I once saw a couple of the Gracie brothers, experts at Brazilian Jujitsu, discuss the efficacy of martial arts in self-defense. They believed that training that emphasizes safety—for example where all punches are pulled—was not effective in real street situations.
“You fight the way you fight,” said one.
“You fight the way you train,” said the other, expanding on the theme.
In other words, muscle memory counts for a lot. If you have pulled a punch hundreds of times in practice, you will not throw it with full force later even if your life depends on it.
This brings to mind military training, where trainees repeat the same movements over and over again, so that even when they are gripped with mortal fear, they can still obey orders and fire their weapons.
Let’s turn now to Trump and the Republican Party. They have been thinking the same thoughts now for decades: cut taxes, deny healthcare, concentrate wealth, undermine science and education, and promote cynicism and nihilism.
The common good is of course never part of their thinking, because they seek only the good of the very wealthy. Sacrificing the well-being of the vast majority is automatic for them, as evidenced by our declining life expectancy and birth rate.
So, managing a pandemic, which requires a dispassionate focus on the good of all, is practically impossible for Republicans. It’s like playing four-dimensional chess while shaving left-handed—they have no neural pathways for this task. The entire situation is literally unthinkable for them.
So they keep trying to convert managing a pandemic to something they are more familiar with, like concentrating wealth or undermining the Constitution—or sacrificing the lives of ordinary people.
Here’s the concentration of wealth:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/14/coronavirus-law-congress-tax-change/
And here’s the undermining of the Constitution:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/politics/trump-total-authority-claim.html
And finally, the sacrificing of American lives:
It took me only a couple of minutes to find these examples, and I could have cited fifty other cases just like them; in the current emergency Republicans are unable to conceal their true beliefs. What they are saying and doing may seem senseless, but it all follows logically from the goals and methods of Billionaire Capitalism.
Republicans are simply being true to their ideology. Billionaire Capitalism wasn’t designed to protect ordinary people from pandemics or anything else. It’s designed to increase the wealth and power of billionaires, ad infinitum.
Over the next century, our survival as a species probably depends on our ability to counter novel pandemics and other global catastrophes, such as climate change. Billionaire Capitalism could therefore literally be the death of us.
If the preceding paragraph seems too extreme, consider this: every species goes extinct eventually, and a massive change in habitat is a common cause.
If we change our own habitat too much, we may well go extinct.
The Socialist Investor 