Dr. Scott Atlas probably doesn’t want you to know who he is.

He’s the physician (neuroradiologist, to be precise) who’s been doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes, um, shaping of CDC and administration guidelines and policies related to the coronavirus.

According to a recent Financial Times profile,

Unlike some others on the [White House pandemic] task force, Dr Atlas does not have a background in epidemiology, but he is known in rightwing circles as a former healthcare adviser to both Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney during their failed presidential bids. [President] Trump appointed him to the task force after a string of appearances on Fox News during which he [Atlas] argued combatively against lockdowns.

The main thrust of the article is that Dr. Atlas has become quite the vocal advocate for the idea of herd immunity — “aggressively protecting” the most vulnerable while letting the virus burn its way through the rest of the population.

But as the epidemiologists of Kings College London showed early on, even a smallish percentage of deaths in a large population works out to be an awful lot of dead people. If you assume 1 percent mortality on 100 percent infection, you’d see 3.3 million deaths in the United States alone; even if you drop those numbers to achieve “only,” say, 2 million deaths, that’s still outrageous — ten times as many as we’ve seen yet. And, as KCL recently showed, immunity isn’t forever, so herd immunity is effectively never.

So we need to be clear about a few things: first, “herd immunity” is a euphemism for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Second, that’s the official line of the administration — both from the White House and from the task force.

Third, even if such a shrugging response to mass death might be expected from someone whose qualifications for his current role prominently feature advising Rudy Giuliani and a string of Fox News appearances, it’s completely and sickly incompatible with the battle royale unfolding before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The thing about Amy Coney Barrett is that she’s pro-life. And the thing about Scott Atlas is he’s pushing policies that are undeniably pro-death.

There are miracles, and there is medicine. (For that matter, there is jurisprudence, and there is religion.) But the haphazard conflation cynically peddled by the current administration is, frankly, sickening.

As the old saying goes, the fox knows many things while the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Looking back over the past five years and ahead to the election, consider how much hay the president has made on one or two massive, overwhelming, totally un-prioritized insights.

Politics — campaigning, especially — always mixes some pathos with logos and ethos. But we haven’t had a fully emotional platform in decades, not to mention one that appeals directly to the lower angels of our nature (at best).

What you end up with is the same perspective error that’s at the heart of “all lives matter.” Of course they do, and that’s never been the question. Instead, Those People become the most salient issue, and a flood of votes based on hate rather than heart is released.

Democrats can be prone to yak-shaving: arguing about the design of seatbelts and the rules for wearing them, as though the plane can’t fly unless everyone’s wearing one. But the Trumpists’ argument is and has always been that FIRST CLASS SITS AT THE FRONT!

Not only is that not a real issue (people grumble in line, but the diamond-elite customers always board first across the cheap red carpet anyway), but it’s definitely not the most important one if it looks like the wings might be coming off.

At that point, you want a pilot who knows enough about aerodynamics, engineering, and crew management to land safely.

The United States has a pre-existing condition.

In fact, we might have several — but the one that’s really and truly inarguable is that we’re going into November with a Covid caseload that’s high and rising.

On the one hand, it’s notable that Europe is beginning to reimpose lockdowns after a relatively easier summer. Remember watching Italy and Spain in extremis before things got really bad here? Chances are sadly high that we’re squandering another epidemiological warning.

On the other hand, there’s the matter of the election. As of inauguration day, the facts on the ground are likely to be:

• About a quarter of a million Americans dead in under a year
• An epidemic still burning pretty much out of control, with about 8 million Covid cases and counting (at a rate of 50,000 or more per day)
• No prospect of a well-proven, widely-available, widely-accepted vaccine for another year-plus
• Perhaps another year or so (I’m guessing here) to roll out the vaccine, tiptoe into a new normal, and begin to truly reboot the economy (presidents don’t control the economy — that’s called Sovietism — but that’s another rant)

We know that Covid is a tough disease, even if we’re still figuring out all the long-term effects. The moral of the story, however, is clear:

• A lot of Americans are going to have pre-existing conditions thanks to Covid
• Many more will discover them as they seek delayed or deferred care
• And the economy will remain in some kind of holding pattern until people feel safe to interact again (even without “lockdown,” voluntary social distancing has negative economic effects)

Hence the question: if many Americans will have pre-existing conditions, and the next presidential term will have such stiff pre-existing conditions, which personality — and which policies — do you trust on this issue?

For most of us, for most of the next term, health and healthcare are going to be the issue.

With the second debate officially canceled, can we just go ahead and scratch the third one, too?

After all:

• Debates aren’t about information or substance. They haven’t been for a long time. The people who really want you to watch are television executives, social media executives, and (perhaps) the president.
• The last debate showed the choice plenty clearly: it’s Joe Biden, who requires no further introduction, versus Donald Trump, who also requires no further introduction. Moreover, the president showed he was perfectly capable of turning it up to 11 even before the steroids. Anybody want four more years of that?
• And, of course, in the last battle of the high-risk septuagenarians, one of them already had a perhaps-unconfirmed case of Covid. Who’s for running that risk again pre-election?

What more do you need or want to see, really?

Four great reads this week — three from the FT, and one from the Scholar’s Stage:

First, “‘To Be Near Trump is Toxic:’ Covid-19, Chaos, and the Election:”

On Monday, Mr Trump returned to the White House by helicopter and made his way up the steps to the South Portico before dramatically ripping his mask off “like a burlesque artist,” as [presidential historian Donald] Brinkley puts it.

Meanwhile, inside the White House itself, some seem to be betting on science:

Inside the Oval Office, only two officials were allowed access to the president — Mark Meadows, chief of staff, and Dan Scavino, Donald Trump’s director of social media [!]. Both men had to dress head-to-toe in protective garb.

Meanwhile, in the real America, we’re still suffering at least two 9/11s a week in terms of Covid deaths, apparently due to a lack of will, or faith, or miracle cures.

It’s been said before, but it bears saying again as the election — and winter — bears down: economic recovery will and must follow epidemiology, not the other way around.

***

Zooming way out, Janan Ganesh has a long, detailed, and extremely perceptive look at the United States’ “re-pivot to the Pacific” in “Why America No Longer Looks to Europe.”

Kudos, as always, to him for looking deeper and taking a longer view than most other columnists — especially the famous ones born, bred, and stuck here. The United States is consistently surprised by the world, even as we continue to shape it.

***

Janan’s piece is best read together with at least one piece of the FT‘s weeklong series on “the new Cold War” between the United States and China. If you think Trump’s policy program was totally incoherent or a merely a passing fad, you’ve got another think coming.

Here’s “‘This is a Guy Who is a Thug:’ How U.S. Elite Became Hawks on Xi’s China.” Note that “‘This is a guy who is a thug'” is Joe Biden speaking — as you no doubt already guessed by the highbrow syntax.

***

Finally, from late August at the Scholar’s Stage, T. Greer writes up a New York magazine interview with “electoral whiz kid” David Shor.

The whole thing is worth your while, but, if you’re a typical reader of this blog, it’s worth meditating on this observation [Greer, quoting Shor, as quoted in NY mag]:

The single biggest way that highly educated people who follow politics closely are different from everyone else is that we have much more ideological coherence in our views. […] There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.

Further, “whenever we talk about a given issue, that increases the extent to which voters will cast their ballots on the basis of that issue” [Shor again, as quoted by Greer] — and so, after an immigration-themed campaign, we see a lot of people switch their votes from Obama to Trump not because of substance or style differences between Obama/Clinton or Romney/Trump, but because of relative issue salience.

And so to the kicker, which still bewilders so many, um, ideologically coherent people:

The way that racially charged issues generally get brought up in the U.S. is in the context of crime, which is a very Republican-loaded issue (in terms of which party the median voter trusts on it). Or it comes up in terms of immigration, which is itself a Republican-loaded issue. So even if voters acknowledge the massive systemic inequities that exist in the U.S., discussion of them normally happens in a context where conservatives can posit a trade-off with safety, or all these other things people trust Republicans on.

Shor, qtd. by Greer, emphasis Greer’s [and I’d agree]

If there’s one mimetic image of the Great Depression, it’s unemployed men standing in endless bread lines.

Those men didn’t have to worry about standing six feet apart, but what’s economically different now? There have been some stories and images of people lining up for food aid, but it hasn’t been as pervasive as in 1931–1933, despite roughly comparable unemployment. (Which, it’s always worth noting, doesn’t count those not looking for work nor the underemployed.)

Broadly speaking, this downturn has two different and divergent images: “essential workers” carrying on as ever, and the rest of society eating carry-out on the couch with Zoom and Netflix.

If we care to see it, that’s a clear look at the shadow side of the culture we’ve built:

• It’s more possible to be more alone more of the time. The image of cities is the couch-bound Millennial, not the tenement.
• From fashion to food to entertainment, we’ve made an absurd amount of good-enough options absurdly affordable.
• We’ve made work much less visible at every step of the chain. People who work with their fingertips have found it’s just about as easy to do that from home as from the office. And, with the touch of a finger, they can send another person out for food, delivery, or whatever else feels essential at the moment.

Just as a few families sent two successive generations off to war while the rest of the country stopped paying attention to a faraway tragedy, we’ve now made it easy and acceptable for some to risk dying of boredom while others risk their lives to deliver food to the bored.

Today’s breadlines are inside Whole Foods. I’m not so sure that’s really progress. In fact, it might be holding progress back, since it’s much easier to ignore.

“Carthago delenda est — Carthage must be destroyed.”

Cato the Censor was famous for ending all of his speeches to the Roman Senate with this phrase (or a variant) in the lead-up to the Third Punic War (149–146 BC). He pushed and he pushed, and eventually he got what he wanted.

As we all know and are (painfully) re-learning daily, a statement repeated strongly enough for long enough may come to be taken seriously.

From Reagan forward (depending on how you count), the Republican Party’s message has included the idea that the federal government must be destroyed. Hence the ever more cynical show of politicians running like hell against Washington in order to keep their seats inside the Beltway.

Small wonder, after all those years, that people began to take it seriously. The Tea Party, of course, popularized the notion; the McCain-Palin ticket of 2008 embodied it and showed just how far inside the unironic outsiders had made it.

A dozen years later, we still don’t know just how ironic the message is in its chief standard bearer — only that he’s been exceptionally effective in waging a punic war on the government. And the next generation of suited insiders and camo-swathed outsiders appear, if anything, more serious still.

Moving from critiquing to censoring might feel like a small step at first. But once you take it, you’ve put up the bat signal for anyone who has a beef (real or imagined) with whatever or whomever you’re censoring.

Don’t be surprised when they answer the invitation you’ve been making all along.

Yesterday, Steve Pressfield wrote an extraordinary post about how we are both the selves of our everyday lives, and the selves we could be if only we could realize them — and how what stands between the two is Resistance.

The framing might be a little dualistic, but the insights and the questions are real.

Why is everyone so freaked out and ticked off? Probably because the systems we have aren’t working, we all know it, and we can’t seem to look at our failures or dream up better ways.

Playing by the rules in the United States today means working like crazy to “win” at the Common App roulette; in order to start life an average of about $33,000 in debt; only to graduate into the world of the $34,000 wedding, an inaccessible housing market, and the wealthcare system.

And that’s if you’re privileged enough to be able to enter that race to begin with, which an awful lot of people are not.

That’s not winning, and we all know it.

So where can we go from here? Assuming we can hang together long enough to begin to turn things around, I’m reminded of the old Zen parable in which a series of “happy” and “unhappy” events befall a farmer, and he responds to each of them by saying merely, “we’ll see.”

There’s a chance — not a certainty, by any means, but a chance nonetheless — that we begin to turn. That we recognize ecological suicide for what it is. That we re-subordinate the economy to the culture. That we demand and practice a politics rooted in the idea that we’re all in this together and for the long haul.

There’ll be plenty of Resistance along that road, that’s for sure. But we could do it, right?

We’ll see.

Lest there was any lingering doubt, history has returned — with a vengeance, and with new challenges that will surely test us as people, as countries, and as a species in ways we’ve never been tested before.

The post-World War II version of normal was an aberration: with unprecedented peace, growth, and stability, it’s understandable that people could have jumped to all sorts of conclusions about, say, economics, politics, war, or the United States and its place in the world.

Though we haven’t seen a pandemic in over a century, this might not be the last one in our lifetimes. And we’re already seeing drastic climate damage, unprecedented economic changes, and the beginnings of what looks to be a very poorly thought-through great-power competition.

When we can’t see around the corner of the next week or month or decade, what sort of leaders should we be looking for?

It seems the only way forward is to elevate those who have an appropriate respect for tradition combined with a high tolerance for ambiguity and innovation. And all of that needs to be couched in a strong respect for the rule of law and the power of example.

A rare combination, to be sure, but we’re going to be all out of Boomer candidates pretty soon. That’s as good a chance as any to re-examine what we’re looking for in the leaders who’ll have to deal with the world the outgoing (and going, and going) generation has made.

Over the weekend, I had a chance to talk with a teenager about her experience of this election season.

On the one hand, I was really impressed: she’s paying attention, knows the issues, has clearly thought-out positions, and talked about others’ positions with a level of empathy that I often struggle to muster.

On the other hand, I can’t imagine what this is like for teenagers now, and told her so. Though I’d say most of my classmates agreed on specific policy choices, especially the invasion of Iraq, I didn’t think of any of them in strictly partisan terms. And a little bit of The Daily Show was as edgy as our mimetic political commentary got: there was no constant immersion in (mis)information and everybody else’s individual opinions.

Both sides would probably agree, on some level, that leadership matters: as social animals, we look to people in positions of power, and we pay very close attention to the words they use. We can’t help it.

Whether or not teenagers should be on Snap is not a debate I’m eager to enter. But we can control the influence coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and I’m definitely in favor of leadership that helps explain the world to kids, rather than leaders (and a world) we have to explain to kids.

Times and standards have definitely changed, but we all know baseline truthfulness and decency when we see them. At that level, oceans of information and continents of commentary are all gloss on the essence of a person and his or her actions.