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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 1, 2023; see related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II

SILVER SPRING—Not even a full month after Trump’s inauguration, I published a massive two-part essay discussing what I called the rise of “democratic fascism,” with Trump’s victory and being sworn into office one of largest developments on this front.

This is not a democratic fascism as in the Democratic Party of the U.S., but in terms of fascists nonviolently and legally winning elections, using their resulting power to chip away enough at what I have called the four main pillars of democracy—1.) popular elections, 2.) a law enforcement and highly-independent judicial system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool for aggrandizement or persecution (“rule of law”), 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, and 4.) a public free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated too much by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality—to twist the system into unfairly favoring themselves and keeping themselves in power as they continue to enact illiberal policies that only further stack the political and societal deck in their favor.

The first part of the two-parter focused on definitions of important terms like “democracy,” “fascism,” and my conception of what I called “democratic fascism.”  In particular, the term “fascism” is highly overused and often poorly understood or defined, a lot like the word “terrorism,” an issue I have previously discussed in detail: as I argued some time ago, “terrorism” must mean more than simply violence or threats of violence from people and organizations we personally dislike, and, similarly, fascism must mean more than the politics of someone or something we personally dislike.  The first part also discussed the difference between political spin and outright lies and how fascism embraces outright lies, as fascism is, among its other horrendous characteristics, a war on truth and reality itself.

In the second part, I looked specifically at why Trump very much fit the definition of “democratic fascist” as I had defined it.  As the word fascist is so strongly associated with Nazis, the Holocaust, and mass arrests and mass executions, I felt separating the traditional conception of fascism from the current wave that was, at least for the time being then, eschewing violent means to achieve and maintain power was useful back in 2017.  But in the roughly five years since Trump’s democratic fascist movement emerged to take over the Republican Party—one of America’s two major parties—and transformed it into a cult of Trump, the leader himself and bulk of that Trumpist movement have clearly transitioned already to accepting and embracing violence and overthrowing the rule of law illegally in their quest to achieve and maintain power, as most notably demonstrated in the culmination of the Trump Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.  That coup attempt did not stop with its failure on that day, but has since continued through the present. 

Once their embrace of violence and their failure to repudiate Trump’s insurrection became clear, I have felt “fascist” became more appropriate label for them, as the Trumpists are now trying to use undemocratic and/or violent means to achieve power, the latest being MAGA Republican Kari Lake trying to use false lawsuits to overturn her clear defeat in the Arizona governor’s race (I think she is a favorite to be Trump’s vice presidential-nominee in what I think will be his highly successful quest to rewin the Republican Party’s nomination for president).

The rest of my second part detailed how Russia’s Vladimir Putin was leading a global fascist movement as part of his war on Western democracy and how all who opposed such fascism needed to put pettier differences aside to defeat it (a spirit recent political victories in France, the United States, and Brazil embody).

As fascism has very much become an important theme in global politics today—from the Trumpist movement to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from multiple political parties in Europe to Putin’s Russia and its war on Ukrainian democracy, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to the Narendra Modi’s India, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, I think it is important to revisit the definition of “fascism.”  In this spirit, I am reposting parts of part one of the two-part piece discussed above because I think they are deeply relevant to our current circumstances. Not all fascism will be as obvious and violent as Putin’s Russian fascism, so a common definition is essential to fight fascism in all its forms (and on a side note, please do see the 10/10 spectacular Andor television series for a beautiful meditation on the nature of fascism and of resisting it).

Excerpt begins:

Fascism comes in many forms; if Hitler and genocide can be one end of the spectrum, there’s plenty of room for fascism that falls far short of that standard, eschewing pogroms and other forms of mass violence, forms of fascism that include what we are seeing now: a democratic fascism (small “d” referring to democracy in general, as opposed to a capital “D” associated with America’s Democratic Party) empowered by populations, media, and elections that rewards and empowers those willing to feed off division and fear as it overwhelms norms, dissenting minorities, and even the law. As this democratic fascism rises, the losers are the liberal democratic governments that have been dominant since the end of WWII; in effect, it is no longer a question of if, as I posed nearly a year ago, but how fast we will see the unraveling of the post-WWII U.S.-led international order. What we do now will define the West and the world for decades to come, but the growing far left must grow up quickly and act within the clear choices of present reality if we are to have a good chance of stopping democratic fascism from destroying our societies, the West, and the international order as we know it.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”— Henry A. Wallace, 1944, Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested)…

…the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definition…of…“fascism.”…

Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon…

Henry A. Wallace…was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

End excerpt

It is my earnest hope that, with the above discussion perhaps shared widely and profusely, we can more easily combat fascism by agreeing on what fascism is, and I do believe that herein I have presented a useable and workable definition by citing minds far greater than my own. From our elections at home to the battlefields of Ukraine, nothing is more urgent than defeating this fascism and calling it out by name and agreeing on what that name means is a crucial step to defeating it.

See related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

1.) THE WORLD FAILS ON CORONAVIRUS, LED BY AMERICA

Living systems are not like mechanical systems.  Living systems are never in equilibrium.  They are inherently unstable.  They may seem stable, but they’re not.  Everything is moving and changing.  In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

—John Arnold, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

When asked recently “where” we went “wrong” specifically as far as the coronavirus pandemic but also generally, if there was an “exact moment,” journalist Masha Gessen replied by saying “I think there are many moments.  But certainly, our responses, as a nation, to 9-11 and to the financial crisis of 2008, paved the ground for this, as has our persistent disregard for the climate crisis.”

We must hope that, in the long-run, we do not respond to the coronavirus in incredibly self-destructive ways that echo our responses to 9/11 and the other unconventional, asymmetric threats we failed to properly understand and handle, failures I have outlined before. Depressingly, though, the signs are already dire.

One of the most depressing things about this pandemic is that, as an American who had little faith in our leadership or system to significantly mitigate this looming disaster, I looked to countries with far more competent leadership and more centralized and robust health systems than ours to be beacons in the night of this pandemic, especially for democratic countries to beam in this true trial not just for humanity, but Western democracy, which has been teetering of late.  I saw a few slivers of light for effective coronavirus programs so far—South Korea especially above all but also Israel, Germany, plucky Ireland, and, at least through the present and perhaps still to be, Japan—but, overwhelmingly, I saw darkness where I expected light in Europe from technocratic establishments and national health systems that (mostly) did not have buffoons in charge or the gaping holes of America’s health system that this pandemic has displayed all-too glaringly.  Italy, Spain, and France are obvious disasters, along with the Netherlands and the UK (whose Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, led the way with poor choices both personally and as a leader and found himself hospitalized in an intensive care unit; and just look at this thread delving into differences between the UK and Ireland). Even Sweden seems like it could be an example of bad-practice: like the other mentioned countries, it did not take proper precautions for long after it should have.  Some of these countries are regular fountains of inspiration for Americans who expect more from their government, but these nations failed here along with us to varying degrees.  In the absence of traditional U.S. global-level leadership, then, there essentially was no global leadership. 

Much of the developing world has yet to be hard hit, but there is great potential for the tolls there to be devastating.  The terrible government response in Brazil–exemplified by the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro—seems to be setting up a tidal wave of infections, which were recently likely twelve times higher than officially reported numbers.  In Ecuador, a country with little ability to conduct proper testing to determine the full extent of the virus, the death toll recently seemed to be fifteen times higher than what officials there had been able to determine.  If the coronavirus spreads intensely in Africa, the prospects there are also looking quite grim.  In many poorer nations around the world, social distancing is a privilege and a luxury that for a great many is impossible (not even getting into the situation of earlier-discussed refugees).  And already terrible social and economic conditions in many developing nations are only being made exponentially worse by COVID-19, meaning that hunger is now going to be a much larger problem globally, rising to affect 265 million people after factoring in coronavirus, nearly doubling the pre-pandemic figures.  Other sad realities coronavirus will exponentially inflate include, but are hardly limited to, domestic abuse, human trafficking, and suicide.  The threat to the developing world is only exacerbated by the recent inexcusable, despicable, “incredibly stupid,” and needless U.S. announcement that it will halt funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of a global pandemic, a decision that for many in the world’s poorest nations that sorely lack vital resources amounts to a death sentence if that funding is not replaced soon from elsewhere; as if that was not enough, the Trump Administration is seeking to do long-term damage to the WHO beyond just defunding it.

Despite plenty of poor responses globally, that top national leadership in America seems to have stood out in failing miserably is not in serious dispute for anyone attempting objectivity.  This was even obvious fairly early, before most American were concerned, with top government officials warning the president repeatedly in January and February about the extraordinary nature of the coronavirus threat and bringing it to the attention of the White House’s National Security Council even earlier.  Others outside the current Administration also sounded the alarm early, including former Vice President Joe Biden—the now-clear Democratic presidential nominee-to-be set to challenge the incumbent president for the White House—who even wrote an op-ed published on January 27 warning of the seriousness of the coronavirus threat and how ill-prepared we were to confront it.  As Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, made painfully clear, “putting off the decision to go on the offensive against COVID-19–treating a war of necessity as a war of choice–has proved extraordinarily costly in terms of lives lost and economic destruction.”  In a pandemic in which timing has perhaps been the most important factor or at least as important as any, our leaders at the top sat passively—even stubbornly—and refused to look at the rising viral tsunami heading in our direction, let alone acknowledge it as the hundred-year plague it was.

Even the military has been seriously affected, one notable example being the Navy having to semi-abandon one of our aircraft carriers in mid-deployment, another being that recruitment has been hampered.

And while books could be and articles already have been written that demonstrate America’s failure clearly even for the most fanatically partisan supporters of the current leadership, here will be shared just this excellent, highly informative, regularly updated chart from The Financial Timesthat shows the U.S. is, literally, the worst at “flattening the curve” (the main format has been changed but there is an interactive version of the below chart here that lets you set up your own comparisons):

That phrase “flattening the curve” (or “bending the curve” as a precursor) was only understood by a handful of people a few months ago but is now well-known coronavirus-era lingo for taking collective action to limit the spread and death-toll of the virus, to lower the height of the curve (bend it) over and then keep it from increasing (flattening it) so that our medical systems can better care for those infected (with bending again all the way down after flattening as the endgame). Clearly, our American curve stands out in the above chart as both the most stridently upward-trending arc and the arc that took the longest to be pulled down relative to other nations grappling with serious coronavirus outbreaks over a similar timeframe.  Case/infection-counts are highly problematic for a variety of reasons, but the deaths statistic is far clearer as to its weight, meaning, and finality, the above chart highlighting quite well that statistic and how well countries are at slowing deaths (even if globally across the board there is a serious problem of unintentional undercounting and underattributing deaths from coronavirus, tracking deaths is still far less ambiguous than tracking overall cases/infections). 

So, relatively speaking, despite massive daily disinformation to the contrary, the U.S seems to have done the worst job of flattening the curve of coronavirus deaths out of countries with significant levels of infection that have experienced fighting coronavirus for a similar amount of time, and this would seem to be the case even for allowing for countries like China (from which this pandemic originated) and Russia, which are virtually certainly deliberately underreporting their coronavirus case numbers and deaths and also allowing for serious questions about developing countries with poor means of tracking the virus, as discussed earlier.  And while the U.S. is hardly the worst in terms of deaths per capita, the above chart shows with the available data that it is still the worst of any country with a major outbreak at slowing the level of death (and preventive measures like lockdowns seem collectively to be a much more important variable than population size or density, anyway).

And the chart just takes into account the deaths we know about; there are “almost certainly” Americans dying from coronavirus not being counted as coronavirus-related deaths because of testing issues, reporting issues, and other shortcomings, with this hardly being the situation only in the U.S. 

In the U.S. in particular, the lack of testing has emerged as one of the premier failings regarding coronavirus, making our sense of how many are truly infected by (and, to a lesser extent, dying from) the virus woefully incomplete and greatly hampering our ability to accurately model the spread of the virus.  And this, in turn, makes it very difficult for leaders to plan ahead beyond the short-term.  Especially because of our lack of testing—one of the most crucial aspects of coronavirus response—we are essentially on a ship at night in heavy fog, trying to see what obstacles lie ahead and how to avoid them but unable to see far in front because of that fog and unable to have any solid sense of when the fog will lift or if or when it will return.  Under those conditions, crashing into an iceberg and sinking is far more likely.  A military counterinsurgency analogy is also apt, as not having enough testing is like trying to neuter an insurgency without having intelligence or enough regular patrols to get a lay of the land before, say, sending a major convoy through enemy territory: with few pieces of intelligence and fewer teams gathering intelligence, the chances the enemy can launch a successful ambush on that convoy when it is sent out are far greater than if you had a much larger number of troops getting much more intelligence on the enemy territory.  Intelligence helps to lift the fog of war, then, while testing helps to lift the fog of pandemics.

Considering a detailed, highly-credibly report from last year ranked America, by relatively far, as the best-prepared nation in the world for a pandemic, the failure in U.S. leadership is even more stunningly spectacular and inexcusable; it is like losing a race in which you started ahead of everyone or if you were, say, someone who inherited millions and were already working in a lucrative field (maybe real estate in Manhattan in the 1980s) and then still managed to go bankrupt six times.

In the words of Max Brooks from an interview from late March:

I think that we have been disastrously slow and disorganized from day one.  I think the notion that we were caught unaware of this pandemic is just an onion of layered lies.  That is not true at all.  We have been preparing for this since the 1918 influenza pandemic.  No excuse…The knowledge was out.  We knew.  We did not prepare.  This is on us.

…All of this panic could have been prevented if the federal government had done what it was supposed to do before the crisis became a crisis.  Because the way to stop panic is with knowledge, and if the president had been working since January to get the organs of government ready for this, we as citizens could have been calmed down knowing that the people that we trust to protect us are doing that.

A friend of mine, Ellen Adair (an actress who played a top senator’s chief of staff in Homeland in its previous season while that universe’s America was facing nontraditional, asymmetric threats similar to the types we are currently facing from Russia), pointed out a specific article from a few years back that saw all too much of this coming: writing in the summer of 2018 for The Atlantic, Ed Yong terrifyingly accurately predicts not only America’s general unpreparedness for a pandemic, but why this current administration would be particularly ill-suited for handling one (his late March, 2020, predictions for how this will end—made when the U.S. outbreak was starting to really pick up steam and yet was still a fraction as bad as it is now—should also be of interest).  While the entire piece from before COVID-19 even existed feels exceedingly current and sickeningly prescient, I felt particular chills reading these words:

Perhaps most important, the U.S. is prone to the same forgetfulness and shortsightedness that befall all nations, rich and poor—and the myopia has worsened considerably in recent years.  Public-health programs are low on money; hospitals are stretched perilously thin; crucial funding is being slashed.  And while we tend to think of science when we think of pandemic response, the worse the situation, the more the defense depends on political leadership.

…Preparing for a pandemic ultimately boils down to real people and tangible things: A busy doctor who raises an eyebrow when a patient presents with an unfamiliar fever.  A nurse who takes a travel history. A hospital wing in which patients can be isolated.  A warehouse where protective masks are stockpiled. A factory that churns out vaccines.  A line on a budget.  A vote in Congress.  “It’s like a chain—one weak link and the whole thing falls apart,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  “You need no weak links.”

Right now, we look bad, and the idea of the U.S. leading the world when it cannot lead itself anymore is indeed going to be problematic for many who used to be comfortable with U.S. leadership or, at least, tacitly accepted it.  That does not mean there will be a new world order overnight, but it sure will be harder for not just millions, but likely hundreds of millions or even billions of people to see the U.S. as a leader after our failures with this virus are literally broadcast every day for global public consumption.

Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around in America, from governors’ mansions to various media outlets, from our very own American culture to ourselves, from individual institutions to local leaders.  One standout in that last group is the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker telling people during the recent controversially-held dangerous April 7^th elections in his state to go outside and vote after he himself worked to stop both extending absentee voting and delaying the election despite the pandemic, saying this to Wisconsinites this while wearing what seems to be a hospital-quality mask, gloves, and gown set.  Dysfunction and division is not just present at the federal level and between states and the federal government, then, but within states, between governors and mayors or others all throughout the country: in South Dakota, there is even a dispute between the governor and Sioux tribal authorities.

But in dire emergencies like this, the national leaders set the tone for the nation as a whole, with many others farther down the totem pole taking their cues from national leadership, none more so than the top national leader, be it a president, prime minister, or king.  And this is the way it should be.  When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor all the way back in 1941, we did not have dozens of regional, state, city, county, and town war policies operating independently from one another: we had a coordinated national effort, and fighting deadly national and global pandemics should be no different.  In the 1940s, we were able to triumph in our finest national hour even as were caught off-guard.  That clearly has not happened with coronavirus, and our “collective” “national” response can be said to be anything but a single one with unity of purpose.

In stunning displays of hubris and lack of preparation, Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 famously sent their armies towards Russia in June, months away from the famed Russian winter, with no winter clothing.  Now we can similarly say that, in 2020, the American President allowed our medical first-line responders to face off against coronavirus without nearly enough proper protective gear despite having weeks and months to take proper action to equip them.

We could have approached this coronavirus threat with the mentality of the Starks in Game of Thrones, whose mantra is “winter is coming”: be prepared, get ready, unite, take this threat very seriously, take nothing for granted.  Instead, (spoilers for the show/books in this sentence) our leaders were more like Queen Cersei Lannister in the final seasons: warned repeatedly and with a zombie-wight coming at her face-to-face, she still did not prioritize dealing with the Army of the Dead and, instead, took the crisis as an opportunity to advance her personal and political interests, to settle scores and amass power for herself.

Wherever blame should or should not be placed, this novel (new) coronavirus has brought the world to its knees.  Socially and economically, a huge portion of global activity has come to screeching halt or, at least, a vastly reduced intensity.  Something this sudden on a global scale is new for humanity, and we have no idea even when this pandemic will really end (other than an increasing understanding that the end will probably not be soon), if it will end, how soon other waves will come or how bad those waves will be (they may be worse).  The virus’s national and overall global spread even seems to be increasing several months into the pandemic, not decreasing.  We do not know how many people will die (today, there will be over 350,000 worldwide and over 100,000 in the U.S. for just the recorded COVID-19 deaths), except that earlier rosier predictions are now clearly way off the mark.  People are deeply fearful of a deeply uncertain future and what the world will look like after this virus leaves its initial mark.  Thus, this novel coronavirus is not only engendering a sense of fear throughout the human race, but also terror.

But the true terror is to come.

2.) A FAR MORE WORRISOME FUTURE

The death wish of the theocratic totalitarians, for themselves and others, is too impressive to overlook.

—Christopher Hitchens, “Terrorism: Notes toward a definition,” Slate, November 18, 2002

Ultimately, humanity might not end with a bang but with a feeble cough.

—Max Brooks, “The Next Pandemic Might Not Be Natural,” Foreign Policy, April 20, 2020

Despite the examples listed earlier in my brief biowarfare and bioterrorism survey and other acts not included therein, both biological warfare and bioterrorism have been exceedingly rare in history.

One obvious reason for this is that it is hard to ensure that such weapons only infect the enemy and not also the people attempting to do the infecting and their compatriots (Japanese forces, for example, incurred thousands of casualties from their own bioweapons use in China).  In other words, bioagents are so dangerous that they have mostly been felt to be too dangerous to use, especially on a larger scale.

The idea that is supposed to give us comfort is that, in theory, it is not rational to use such weapons.  Yet the country with the largest bioweapons program in history—the Soviet Union—was regarded as insecure, famously concerned with self-preservation and constrained by rational realpolitik as a result, making it fairly predictable.  Sure, the Soviets did not use these weapons, but they still put smallpox in ICBMS and worked to create disease even worse than Mother Nature has been able to create.

Rather than us being able to trust in some solid proof of human rationality—the concept of which, as an overall rule, is highly debatable at best—then, I feel the non-use of biological weapons (similar to the situation with nuclear weapons after 1945) is less a natural product of human wisdom or design but, instead, is a product of the small-N problem, that dilemma of comparative studies and of politics in general: that there is such a small number of relevant actors with bioweapons capabilities that we cannot draw rock-solid proof from those weapons’ non-use that this is non-use some sort of “natural” outcome.  In short, we have likely just “lucked out” biological (and nuclear) weapons have not been used because only a handful of governments have had serious capabilities and the technology was advanced enough to the degree that it was hard to have anyone other than governments and specialized scientists develop them, and of these small samples, only a handful of those had the will to actually pursue these weapons, with an even far smaller number pursuing their use.

As any basic statistics primer would tell you, though, the more actors that develop such capabilities, the greater the chance that such capabilities will eventually be used, with that probability increasing being a mathematical certainty.

And therein lies one of the major current problems.  For, even before now, technology had advanced in recent years to a degree that has made it far easier for governments, organizations, and individuals to research, produce, and deploy these weapons: the internet has made the information on how to do all that more available than ever before; logistics technology have made the ability to obtain and transport necessary materials easier than ever before; and advances in medical science and technology have opened up bioengineering and made creating biolabs easier, by far, than ever before. 

So that “small-N (number)” reality an ally in perpetuating the non-use of bioweapons, that bulwark that so few people had access or ability when it came to what was needed to operationalize bioweapons, has been dramatically weakened in recent years as the breadth of actors with the ability to research, develop, and deploy bioweapons has grown exponentially in recent years with the latest remarkable advances of human civilization. 

The math, then, has changed: that probability that the small-N problem kept so low is now dramatically higher.

Even putting aside the small-N problem being a more likely explanation for general non-use of bioweapons up through the present than our own supposed rationality—even if we accept, in principle, that it is our rationality that is to be credited for the lack of biowarfare and bioterrorism and could take comfort in that—the future still looks comparatively bleak.  And the reason for that is because, relative to the rest of the modern era, we ae seeing an explosion in those swelling the ranks of apocalyptic-minded groups of religiously-motivated violent extremists.  Indeed, our era has seen a sharp increase in the number of terrorists willing to sacrifice themselves, their people, and countless innocent civilians in pursuit of their apocalyptic goals.   Such terrorists are possessed with end-times-oriented mindsets that are hell-bent on accelerating the arrival of the apocalypse, with ISIS as the flagship movement.

If we add to that equation the possibility of governments using newer science—especially genetic engineering and advanced vaccination programs—to perfect a way to immunize their own militaries and people against a weapon they could then feel safe to deploy against others and therefore confident to weaponize and develop, then the threat of bioweapons being used against America and others is only increasing by yet another factor.  If you think this sounds too much like science fiction, recall how a mass biological test on the part of the U.S. government infected the whole San Francisco metropolitan area in 1950 and how the public never learned about it until 1976.  In other words, if another government wanted to immunize its population against something pretty nasty without drawing attention to that nasty something, there are more than a few ways to immunize people without people even knowing they are being immunized (slipping in with other standard immunizations, perhaps adding into the water or food supply, manufacturing a controlled “outbreak” that would give cover for a mass immunization, etc.), especially for a government motivated enough to carry out and plan years in advance a biological first strike with a deadly bioweapon.

But there are other technological multipliers that have yet to have their potential impact be anywhere near realized that make the future look even less comforting.  Technology has just recently been advancing, and is continuing to advance, rapidly in such a way that it is only going to exponentially increase the number of actors able to carry out biological attacks, and that is even in addition to the exponential increase that has already occurred recently.  And perhaps the foremost reason for this coming exponential growth in potential biothreats and actors is a new genetic engineering technique known as CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats—that makes it far easier and cheaper to create bioweapons than ever before.

To put this into perspective, some CRISPR kits were selling for under $150 even in 2017.  A United Nations panel even characterized this CRISPR threat as do-it-yourself bioweapons creation (“DIY biological labs”).  One post from a leading bioresearch and development company that has led on, and sells, CISPR tools and material ended by noting CRISPR’s “usefulness for genome locus-specific recruitment of proteins will likely only be limited by our imagination.”  And if we recall that Dream of Scipio quote from the introduction about how man is worse than beast because beasts are constrained by their lack of imagination but men are not, well, that is where this gets truly terrifying.  Indeed, the alarm has been soundly rung by many an expert on the soon-to-be-clear and present danger of this CRISPR technology’s ability to empower those with the most malevolent of imaginations.  We are, then, being presented with a brave new world of bioterrorism.

Thus, the guardrails—supposed or real—that may have offered protection from the use of bioweapons before are simply not as strong as they used to be.  Even if we accept human rationality as a bulwark, some of the biggest increases in terrorism involve suicide attackers and those embracing apocalyptic theology hoping to bring about a final world-ending confrontation, comforted by an ideology that tells them if they die as martyrs fighting for their cause they will ascend to heaven with a special spot waiting for them, with a degree of terrorists and terrorist groups concerned less with temporal self-preservation than at any other time in the modern era.  And whatever their motives, the modern world has not only already made bioweapons more accessible than ever to them, but will also dramatically expand this greater accessibility with the newest CRISPR technology that will itself spread rapidly.  Thus, we have both terrorists increasingly less worried about doing damage to themselves and a far greater number of actors that will be dabbling in bioweapons.

I had earlier discussed Max Boot’s lesson on technology at the end of his book on guerrilla warfare, Invisible Armies (“technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war”), but I left out the second part of his lesson’s heading, “but that may be changing,” to save it for here.  He does not mean the usefulness of technology on our end, either; he is talking about a change in favor of terrorists:

The role of weapons in this type of war [i.e. unconventional] could grow in the future if insurgents get their hands on chemical, biological, or especially nuclear weapons. A small terrorist cell the size of a platoon might then have more killing capacity than the entire army of a nonnuclear state like Brazil or Egypt.  That is a sobering thought.  It suggests that in the future low-intensity conflict could pose even greater problems for the world’s leading powers than it has in the past.  And, as we have seen, the problems of the past were substantial and varied.

And the type of weapons which are seeing the most rapid advancement in technology and ease of access are not chemical or nuclear, but biological.

In fact, as Karl Johnson, one veteran of fighting Ebola outbreaks, mentioned over a quarter-century ago:

It’s only a matter of months—years, at most—before people nail down the genes for virulence and airborne transmission in influenza, Ebola, Lassa, you name it.  And then any crackpot with a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment and a college biology education under his belt could manufacture bugs that would make Ebola look like a walk around the park.

For Max Brooks, “Johnson’s prediction is right around the corner. With a little dark-web information and some secondhand lab equipment, anyone will soon be able to generate do-it-yourself blights in a basement lab and then release them back into the general population.”

Brooks echoes the earlier sentiments expressed herein that public policy attention given to threats posed by nuclear weapons are overemphasized relative those given to biological weapons.  As Brooks writes in Foreign Policy:

Genetic manipulation is the most dangerous threat humanity has ever faced because it allows anyone to spin straw into lethal gold. Unlike the hypothetical nuclear terrorist whom we’ve spent untold fortunes preparing for but who can’t act without acquiring precious, rare, and heavily guarded fissile material, the biohacker will be able to harvest germs from anywhere.  And unlike the nuclear terrorist, who gets only one shot at destruction, the biohacker’s bomb can copy itself over and over again.

If we look at the present and the future, then, without a doubt, terrorists and governments that have been and are pursuing the research and development of arsenals of bioweapons will only be doing so under even more favorable conditions to their goals as the future unfolds, including the near-future.  For these biowarrior wannabes, they are seeing what just something superflu/superpneumonia-ish like this coronavirus can do and are thinking of the damage and havoc they can wreak with far worse diseases.  And not only them but those who were on the fence about or reluctant to consider pursuing bioweapons programs will be seriously thinking that now.  Because the logical conclusion anyone contemplating biowarfare would draw from our current pandemic is that if coronavirus can do what it is doing now to America and the world, a deliberate, competent bioattack at a certain level could destroy the world as we know it.  We must realize that, to the degree that we are unsettled and shaken by looking at the state of our nation, our enemies are emboldened and more confident in their ability to do us harm.

Just imagine a brand new virus engineered to kill thirty percent—let alone fifty or seventy-five percent—of victims and that incapacitates most of the rest, one that spreads like wildfire, for which we have no immunity and no cure, which could cripple nations in days (not weeks), wiping out some people in key leadership positions along with millions of others, and incapacitating for days or weeks even those that survive.  Imagine the people unleashing such a disease are religious terrorists with apocalyptic death-wishes (plenty of those) or military officials from a government that has developed a secret immunity that only they and their countrymen have.  Imagine, while we are crippled, our enemy then offers the immunity it to allies or potentially new allies in the moment of crises, allowing it to destroy the nations as we know them that it deems enemies, remaking a world order with our successful enemy at the top.  Even staunch allies of ours would be tempted to fold in the face of a weapon for which the only defense comes with joining the new order. 

Think about the decades to come, in a world far more crowded where living space will literally be an issue, imagine an invasion by troops immune to the virus; with our leaders, government, and society—including the military—largely wiped out or crippled by the disease, how would an effective resistance—military or medical—to a simultaneous military and viral invasion be able to be mounted in the face of an organized enemy largely escaping the effects of such a disease?  And if the enemy offers immunity for a disease for which we have no cure and have no hope of dealing with medically in time in exchange for surrender, if the choice is between surrender and death, what happens to us and America as we know it?  The sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors did not plan to use the smallpox virus as a biological weapon to mostly wipe out the mighty armies of the Aztecs and the Incas and bring their societies to their knees with it in the span of a blink of a historical eye, but smallpox obliged anyway, and the Spanish wiped those Empires easily from the face of the earth as a result.  The same devastating effects with the right cocktail of virus can happen today.

One case study shows how a just single person can easily cause over a dozen new coronavirus infections; imagine how few infected people would be required to mass-transmit a far worse virus like the hypothetical engineered one described a few paragraphs above. 

Now consider that out current coronavirus has already weakened and damaged democracy in some places —including in the U.S.—pushed it to the brink in others, and, at least in the case of Hungary, seems to have destroyed it.  And that does not even get to authoritarians and the authoritarian-leaning, for whom the virus has been an excellent excuse to crack down on freedoms.

The simple truth is, we are not prepared even for a naturally occurring pandemic like coronavirus, let alone a worse one than coronavirus, let alone even more so bioagents designed to as a weapon by our human enemies to kill us and crush our society.

How we appear now matters to our enemies, and not only was the U.S. caught off-guard, its overall response has exposed our weaknesses to the world (and hopefully ourselves).  Whether we learn from this experience and patch up our weaknesses before the next major threat—natural or man-made or a sick combination of both—remains to be seen.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 31, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 31st, 2016

Barcroft Media; AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File

Among all the problems the Republican Party is causing today, there is a new blunder that truly stands in its own category…

The Zika virus.

Yes, we truly can blame the Republican Party for the fact that there is a growing Zika threat in America, at least for the degree to which it will be a threat.  It was entirely possibly to plan ahead and mitigate whatever damage Zika would have done, but the Republican Party failed on this front, and it is important to understand why because this illustrates the modern Republican Party’s philosophy on government and illustrates it well.  In fact, Republicans’ handling of Zika is a sad yet clear reminder of how unfit to govern the GOP was even before that asteroid that is Donald Trump hit it, and that it was not a serious political party when it came to policy for some time before The Donald’s rise.

To truly understand the magnitude of the error here, we must start at the beginning.

From Uganda to Florida: The Strange, Surprising Odyssey of Zika 

The Zika virus was discovered in 1947 in the Zika forest of Uganda, a disease related to West Nile virus, dengue, and yellow fever.  The first case in humans was not detected until 1952, but it was not linked to illness in people until 1964, when a scientist studying the virus came down with a rash.  From its discovery until 2007, no outbreaks of Zika were detected by public health officials, only 14 confirmed cases in humans were detected, and the virus was thought to only to be “rare” and exhibit “mild symptoms,” even as mosquitoes carrying Zika were found in new parts of Africa and also Asia. However, the WHO considers the possibility that Zika’s similarities to dengue and chikungunya may have contributed to its lack of diagnosis. 

In 2007, though, Zika burst is way into medical headlines with an outbreak on the island of Yap, part of the Caroline Islands of the Federated States of Micronesia.  The small island nation—whose population was less than 7,400 as of its 2000 census—ended up with 185 suspected cases of Zika virus (49 confirmed, 59 probable), a figure arrived at from just completing surveys of 173 out of the island’s 1,276 households; from this information, researchers were able to estimate that 73% of the entire Island’s population 3 years of age or older were infected with Zika, with 919 of those falling ill, or 18% of the infected; none of those who became ill experienced serious symptoms or conditions.  Most common among the reported symptoms were rashes and fevers, followed by joint pain/inflammation and conjunctivitis.  Researchers were unable to determine a clear path as to how Zika emerged in this remote Pacific island.

The following year, a researcher in Senegal contracted the virus there, came back to the U.S., and sexually transmitted the virus to his wife; it could be the first example of a generally insect-transmitted disease being passed on through sexual intercourse (something which we now know is a feature of Zika).

Zika roared back into the headlines again in 2013 with a series outbreaks in the Pacific in 2013-2014.  The most serious outbreak occurred in French Polynesia, where as many as two-thirds of its 270,000 residents were estimated to have been infected (with 8,750 specific cases suspected, 341 actually confirmed).  Over 31,000 people sought treatment, and this outbreak came with a series of far more severe symptoms and conditions than previous outbreaks, including immune system problems.  Especially alarming were 8 confirmed cases of microcephaly: pregnant women developing fetuses with abnormally small heads, leading to a whole range of possible issues with mental development (5 of the fetuses were aborted, 3 were birthed), and researchers estimated that 1% of women infected with Zika who were pregnant and in their first trimester would be at risk of developing fetuses with microcephaly; this may seem low, but it is actually relatively high (all this information came from a retroactive study that only came out in mid-March 2016, a response to the WHO’s calling the suspected links between Zika and neurological disorders a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on February 1st, 2016; now, it also seems Zika can lead to other problems for babies’ brains, including hearing loss).

The Zika virus in French Polynesia also seemed to lead to dramatically higher incidents of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition in which the immune system attacks the nervous system and can lead to paralysis and even death, a conclusion supported by a study released late February in 2016, also in response to the WHO. 

The origin of the French Polynesia outbreak remains unknown, but it seems to have been the one to spread Zika to other places in the Pacific, including Chile’s Easter Island, and Zika probably even spread to other Pacific locales without their populations’ or medical experts’ awareness.

Thus, a disease that had been known for well over half-a-century in parts of Africa and Asia that had never been associated with any serious illness all of a sudden capable of leading to paralysis, severe birth defects, even death.

Fast forward to early March, 2015, when Brazil informs the WHO that a strange new disease is spreading; from February through April, about 7,000 people report infection, but most of them only experience mild symptoms, mainly a rash.  From 425 blood samples, tests are conducted to determine what the infection is, with a number of diseases not being confirmed present in any of the tests and only dengue coming up, present in just 13% of the samples.

Going back, only a few weeks after Brazil’s 2014 World Cup, much smaller numbers of patients had been coming in with rashes, fevers, joint pain, and other mild symptoms. 

The disease kept spreading throughout the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, but kept eluding diagnosis.

Then in May, Brazil was finally able to confirm that the mystery illness was caused by the Zika virus, transmitted by local mosquitoes.  In response, the WHO declared a Zika alert.  But local Brazilian officials seemed relieved it was Zika; the available studies on it at the time suggested that it was only a mild disease, not as bad as other regularly occurring diseases in Brazil, with studies confirming links to more serious complications during the French Polynesia outbreak not coming out until later, in 2016.  It seems that the virus was brought to Brazil in a way where it became established locally by either the 2014 World Cup or an international boat race that occurred a few weeks later.

But the virus can also spread easily from travelers spreading the disease on their own, without mosquitoes; New York City’s first case predated Brazil’s outbreak, and was detected in December 2013 in a man who had just traveled extensively in Latin-America and the Asia-Pacific region.

The relief in Brazil at the diagnosis of Zika quickly disappeared just weeks later when cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome shot up sharply, the sense of dread only worsening when microcephaly also later began showing up in abnormally large numbers.  As of August 17th, Brazil has had 1,845 reported cases of microcephaly and/or other infant neurological complications from, or likely from, Zika infections, with 2,957 cases still being investigated.  And not only has Zika spread all over Central and South America and the Caribbean, but locally-transmitted Zika cases have just begun happening in the continental United States, in the Miami, Florida area.  It is expected to spread locally (i.e., through local mosquito populations) elsewhere in the U.S., especially the mosquito-rich American southeast and Gulf Coast; Texas, for example, has already had 108 travel-related cases but not locally-transmitted ones so far, but the state’s response to a potential outbreak has been lacking; in some cases, prescriptions from doctors are even required for the appropriate mosquito repellent.

But what makes this situation far worse is that most people won’t be showing any symptoms even after they have been infected with the virus (but can still transmit the disease through sexual contact!), meaning many travelers, including those returning from the just-concluded Rio Olympics, will be carrying the disease with them around the world without knowing it, including in the U.S.  Furthermore, as in Brazil, it will be many months before babies will be born with or fetuses clearly exhibit microcephaly. 

There have been confirmed cases of travel-related Zika in every U.S. state, though so far, only Florida has developed locally transmitted (mosquito) cases.  But for Zika to be established locally, it wouldn’t take much: there are two types of mosquitoes known to be able to transmit Zika in the U.S., and they live in most of the East Coast, most of the Midwest, the Southeast, and much of the Southwest; global warming has helped expand the reach of these mosquitoes, and they would just need to bite someone infected with Zika from abroad to spread it to other people.  Additionally, a very small percentage of the time (a bit more than one-third of 1%) at least one of the two mosquito species’ mothers pass Zika to their eggs (which are “impervious” to pesticide) and therefore pass it on to new generations of mosquitoes, making containment even more difficult; it may seem like a small percentage, but when you think about how many mosquitoes there are in any given area, it is enough to make an impact.

Zika & Congressional Republicans in 2016: A Timeline & Microcosm of GOP’s Reckless Irresponsibility & Inability to Govern

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images: CDC Director discusses poor response to Zika

Yet the U.S. should hardly be caught flat-footed at this moment in time, even if that seems to be exactly what is happening: back in January of this year, about half a year before the first local/mosquito U.S. transmissions in Florida at the end of July, both the WHO (January 25th) and CDC warned (January 28th) that Zika, already “explosively” spreading in South America, was “likely” to spread to the U.S., and they were hardly alone in sounding the alarm that the U.S. was at risk.  And on February 1st, the WHO labeled Zika’s suspected links with neurological disorders a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Thankfully, after a February 5th request from Senate Democrats that President Obama forcefully address the threat of Zika, Obama acted swiftly, barely more than a week after the CDC warning, requesting nearly $2 billion in funds to help prevent and fight off a U.S. Zika outbreak (February 8th).  The funding would have included boosts to mosquito control programs, vaccine research, and educational efforts.

But not even two weeks later, leading Republicans in the House of Representatives rejected the president’s request (February 18th).  Enter politics: those leading House Republicans felt that existing money set aside for the State Department and for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to deal with an earlier Ebola scare should have been allocated to deal with Zika, and rejected the call for new funding.  The White House maintained that it would not support sabotaging efforts to keep Americans and others safe from Ebola, one of the world’s worst infectious diseases.  Even a compromise measure that would have seen about $1 billion in emergency Zika funding approved fell by the wayside because of the politics of Republican objections to the Iran nuclear deal and Republican infighting. Many (and important) Republicans in the Senate followed their House colleagues in questioning and resisting Obama’s request.

Eventually, in the face of Republican intransigence, the White House reluctantly felt compelled to use $589 million already set aside for other emergency preparedness programs (April 6th): $510 million from ongoing Ebola programs (including those run by USAID in Africa) and $79 million from other programs, including ones that strategically stockpiles vaccines and other supplies in case of serious outbreaks, a move that has various local jurisdictions worried about their abilities to meet other threats now.  The gutting of the Ebola programs could see their funding run out in October, which is when the funding Obama redirected to deal with Zika could also run out.

Republicans seemed awfully ready to dismiss such concerns of national and international public health, though the White House stressed that new funding was still then necessary.  In contrast, many Republicans at first wanted to avoid appropriating any new emergency funds and wanted the White House to appropriate (and later, keep appropriating) money from other emergency funds until a new discussion about new non-emergency standard funding can come about when decisions are made about how to fund the government for FY2017, which should begin being funded around October 1st, provided there is not a repeat of brinksmanship about a shutdown.

In essence, the Republicans were procedurally trying to treat Zika as if it were anything but an emergency in order to save money, oppose president Obama, and score political points on various fronts: some wanted to demand cuts in other areas in return, others did not want to see any spending bill passed whatsoever in a heated election year; things are particularly difficult in the House, where every Republican and Democrat is up for reelection this fall, and in which getting agreement just among GOP members is notoriously difficult (just ask former Speaker John Boehner or current Speaker Paul Ryan).

Even as Republicans in Congress delayed and obstructed, the WHO announced “a strong scientific consensus” that Zika was the cause of the more severe conditions it had been suspected of causing (March 31st), and CDC officials confirmed the suspicion that Zika was definitely a causeof birth defects, namely severe microcephaly (April 13th): “Never before in history has there been a situation where a bite from a mosquito can result in a devastating malformation,” noted the CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden.

In the second half of May, House Republicans finally passed a $622 million Zika bill (May 18th), far less than Obama had asked far (about one-third, to be more precise).  It was a bill that was only intended to provide funding for not even half a year and that took even more funding—over $352 million—away from Ebola programs and also took $270 million from HHS administrative funds.  For the Director of the CDC (who quipped: “It’s just not enough”) and other experts, such funding falls far short of what is necessary, limits and impairs effective responses, and is risky in that it jeopardizes preparedness for other emergencies. 

The White House threatened to veto the legislation; however, relative to the position of some Republicans that the funding for Zika could wait until the next fiscal year, this move, sadly, marked a sort of “progress.”  But Obama said he would veto the measure as grossly insufficient, a view shared even by Obama opponent and Sen. (and former presidential candidate) Marco Rubio, Florida’s lone Republican in the Senate (it probably helps that Florida is particularly vulnerable to Zika).

The Senate itself passed (May 19th) a measure that allocated $1.1 billion in new funding for Zika, nearly twice as much what the House approved; though it received much support from Senate Democrats, it was part of a huge spending bill, one that also faces a White House veto, but for reasons unrelated to Zika: included were provisions limiting the power of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and barring the president from closing the Guantánamo Bay military prison facility or from authorizing new facilities to house the prisoners now held there anywhere back in the U.S.Such is the way standard and ongoing political fights between the White House and Republicans come to affect pressing action on emergencies like the Zika virus.

Such is the way standard and ongoing political fights between the White House and Republicans come to affect pressing action on emergencies like the Zika virus.

Efforts to reconcile the House and Senate legislation ran into further political speed bumps in the weeks after their passings: Republicans in the House thought removing environmental protections against some pesticides was an appropriate measure to pass (May 24th), which earned a response from the White House which excoriated the move: “Rebranding legislation that removes important Clean Water Act protections for public health and water quality is not an appropriate avenue for addressing the serious threat to the nation that the Zika virus poses,” noting that exceptions already exist for emergencies like this one and that this is part of a larger, preexisting GOP agenda to loosen environmental restrictions on pesticides.  Republicans are also fighting against any additional abortion or contraceptive methods being used in response to sexually-transmissible Zika, with some preferring abstinence-only educational approaches: the Zika bill passed by the House did not even provide money for facilities that might use contraceptive methods to help fight the sexual spread of Zika. 

Things would only get worse: during the reconciliation process to merge the House and Senate bills into something final, amid the height of partisan rancor over gun control after this summer’s Orlando terrorist mass shooting at a gay nightclub and during a Democratic sit-in on that very issue of gun-control, Republicans saw to it that a provision was removed (June 23rd, around 3AM) that would have banned and prevented federal funding for official large flyings of “Confederate” rebel flags in federal cemeteries, itself a product of a contentious fight over the rebel Civil War flag that took place after the terrorist shooting of African-Americans in Charleston last summer.  Additionally, the final bill: cut $540 million in funding for Obamacare/ACA, did not provide any funding for contraceptive prevention providers (including, of course, any funds for Planned Parenthood) for this STD, and took an additional $107 million away from Ebola programs and another $100 million from administrative funding for HHS, with $750 million in total cuts/reallocations offsetting the $1.1 billion in Zika funding, funding which would sustain efforts to fight the disease through September 2017.  Unsurprisingly, Senate Democrats blocked the bill in a procedural vote on June 28th, having felt that by agreeing to an amount that was $800 million less than what the Obama Administration wanted was compromise enough, and that the cheap political ploys, especially blocking the funding of preventive contraceptive measures for the rapidly spreading STD that is Zika—a move that especially leaves poor women vulnerable—went too far.

So, too, did the White House, which said it would veto the legislation over the controversial provisions.

In fact, Obama noted (July 1st) that had funding already been approved, it is likely that a functional Zika vaccine would already be close to on its way; the president noted the delay in funding and the efforts to score cheap, often unrelated, political points in trying to deal with this emergency have prevented this from being the case and this unacceptable situation poses a serious—and seriously avoidable and unnecessary—national health risk: “It’s been politics as usual rather than responding to a very serious health request,” he said.

Even as new Congressional testimony by experts offered dire warnings on Zika (July 13th), the very next day (July 14th), Congress adjourned for its nearly two-month summer recess after failing again to bridge the divide: Republicans still decided it was better to use the vital, pressing funding for fighting Zika as a poker chip in a card game involving Obamacare, government spending, birth control, pesticides, even the “Confederate” flag rather than treat it as its own issue and its own end; after Republicans rejected an attempt by the Democrats to go back to the bipartisan $1.1 billion clean bill they had passed May 19th without the controversial political gimmicks—with GOP Senate leaders saying they had to accept the House bill as is because of procedure (a procedure the Senate Republican leadership had pursued without including Democrats in the process)—Democrats again blocked the new $1.1 billion measure with the controversial, sometimes counterproductive measures.  Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who would be announced as Hillary Clinton’s VP pick over a week later, was at the hearing the day before and expressed what many are feeling: “This is why people hate Congress…This is why people hate Washington.”  At the same hearing, CDC Director Frieden somberly added that “This is no way to fight epidemics.”

Thus, Congress went on vacation during the peak of the threat of Zika spreading in the U.S. and over five months after Obama first asked for funding to fight Zika without providing funding to fight Zika.  The fight over Zika will resume again once Congress is back in session, in the fall, nearly seven months after the president first laid out his request.

And it was only a few weeks after Congress went on recess when news broke on July 29ththat Zika had been spread through local/mosquito transmission in Florida, the first/local mosquito transmissions in the continental U.S; the virus continues to spread in the state.

In response to the local transmissions in Florida, congressional Democrats urged Republican congressional leaders to call Congress back to session in order to pass a Zika bill (July 31st).  They repeated this call on August 4th.  Republican leaders, however, choose not to reconvene Congress.

On August 9th, the first Zika-related death of an infant in the U.S., one born with microcephaly in Texas, is announced.

On August 11th, Sec. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the head of HHS, announced that her department’s money to fight ZIka—taken earlier by the Obama Administration from money set aside for the important Ebola and other emergency programs—would run out by the end of August.  In order to prevent a stoppage of the work to develop a critically important Zika vaccine, which had just begun clinical trials on people, she announced that she was taking $81 million away from other noteworthy programs: $34 million from programs at the National Institutes of Health for researching treatment of cancer, diabetes, and other diseases; $19 million from a program that provides heating oil for low-income families; $4 million to help substance abuse, among others.  On this day also, Democrats again call for Republican leaders in Congress to end the recess to pass a Zika bill.  This still has not happened.

On August 12th, the U.S. declares a public health emergency in Puerto Rico, where at that time well over 10,000 confirmed cases of Zika had occurred, nearly 10% of those with pregnant women.

On August 30th, the CDC noted that it would have no more funds to send to states if new outbreaks occurred.

And, oh, there could be another self-inflicted government shutdown this fall, further complicating health agencies’ abilities to combat Zika as chaos would envelop the funding and budgeting process.

Republicans Chose Politics Over Protecting Americans

Obama has for months repeatedly pleaded with Congressional Republicans to put politics aside in dealing with a potential Zika epidemic, but his efforts to publicly pressure Republicans, as is often the case, thus far have very little to show for them.  He is exercising his constitutional duty to protect the American people, but Congress is failing to do its constitutional to pass laws to do the same.

Let’s be clear about how absolutely miserably the Republican congressional delegation is failing to do its basic duties, is failing the American people: given the following choice, Republicans chose all the wrong ones:

• xA.) Respond by fully funding Obama’s request to protect Americans from Zika without taking money from other important emergency response programs
• ✓B.) Nickel-and-dime the president on this request and argue over funding levels for a pressing medical emergency when the funding request is relatively very small compared to general congressional spending levels
• ✓C.) Fund Obama’s request by taking money out of the ongoing emergency response to the deadly, horrific Ebola virus
• ✓D.) Pass a Zika bill that does not allow for federal support of contraception programs in trying to fight a virus that is sexually transmitted
• ✓E.) Use Obama’s request to continue the irrational, misleading fight over Planned Parenthood and contraception in general
• ✓F.) Use Obama’s request as a political excuse to defund Obamacare
• ✓G.) Use Obama’s request as a political excuse to loosen general long-term regulations on pesticides that can harm the American people even though exceptions for dealing with emergencies like Zika already exist
• ✓H.) Use Obama’s request as a political excuse to fight for federally funded public displays of the “Confederate” rebel flag, inarguably a symbol of white supremacy
• ✓I.) Blame Obama for not funding a Zika response because he doesn’t give in to outrageous political brinksmanship, à la the shutdown fights
• ✓J.) Keep refusing to fund the emergency response on terms acceptable (or sensible) to the Obama Administration and Democrats in order to force Obama to take money away from programs Republicans don’t like
• ✓K.) Don’t give Obama what he wants because it’s Obama asking for something and giving it to him is a “win” for Obama and Democrats during an election year, or during anything

Without question, Republicans very much did not choose A.), definitely chose B.) through I.), and arguably but quite likely chose J.) and K.). 

And all this regarding a public health emergency that could threaten thousands of American babies with lifelong mental defects and others with other conditions.  And Democrats are 100% right to oppose B.) through H.): to legitimize such political malpractice and allow such tawdry, cheap games to be played with a public health emergency is not a precedent that should be legitimized or tolerated in any way, at any time.  Zika is a serious public health emergency that deserves to be treated as an end in and of itself, not to be used as a political football to be kicked around in the process of arguing over unrelated issues. With the fight over Medicaid expansion and the 9/11 first-responders bill, we already saw that the GOP was more than willing to play politics with the health and lives of Americans, and now we have yet another example of such behavior.

The True Republican Party: Disgraceful Long Before Trump & Not to Be Trusted Either with Power or to Keep Americans Safe

Getty: GOP Leaders Speaker Paul Ryan & Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

Ladies and gentlemen, this choice calculus is today’s Republican Party.  And the thing is, none of this has to do with Trump: this is the Republican Party’s style, its governing ethos, its modus operandi, its political philosophy.  And this is nothing new: this is how this disgrace of a political party has operated for much of Obama’s time in the White House, for years now.  The stupidity, recklessness, and political gamesmanship with which the Republican Party approaches matters of life and death, of public health, of emergency concern are not in dispute and are made quite clear with the GOP’s behavior regarding the Zika emergency response.  In fact, the Republicans’ actions on Zika are a perfect microcosm of what the Republican Party is and is not: it is a farce and, as I noted last fall, is not a serious party deserving of our respect, let alone our vote. 

And, again, for all those who are trying to pin the failure of the Republican Party as a party on Trump, as if somehow the GOP is ok and respectable as long as Trump is removed from the picture, the Zika crisis makes it clear Trump is just one symptom of the disease that is the Republican Party itself.

Without a doubt, then, the Zika example is clear proof that the Republican Party is a disgrace and is not fit for or even capable of governing, with or without Trump.  It seems that Trump will lose (though who really knows?!), but Americans need to remember what the real Republican Party is, and not let it get away with deflecting blame away from the party itself onto Trump.  Who knows how many cases of Zika, present and future, could have been prevented—how many fewer babies with lifelong damage to their brains there would be, how many fewer mothers would be literally worried sick, how many deaths could have been prevented—if Republicans responded quickly and sensibly in February to Obama’s Zika request.

That request was made February 8th.  Tomorrow is September 1st.  How much longer will this continue?  How much longer will voters tolerate it? As far back as January, experts have been warning that the Gulf Coast, with its hot and humid climate, large mosquito populations, and large segments of populations living in poverty, was very vulnerable to Zika.  Many of these locations are in Republican congressional districts; will voters hold their representatives accountable this fall, as Zika spreads and most of these Republicans fail(ed) to protect their people from a fast-spreading disease that can cause serious complications, especially to the unborn?  Shame on the Republican Party.  But for people, especially in Zika-vulnerable places, who voted and vote for congressmen that played, play, and will play politics with Zika?  Shame on you, too.  And shame on America for having this be our response to such a major public health crisis.

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