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Finding housing is the most difficult part of the resettlement process.
Roughly a quarter of the more than 100,000 Afghans evacuated from Kabul in August have already arrived at American military bases for further processing, awaiting their opportunity to start a new life in the US. But amid a nationwide affordable housing crisis, finding them a place to call home is proving a major obstacle.
There has been a dearth of available and affordable homes for low-income renters for years, but the pandemic has exacerbated the trend, increasing the shortage to 6.8 million units nationwide as of March 2021. The problem is particularly acute in states that have historically taken in large numbers of refugees — such as California, Texas, and New York — as well as in major metro areas across the US.
In New York, there are 37 affordable homes for every 100 low-income renters. In Texas and California, there are fewer than 30. This limited supply has created massive demand for rental units, driving up rents as a result.
The White House is attempting to address the shortage. In the next three years, it plans to build and sell 100,000 affordable homes, prioritizing both individual buyers and nonprofit organizations.
President Joe Biden has also proposed a $300 billion plan to either build or preserve 2 million affordable homes as part of a broader infrastructure package that has already passed the Senate and is currently being considered in the House. Finally, the Biden administration has made a $6.4 billion emergency funding request to Congress to support Afghan resettlement.
But those measures might not come to fruition soon enough for refugee resettlement agencies charged with helping Afghans find their footing during their first three months in the US. They are under immediate pressure to locate housing for the up to 65,000 Afghans expected to arrive by the end of September — and the additional 30,000 projected to come over the next 12 months, a number that could ultimately be a low estimate.
Essentially, the housing crunch is about to get even worse as Afghan refugees continue to arrive in the US.
“Housing is the hardest piece to manage for resettlement,” said Alicia Wrenn, senior director for resettlement and integration at the refugee resettlement agency HIAS. “Our clients are coming in with very limited means, and additionally, they don’t have a history here. So you’re scrambling in a housing market that’s tight for all Americans and really tight for low-income people. Depending on the location, it’s more or less acute — but it’s all acute.”
Afghan refugees are coming to the US through one of two primary avenues.
Those who worked alongside the US military during the 20-year war effort can apply for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) that gives them access to government-funded services, including a stipend of $1,200 that they can use to pay rent once they’re in the US. Others are coming to the US on humanitarian parole, which allows recipients to live and work in the country for up to two years but does not qualify them for the same kind of government assistance. Those on parole are responsible for raising money for expenses like rent on their own, and refugee agencies have stepped up to front the cost of providing them with support.
Regardless of which path they take, Afghans arriving in the US can choose where they ultimately want to settle, whether they opt to be near family members or select from the State Department’s list of 19 “affordable” cities spanning from Phoenix to St. Louis. Notably, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC — once top destinations for refugees — did not make the department’s list.
No matter where they settle or which program brought them to the US, newly arrived Afghans will have to navigate a troubled housing market — one that can make finding shelter difficult even with advanced planning, a luxury refugees hastily fleeing the Taliban’s rapid advance do not have.
Under normal circumstances, a resettlement agency would typically get a couple weeks’ notice before a refugee or SIV arrives at their final destination, which is usually enough time to find long-term housing. They work with local landlords and apartment complexes to secure six- to 12-month leases for refugees in safe, sanitary units located near grocery stores and bus routes, and in a community that is likely to welcome them.
Acquiring those leases involves explaining to the landlord that the refugee is authorized to live and work in the US, that they don’t have a credit or renting history because they just arrived, that the agency might cover the first few months of rent, and that the renter will become self-sufficient in a short amount of time. Once landlords understand the kind of financial support refugee resettlement agencies provide, most are eager to partner with them, said Mark Hagar, the Dallas-area director of Refugee Services of Texas.
“It takes some advocacy, but not a lot because it’s a win-win,” he said.
Building those relationships with housing partners can take time, though. Given that many agencies were forced to shutter offices across the country when the Trump administration slashed refugee admissions to a record low and cut their federal funding, many established agencies were forced to let longstanding partnerships lapse. With 100,000 Afghans waiting, they now need to urgently reestablish those relationships or look for new partners.
Complicating matters is recent consolidation in the housing industry: In some parts of the country, refugee agencies are discovering that the small landlords they once worked with no longer exist; instead, in cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, many of the apartment complexes are now owned by corporations based out of state.
“We might have historically had relationships with landlords who knew refugee resettlement, knew the agency, and knew that they were referring people who were set up to pay but didn’t have a traditional record,” Wrenn said. “It’s getting harder and harder to do that because nobody locally has decision-making authority.”
It’s also becoming more difficult to find affordable housing in areas within close proximity of refugees’ family members in the US, existing diaspora communities, and the staff and volunteer base of refugee resettlement agencies.
“Ideally, for long-term stability, we’re hoping to place them in a community that is supportive, that might be from the same country of origin, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to find places that have that capacity to do so in an affordable way,” said Garrett Pearson, director of the refugee resettlement agency World Relief North Texas, which serves the area surrounding Fort Worth.
These issues have been compounded by the changes the pandemic has brought to the housing market.
In Austin, one of the cities listed by the State Department as an affordable destination for refugees, would-be homebuyers priced out of the second-most competitive housing market in the US have resorted to renting, driving up the average monthly rent from $1,311 in July 2019 to $1,516 as of September — an all-time high and roughly double what renters would have expected to pay a decade ago. Notably, it also exceeds what SIV recipients are given in rental stipends by $316 per month.
The pandemic has also slowed down the construction of new rental units and associated permitting processes in Austin, meaning the housing supply has not grown enough to accommodate the demands of new renters, which grew to 16,000 over the last year, compared with the previous annual average of 12,000.
High prices and low supply leave cash-strapped refugee agencies struggling to compete, and could limit how quickly they can resettle families and how many people they can serve.
All these issues are exacerbated by the fact that agencies are working on an abbreviated time frame. The chaotic nature of the evacuation and processing efforts means agencies might only get a couple days’ notice before Afghan “walk-ins” arrive, leaving them scrambling to find housing. As a stopgap measure, they have had to put refugees up for a few days or weeks in temporary accommodations.
Though refugee agencies say they have received many offers from local community members who want to host refugees, it’s not an option they tend to rely on, in part because it puts refugees and host families in a potentially difficult situation. They have mostly placed refugees in hotels and vetted homes on Airbnb, which has pledged to fund temporary housing for 20,000 Afghan refugees worldwide. Those kinds of accommodations have been particularly useful amid the pandemic in case refugees have had to quarantine.
But refugees can’t live in those places forever. And if housing isn’t available, it’s possible that some Afghans may need to stay on military bases for longer than a couple of weeks before being transferred to their final destination.
“Housing is something that is necessary from the beginning,” Pearson said. “It certainly has the potential where we can get easily overwhelmed with a big wave of walk-ins.”
Refugee resettlement agencies receive funding from the federal government to provide services like temporary housing, but during the current crisis, they’re asking for more support — both financial and administrative.
Given that they’re currently fronting the cost of finding housing and providing other services to Afghans coming to the US on humanitarian parole, resettlement agencies have supported legislation recently introduced by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) and Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), which would make those parolees eligible for the same federal assistance as refugees.
The advantage of parole is that the process lets the US bring vulnerable Afghans to safety on an expedited basis and give them work authorization, rather than waiting months to process their applications for SIVs or refugee status abroad due to significant backlogs. But again, the kind of resources parolees are guaranteed are limited, leaving the cost of providing for them in the hands of agencies. If parolees had access to the same stipend as SIV recipients and refugees, it would stretch those agencies’ resources, allowing them to serve as many people as possible.
“The current ‘parolee’ system, while a necessary stopgap, is … insufficient to address the continuing needs of individuals and families who have been forced to leave everything behind,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said in a statement.
Wrenn said the nine refugee resettlement agencies nationwide that partner with the US government had been pushing federal agencies to help coordinate housing placements for refugees even before the Afghan crisis unfolded, arguing that formalizing the housing placement process at the national level would make it more efficient.
“These are paying people who are ready to start anew and give it their best, so these are not high-risk clients,” Wrenn said. “But you have to make that case every time, and so it’s arduous. It’s too challenging to go at it one by one. There has to be more support applied from a national level.”
Unlike other areas of immigration policy, there has been bipartisan political mobilization around resettling Afghans in the US, so it’s possible some of these proposals for federal action might actually become reality. And Congress is expected to address Biden’s request for more resettlement funding when it returns in late September. But in the meantime, refugee resettlement agencies are on their own.
How 9/11 convinced Americans to buy, buy, buy.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, fashion designer Steve Madden was caught in a relatively minor scandal involving actor Denis Leary, firefighters, and shoes with fake gemstone American flags on them.
Madden and Leary had partnered to launch a line of sneakers — called the Bravest — to raise money for the families of fallen New York City firefighters. But Madden’s company failed to actually put any of the proceeds toward the purported cause. After reporters caught wind of what was going on, Madden’s company agreed to send 10 percent of its profits from the shoes to Leary’s charity. Still, then-Madden CEO Jamie Karson shrugged it off. “The most patriotic thing we can do,” he told the New York Times at the time, “is make money.”
Crass, maybe, but also within the prevailing spirit of the day. Consumers buying the sneakers wanted to perform an act of patriotism by financially supporting heroes, but the simple act of consumerism could be interpreted as patriotic, too. At least, if you believe in a certain version of patriotism.
This version of patriotism — consumer patriotism — was on full display after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 in 2001. The message from political leaders was that the way for Americans to move past the tragedy and overcome their fears was to spend money and spur the economy.
In an address to the nation on the evening of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush reassured the public that “our financial institutions remain strong” and the American economy was still “open for business.” He would go on to tell people to “get down to Disney World in Florida” to help shore up the country’s hurting airlines. “Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed,” he said. Vice President Dick Cheney called for the public to “stick their thumb in the eye of the terrorists” by not letting what had happened “in any way throw off their normal level of activity.” Political leaders declared that the terrorists “hate our freedoms” — of religion, of speech, and, apparently, of the ability to snap a picture with Minnie and Mickey and buy stock in Exxon.
Corporate America, naturally, was happy to oblige. General Motors advertised that it would “keep America rolling” with interest-free financing. Ford followed suit, pledging to “do their part to move America forward” by offering the same deal. The country saw a proliferation of American flag-themed merchandise. The national catastrophe could be commodified, packaged, and sold for profit. Was it exploitative? Maybe. But participating in that exploitation, as long as you were spending, was reaffirming the American way.
There were concerns that the attacks would harm the economy if people were afraid and curbed their activity, and corporations and political leaders alike were determined to make sure that didn’t happen. Economically, the consumerist push worked, and Americans did their patriotic duty to spend.
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David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
This notion of consumer patriotism isn’t unique to 9/11. American colonists boycotted British goods and were expected to buy American during the Revolutionary War; in the 1920s and ’30s, there was a push to buy American fashions. The US set itself apart from the Soviet Union, in part, through consumerism during the Cold War. In the midst of the financial crisis, Warren Buffett told investors, “Buy American. I Am.”
During the Covid-19 pandemic, consumers have been on the receiving end of competing messages around buying. Americans weren’t supposed to spend on things like restaurants and travel, but they were supposed to order delivery to try to save local restaurants, and brands were constantly reassuring consumers that they were here for them. Now, there’s a sense that, once safe, it’s a duty to spend the way to recovery. And as brands have become more political, consumers are often voting with their dollars in deciding where to shop — and where not to.
There’s an earnestness to this — in the face of crisis, people want to do their part, and if consuming is a way to do that, so be it. But there’s a cynical interpretation, too: To be a patriot is to wholeheartedly believe in American capitalism and the strength of the US economy, to pledge allegiance to the flag and the market. Consumer patriotism reduces civic participation to spending money.
The calls for Americans to buy their way past the 9/11 attacks did not go unnoticed at the time.
“The theory is that we demonstrate our resolve to the rest of the world by investing and consuming at least as much as we did before, preferably more,” wrote Robert Reich, the labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, in an article published on September 23, 2001. “The terrorists tried to strike at the heart of American capitalism. We show that American capitalism is alive and well by giving it as much of our credit card as possible.”
In moments of national crisis, one of the most important dangers to the economy is that people will cut back on spending, pushing the country into a recession and costing people their jobs. When the 9/11 attacks happened, the US economy indeed was in the midst of a mild and short-lived recession.
In an interview with Vox reflecting on the rhetoric of the time, Reich acknowledged this was part of the fear — that a national tragedy could become an economic crisis. Still, he said, spending as an expression of patriotism is peculiar. “If you think about it for a minute, you see how really bizarre the idea is,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the notion of sacrifice. In fact, in many ways it’s the opposite.”
He offered up the example of World War II, during which, by contrast, Americans were asked to demonstrate their patriotism by giving up some luxuries, not buying more. “People paid more taxes occasionally, they bought war bonds, they individually sacrificed and cut back on a whole variety of consumer goods that they otherwise might want or need. They participated in rationing,” he said. “In other words, these national emergencies demanded that people respond to the common good.”
Instead, the response to 9/11 mirrored America’s approach to the Cold War. As historian Elaine Tyler May wrote in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Bush’s call for a celebration of the way of American life mirrored Richard Nixon’s “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, where the US leader and his Soviet counterpart engaged in a capitalism versus communism back-and-forth in a model kitchen at an exhibition.
“Although the president launched a hot war in response to the attacks, the cold war served as a model for the home front in the ‘war on terror,’” May wrote. “Telling his fellow citizens to ‘take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed,’ Bush, like Nixon, identified consumerism as the stealth weapon that would triumph over the enemy.”
While Americans were not asked to sacrifice with their wallets after 9/11, some did sacrifice in other ways — namely, the hundreds of thousands of troops who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan in the wars that were sprung from the attacks. But Americans, by and large, didn’t feel those sacrifices economically or as consumers, even though trillions of dollars were spent (trillions of dollars that could have gone to other programs, whether universal health care or free college or universal pre-K). One of the phenomena of the wars of the past 20 years is that many Americans didn’t feel them at all unless they were directly involved.
“Ever since the end of the Vietnam War and the end of the draft, most Americans are not really aware of the sacrifices wars entail,” Reich said. “The war in Afghanistan was almost a secret war in that for most of those 20 years it was unmentioned in the media, it was kind of on automatic pilot. There were certainly Americans who died there, and there was certainly a lot of money spent, but we never paid any attention to it.”
In America, there is a pre- and a post-9/11, and it is marked by the presence of flags. There was a boom of US-themed goods as corporations realized they could channel the country’s desire to express patriotism into profits. Consumers were hungry for the American brand and for products that expressed the values they felt were under threat. Businesses were happy to embrace the trend.
The Wall Street Journal documented the phenomenon at the time, marveling at the range of patriotic-themed items on the market, including pillows, T-shirts, and diapers. Manolo Blahnik was selling red, white, and blue heels priced at nearly $800; Ty Inc. had released two new Beanie Babies named America and Courage; a San Francisco designer had launched a line of patriotic prom dresses. Pro-military messages were on T-shirts and became quintessential features of NFL programming. From Osama bin Laden dart boards to toilet paper to wanted posters, the mastermind behind the attacks had become what the Washington Post described as a “capitalist tool.”
As the WSJ noted at the time, businesses using the flag on their products wasn’t new — there was a rise of patriotic products during the Gulf War as a demonstration of supporting the troops, and every year, there was a bump in such gear around the Fourth of July. But Maj. George Hood, the public affairs director for the Salvation Army, told the publication that they’d “never had a disaster where entrepreneurialism came to the forefront as rapidly as this one.”
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In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images
Beyond flag-themed merchandise, there was a push among companies to express solidarity and associate their brands with patriotism. General Electric ran an ad of the Statue of Liberty rolling up her sleeves that read: “We will roll up our sleeves. We will move forward together. We will overcome. We will never forget.”
Tying in their products and services with 9/11 and with America was good marketing. Many also promised to donate some of their profits to charity. Sometimes that worked; sometimes it didn’t. Consumers were buying CDs with the American Red Cross label on them and believing proceeds from books they were snapping up were going to the New York City Fire Department. In reality, their money was sometimes just being funneled into corporate coffers. Then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer warned that people who wanted to give to charity at the time should just do it directly. “Don’t buy a shoe or a book or a CD,” he said. “Just write a check.”
There’s something comforting and cathartic in feeling like we’re in this together in the face of a crisis, even if part of the “we” is a faceless corporation. And post-9/11, it felt good for consumers to imagine they were committing a patriotic act by buying, especially in a situation where many felt so helpless.
But there is also the question of exploitation. The commodification of 9/11 in order to enhance a business’s bottom line is uncomfortable. During the 2002 Super Bowl, Budweiser, for one time only, ran a one-minute commercial honoring the victims of 9/11. It showed the company’s iconic Clydesdale horses trekking to New York City and taking a knee. The commercial is incredibly moving; it’s also selling beer. There are many examples of companies trying to invoke the attacks in ways that are much, much more egregious, such as an ad from a retailer that was discovered to seize the pay of more active-duty military members than any other company in America.
There’s an uneasiness around the line between honoring 9/11 and exploiting 9/11 that has persisted over the years. When the gift shop opened at the 9/11 museum in New York City in 2014, some people expressed dismay at what one family of a person who died in the attacks described as an example of “crass commercialism.”
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Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
Now, as the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks arrives, many businesses and entrepreneurs are selling 9/11 memorabilia. They’ve found another opportunity to commercialize what is now a decades-old crisis. It’s important to remember what happened; it’s also hard not to wonder whether buying a “Never Forget” T-shirt is the right way.
On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Americans and the world find themselves facing another crisis, though of a different type: the Covid-19 pandemic. What leaders asked of the public and of consumers at the outset of the outbreak was in many ways more in the spirit of World War II: to sacrifice, to stay home, to curb spending in order to save lives.
At the same time, there’s been a sense among consumers, essentially, of “What do we buy about this?” People shopped local to try to keep restaurants and bars and bookstores and other businesses afloat. There’s been a constant tension between prioritizing health and prioritizing the economy, and the government has filled in the financial gaps where consumers haven’t been able to, but only to a point. Now, as the country undertakes a rocky recovery, consumers are once again being asked to open their wallets, and people are being called back to work to meet what political leaders and businesses hope will be a surge in demand.
To be sure, not everyone can afford to join in. “It’s understandable that we would hear from national leaders, including economists, that we need to spend more to keep the economy going,” Reich said. “But the elephant in the room is there is widening inequality, the fact that it is really only people in the top 10 percent who have huge and growing discretionary income.”
The future of the American economy once again rests in part on the shoulders of consumer patriots.
The global aftershocks of Covid-19 and the economic crisis it caused, explained.
If you’re reading this article, you can remember what it was like to be alive in 2020 — all too well, most likely. And while you may not want to relive it, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy — a new book by renowned economic historian Adam Tooze about the year that was — makes a strong case for revisiting it.
Shutdown is a kind of “history of the present,” using information available now to try to make sense of the past year through the lens of the global economy. Tooze first applied this technique to his 2018 book Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, about the Great Recession and its consequences; now he’s applying it on an even more rapid scale.
Reading Tooze’s book does successfully transport one back in time, albeit with the benefit of hindsight. The chapter on the pandemic’s origins in China, confusing as they remain, reads like a horror story. A chapter on financial markets helps reveal how easily we could have fallen into an even worse economic disaster, absent swift action by the Federal Reserve.
I caught up with Tooze in August to talk about some of his main takeaways from the book: why the global economy didn’t crash harder than it did, what 2020 said about the future of “neoliberalism,” and how the events of the past year shaped an emerging competition for global influence between the United States and China. A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
In early 2020, the economic indicators were considerably worse than they were during the 2008 financial crisis.
Oh, yes, much more fast-moving. Like nothing we saw in 2008. It was insane, the unemployment wave striking through the world.
And yet, there wasn’t the same kind of financial market meltdown as there was in 2008. One of the key reasons, according to the book, is the intervention of central banks: not just the Fed in America, which was the key actor, but also this sort of informal global network of central banks working together and coordinating on a rescue package to make sure the same thing didn’t happen.
So to what extent can you say that there were real and significant lessons in that last crisis that were learned this time around?
If you talk to any of the participants in 2008–2009, was it a system? No! They were just improvising their socks off, grabbing deep into the historical canon. Ben Bernanke’s mantra was, “We were not going to fail the way we did in the 1930s.” All else follows.
What I think they’ve developed since then is a toolkit. And I use that metaphor glibly; it’s pragmatic, it’s discombobulated, it isn’t a system. It’s just a bunch of useful tools. Things like quantitative easing — frankly, thoroughbred, blue-blood economists don’t even know why it works.
But the Fed did it on an epic scale last March, and it’s hierarchical. There doesn’t need to be a Zoom call; all that really needs to happen is that the Fed moves, then the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England, and then within days, the rest of the world’s central banks can move, too.
This toolkit has been elaborated not just in the center — and the Fed is the center — but in the emerging markets as well, which are acquiring ever-greater sophistication and competence in managing their risks. It’s clearly no longer Washington consensus, one-size-fits-all.
We’ve moved from a kind of doctrinaire economics, which knew some things were true and that you had to apply certain kinds of rules, to a much more experimental, pragmatic approach, which is empowering and enabled many emerging markets to ride out this storm in important ways that we didn’t anticipate.
Many people, me included, were very alarmist about what was going to happen in low-income and emerging-market economies. Now, the real economic shock in places like South Africa has been savage. The pandemic is still running through. But they did not experience financial meltdown, which is what we thought they were going to experience.
Speaking of doctrinaire economics, let’s talk about neoliberalism. It’s an important term in your book, but it’s one of these very complex, very contested ideas. I ping- pong back and forth between thinking it’s a very discrete and useful term, to thinking it doesn’t refer to anything at all, to thinking it refers to many things at once.
You have a distinct view about what 2020 tells us about the version of neoliberalism that’s generally summarized as the Reagan-Thatcherite consensus: the move away from public service provisions and Keynesian economics to a model oriented around shrinking the size of the state (in some areas), privatizing essential services, and generally seeing the government as less responsible for regulating the market and maintaining the welfare of citizens.
In your treatment, the popular argument that this version of neoliberalism died in 2020 — with the massive amount of spending, public intervention, and fiscal intervention in leading democracies — isn’t the full story.
I’m totally with you [on neoliberalism having mixed meanings]. In my book on 2008, I don’t use the term except when it becomes historically relevant in the period. I decided this time around, “What the hell, let’s have a shot at this.” And I’m distinctly in the camp that you refer to as this being a term that refers to several different things, determined in several different ways.
You could think of neoliberalism as a body of doctrine, a set of ideas associated with a group of economists. I take the view that it’s a much wider view of economists than commonly thought — not just the Austrians and Milton Friedman, but also mainstream macro of the MIT heyday in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. I think that has suffered a real crisis of confidence.
I also think that neoliberalism is a practice of government. It’s also a social structure. I think it implicitly assumed a sort of geopolitics. And if you push the envelope really far out, as people on the climate left point out, actually existing neoliberalism in the period since the ’70s has also been framed by a set of assumptions about how we manage our relationship with nature.
At the level of ideas, this is the easiest thing to talk about: Neoliberalism has really ruptured. The coherence of that body of thought is now shot to pieces — manifestly a regime in crisis.
If you believe that markets and various types of private insurance are going to take care of the problems of the Anthropocene, the pandemic blew that up. It was blitzkrieg Anthropocene: problems coming at us in a matter of hours, days, weeks. And if you didn’t act, you were in a mess.
The elements of neoliberalism which, in some senses, have proven most resilient are precisely the dimensions of social class inequality. If you think of neoliberalism as a project, really of the restoration of the balance of class power and the creation and making permanent of various types of structures of inequality, then 2020 did nothing but reinforce those.
And in part, 2020 did nothing but reinforce those because we saw in 2020, as we saw in 2008, the mobilization of state resources — state spending and monetary policy. In very explicit terms, we were trying to conservatively stabilize the status quo. We proclaimed that because businesses were not responsible for 2020, there is no moral hazard problem, and it’s legitimate to hand out hundreds of billions of dollars to them.
We also — and this was kind of unusual in the United States — gave out lots of money to badly off Americans who desperately needed it, so that was the innovative element. But the entire spending package, especially in 2020 itself, was explicitly conservative. It was about maintaining the existing order because no one wants the blame for what had happened. It supercharged the rebound of the financial market, handing literally trillions of dollars to the better-off members of American society.
So to read that as a massive break to neoliberalism, because we saw a more active role for government, seems to me naive when it comes to what government has historically been responsible for.
I want to push on this not because I think it’s wrong, but because it’s worth looking at some of the tensions here.
Obviously, it’s correct to say that the well-off and corporations were tremendous beneficiaries of government largesse in 2020. But in the United States, there was an individual cash transfer program with no precedent in American history. It was an extreme expansion of our welfare state that, and you write this in the book, really is (or was) putting the US on par, in fact ahead, of what European states were doing.
In the year afterward, there’s been this push — almost an ideological reconfiguration — of where the “mainstream” of politics in our country are. You have a faction of the Republican Party becoming more open to government redistribution, especially when it benefits “traditional” families, and you have a Biden administration that’s embracing a child tax credit and a more expansive welfare state in legislation and proposals than anything in the past 30 years.
So even if capital was the immediate beneficiary of government action in 2020, the year also had this effect of shifting the horizons of what seems possible in American politics.
I think that’s absolutely true, which is why I reject Robert Brenner’s formulation in the New Left Review, where he describes [2020 economics] simply as “escalating plunder.” I don’t think that does justice to the nature of this moment at all, to be honest.
You’re absolutely right that this is the first moment in the experimentation with really large-scale, generous social spending in America’s history since the Great Society moment of the 1960s. And it turns out to be easy to do. If you want to avoid a crisis that leads to mass evictions and mass poverty, you can simply decree that there be no evictions and spend large amounts of money handing out checks to the least well-off.
In the CARES Act of 2020, this was balanced by huge giveaways to the more affluent. What’s more striking, and entirely confirms your point, is that the rescue package of the Biden administration — the single piece of massive legislation they passed so far, in March — was much more carefully targeted at middle- and low-income Americans, and really contains a minimum of pork.
So this is a real shift. But I think the pushback would come — and people like Mike Konczal wrote about this really effectively while it was happening — in that we have to differentiate between large-scale spending, which can be legislated and [for which] you can find large majorities for in moments of crisis, and the question of whether the American political system is capable of structural change. And that is what has been singularly absent so far.
This point about the American political system’s limits is, I think, indicative of some of the broader themes in the book — about what 2020 says about America’s role in the world and its influence over global politics, especially vis-à-vis China.
The chapter in the book that sticks with me the most is the one about the pandemic’s origins, covering the way that China both massively screwed up and massively succeeded. It’s a very interesting paradox that says some interesting things about the Chinese state.
The way you talk about it is a contrast with how the West handled these things. But first I want to nail down what, in your view, we learned about China in 2020.
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We learned about its vulnerabilities, to be sure.
There was that Chernobyl moment when everyone thought it was going to be that kind of a disaster that rocked the regime. And the truth in that, I think, is that this was an absolutely catastrophic shock for the regime. This was a total failure.
It’s a ruthless, authoritarian regime that doesn’t put a high price on the lives of the people it designates as enemies. But what we have to understand is that it is utterly preoccupied with the welfare of the over 1 billion people it regards as its constituency — an immense population whose material welfare, whose standard of living, whose health is essential to the legitimacy of this regime.
As everyone says, it’s an output-based regime. And it’s no secret that Asian societies put a huge premium on health. SARS, in 2003, was a savage shock to the legitimacy of the Communist Party in China. Many of the people in [President Xi Jinping’s] entourage owe their careers to the purge that went through the party after the failure in 2003.
The thing about 2020 is it’s infinitely worse than that. This was a complete disaster.
The regime had promised itself it had built a reporting chain that ran up through the provinces, which are the size of large European states. Managing this ensemble is a dizzying task. It’s like trying to run four Americas at once — so getting a true reporting chain out through the Chinese provinces is an incredibly difficult thing to do, and it failed. And then they had a huge problem on their hands, they screwed up, and they know it.
It’s clear that by February [2020] this is a total disaster for the regime. The lockdown is dramatic because nobody wanted to be the next Hubei, the next Wuhan. Province after province shuts down, and by the middle of February, Xi is struggling to get provinces to reopen — even if there wasn’t very much epidemic there — because nobody wanted to be the next lot of people whose heads were on the chopping block for failing to manage this problem.
It is, far and away, the worst crisis the regime has suffered since the reform period in the 1980s. This is the most serious setback to GDP growth — and it’s not just the big companies, because in China the vast preponderance of people are employed in small firms and services. They are savagely hit by this shutdown, as they are everywhere in the world.
So potentially this could have been a Chernobyl. But speaking in soccer terms, it’s as though after shipping a couple of goals early on to the other side, the other side [democratic governments] ran down the pitch and just took turns firing own-goals into their own net for the rest of the game. The Chinese regime is left saying, “Yeah, we shipped two, but you people ran up the score on yourselves.”
We’re joking, but if you think about the percentage of citizens who died in China versus Western democracies — even allowing for substantial falsification of the Chinese data — it’s orders of magnitudes of difference.
So there’s this term you use, polycrisis, that I really like in describing what we all just lived through. It means what it sounds like: There are multiple different intersecting crises happening at once, forming and combining into a new kind (or kinds) of crisis.
In 2020 we’ve talked about the coronavirus itself and the mismanagement of it by virtually everyone. We’ve talked about the economic fallout of the virus. But we haven’t talked about the social crises that consumed the US and kind of radiated out of it, surrounding both the George Floyd protests and the 2020 elections.
It seems to me that this connects to the coronavirus management in an important way. To return to your soccer metaphor, it’s like there was a different kind of democratic own-goals in the competition with China. Democratic states were trying to show that their model could succeed under conditions of duress.
And not only did we fail, in part due to political division, but then we had a massive set of political crises that played into and intensified the fights over the coronavirus, leading to what any objective observer would call an appearance of severe fragility at the heart of the democratic world.
Fragility is I think even a slight understatement: I’ve never lived in a society before in which talk of civil war seemed just kind of commonplace. And this is at the heart of democratic power. Everyone in the United States — and not just in the United States, I promise you — is looking at this country and going, “What on earth?”
Now, I am absolutely not one of those historians who thinks, “Okay, this is the Weimar Republic.” I find that an unhelpful way of thinking about these problems — in part because it exoticizes them, makes it seem as though they were from somewhere very different. In fact, they were an authentically all-American crisis.
Everyone’s involved. The population on the street, in its full diversity, people waving guns at each other. The law. The military. Though we don’t have the full picture and probably never will, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that the ultima razio, the final reason of state, was in play in this crisis.
And business, in a way that’s causing Marxist political economists to stare in disbelief because it’s so rare to actually see the barons of business appear on the scene and explain out loud why democracy is something they actually sort of have an investment in, up to a point. The most legendary moment is this guy who explains how, during civil wars, people file fewer expense reports. So it’s in the interests of expense accounting software that there shouldn’t be a civil war. It’s the sort of thing that boggles the mind — and begs the question of whether they would have said the same thing if [Bernie] Sanders had been the Democratic Party candidate.
One hypothesis about the Chinese — and it’s only one, because it’s so opaque — is that Beijing believes the West is so degenerate at this point that it’s just time to bulldoze. There’s no point in negotiating because the clock on us is running out.
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But when I asked if I could see a photo she said I need to wait till tomorrow as she is naked and doesn’t want to go to the freezer in the basement when it’s already so late.
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I’m not sure what surprised him most: my nudity, or the fact that I know where he lives.
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The longest minute and a half of your life
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Virgin Mobile
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I can’t deal with high maintenance women
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