American (State Of) Exceptionalism

With their decision to keep the Wisconsin polls open, we can now add the Supreme Court to the list of politicians and government officials who have literally killed people during this crisis. It's a long and bipartisan list, including NYC's mayor who acted much too late, New York's Governor, who also acted much too late, and who has taken this moment to make massive healthcare cuts and to repeal bail reforms (the latter of which will help transform New York's prisons into death camps). And to this list we could also add Joe Biden, who encouraged voters to go the polls in Wisconsin, just as he similarly encouraged them a few weeks ago in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona.

These days, it would be hard to find a politician who didn't have blood on their hands. And while they’ll each claim that these are days when difficult decisions have to be made, and when there are no good decisions, this is a lie. The Supreme Court is intentionally trying to disenfranchise voters, and they're so committed to doing so that they don't mind killing hundreds if not thousands of people in order to achieve their end. Joe Biden is killing people so that he can wrap up the Democratic primaries before people realize how terrible he is as a nominee. The Governor of New York is killing people through Medicaid cuts because he'd rather kill poor people than raise taxes on rich ones, and his refusal to empty prisons (especially of non-violent offenders and those whose only crime is being too poor to afford bail) is probably a combination of innate conservatism and just pure callousness. And the Mayor? He might be killing people for no better reason than that he's a narcissistic moron.

And, of course, in this long list, our president certainly deserves the lion’s share of the blame.

But killing Americans for the sake of greed, power, ideology, or just plain idiocy, is almost a prerequisite for public office in the United States. The main difference is that it’s not usually so obvious. But the year is 2020 and this country still needs a movement whose sole purpose is to try and convince the rest of us that black lives matter. So, COVID-19 might just be making the worthlessness of certain American lives more universal—we’re all getting a taste of something that’s always been true for some. And yet, while COVID-19 is a little more indiscriminate in who it kills, all the data indicates that poorer people and people of color are going to be hit disproportionately hard by this epidemic. As with our criminal justice system, the coronavirus knows which lives matter.

Nonetheless, even though the dangers are distributed unequally, we’re each getting a taste of how expendable our lives are to the American ruling class. What are thousands of American lives when compared to Trump’s desire for reelection, the Democratic Party’s desire to defeat Bernie, Cuomo’s desire to cozy up to the wealthy, and De Blasio’s desire to maintain his own self-delusions? No longer a rhetorical question, we now know: they’re not worth much.

But we’ve always known this. Or, at least, we should have always known this. What else is opposition to Medicare For All but proof that American lives are expendable? We know that universal healthcare leads to longer life expectancies with a better quality of life, and we know that universal healthcare distributes its resources based on medical need rather than corporate profit. So, what else is opposition to M4A but an affirmation that American lives are expendable? That corporate profits and political careers are more important than our health and well-being?

Politicians rationalize this in any numbers of ways, but at the end of the day, it’s always a rationalization. If you don’t agree that everyone deserves healthcare as a human right, if you don’t agree that people should have access to healthcare based on their medical needs rather than their ability to pay, what else are you saying than that some lives are more valuable than others? What else are you saying but that certain people deserve to be sick while others can afford the cure and that certain people should die while others can afford to live. COVID-19 has made the expendability of American lives more obvious, but it was always there to see.

But what’s perplexing is the ability of American citizens to avoid facing this truth. Oftentimes, class, race, and gender have been a useful tool for preventing us from acknowledging this truth, because it allows us to pretend that certain groups deserve their suffering; but when the lesson is more universal, when more of us are having to confront the fact that our lives are expendable, I’m curious about what kind of political consciousness might develop out of this moment. Unfortunately, I suspect that I shouldn’t be too hopeful.

For instance, rather than acknowledging that we’re treating “essential workers” as expendable, we’re instead engaging in that age old American tradition of valorizing our victims. The employees at our local grocery store, as well as everyone up and down the supply chain, the people who deliver us our packages from Amazon (and which we then judiciously wipe down with Clorox), the people keeping our public transit running and our public spaces clean, these are the people whose lives we’re sacrificing so that the rest of us can quarantine ourselves in safety. But rather than admit that we’re treating these people as expendable, we instead treat them like they’re heroes.

But they’re not heroes, they’re victims. And rather than applauding them for the sacrifices they’re making, we should instead be acknowledging that they’re hostages being forced to work because they can’t afford not to work. And if we did so, if we realized that their lives were as valuable as our own, we might stop clapping for them and instead start demanding that their lives are valued the same as ours. And if we did this, then maybe I’d be more hopeful about Medicare for All.

American exceptionalism was an unfamiliar term to me before moving to this country. But the belief that America is somehow a unique country, superior to others, and therefore unsusceptible to the rules that apply elsewhere is an almost ubiquitous belief here. From liberals to conservatives, it manifests itself in different ways, and I also think that many Americans don’t even realize how they harbor this belief, treating their own country as if it was somehow unique among all others.

But if there is any truth to American exceptionalism, perhaps it’s this: from its very origins as part of the Atlantic slave trade to today’s sacrifice of what might amount to millions of people, American exceptionalism might reside in the state of exception under which so many of its citizens have always lived. Often reserved for minority groups and the poor, today, we’re each being forced to confront something that’s been true all along.

In America, American lives have always been expendable.