I know I’m returning to a well-worn theme here, but I found myself spending a surprising amount of time this week watching news reports on Hurricane Ida and it’s aftermath – the trail of destruction from Cuba to Louisiana to the Canadian Maritimes.
It’s hard to resist the conclusion that the US is broken: neither its physical nor political infrastructures are fit for purpose. In case you think I’m picking on the US, our country is pretty broken too – and David Cameron and George Osborne broke it – but it’s the US that’s becoming a paradigm case. I was reminded of something I wrote here in March last year. Commenting on an Ed Yong piece in the Atlantic that mentioned the US healthcare system, I wrote that the problem is that there isn’t a system.
I see lots of private healthcare providers, uncoordinated at county, state and federal level, forced to do the best they can while snagged in the gossamer web of health insurers and political stupidity. Vincanne Adams makes a similar point in passing in Disasters and Capitalism …and COVID-19. As I write, news continues to circulate of States forced by circumstance to compete against each other for vital clinical equipment.
Secondly, one of Yong’s possible outcomes is the one where America leads the way internationally on pandemics and climate change. I think that’s unlikely: it disregards the extent to which the US has squandered what authority it might once have had. Exceptionalism guides the assumption of a leadership role rather than co-operative participation. Leaders need followers, and who is left who would follow the US in this or climate change? Maybe under Obama, maybe under Elizabeth Warren, but both those ships have left the harbour.
I haven’t changed my mind since then.
It’s possible that the systemic shock of Ida will provoke change in the US, and I hope it does, but I remain sceptical that the US is politically capable of taking co-ordinated and decisive action. There’s still three months of the hurricane season left, too. In the meantime, the west coast continues to burn.
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