s public tribute but also facilitated their efforts to organize and assert power over their employers.
The pandemic is hardening the borders it crosses. COVID-19 may spotlight our species’ interdependence on a crowded, interconnected, increasingly inhospitable planet. But it has also illustrated humanity’s strong tendency to circumscribe our spheres of social concern in the face of scarcity and acute threat.
One nation far from God, thoroughly divisible. Even if the left is content to build progressivism in one nation, realizing the egalitarian ambitions of the Green New Deal will require fostering cross-class and inter-ethnic solidarities amid vast inequality and widespread insecurity. And our society’s response to the pandemic isn’t terribly heartening on that front either. The $2 trillion relief package that Congress passed last week provided roughly $0 in aid to the 5 percent of U.S.
Other powerless, stigmatized constituencies have suffered similar fates. For weeks, it has been clear that the people in America’s jails — three-quarters of whom have been convicted of no crime and are incarcerated because they are not wealthy enough to make bail — are at grave risk of infection.
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