The pandemic is changing the world in profound ways. We have been
up-ended by this new virus and so have most of the nations of the
planet. Because we are living in an unfolding crisis, we don’t see
clearly through the fog of fear and uncertainty.

We scramble for precedents. We search for leadership. We compare
the current situation with past historical events in the hope of
finding solutions. Other nations will go through the same process
using their own values, their own narratives, their own history and
culture. But all of us, all over the world, want to know how this
happened, what we can do about it, and how we will get through it.

In the United States we are already hearing that this is a crisis
like the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the stock market
crashed, one-third of workers lost their jobs, and tens of
thousands of Americans became hoboes and vagrants, while many
others stood in long soup lines for something to eat.

We hear talk of mobilizing the nation like we did in World War ll,
where the entire country was affected by the war, not just the
soldiers, sailors, and airmen who fought the war, but the civilian
population that planted victory gardens, the women who worked the
factories, the people who conducted war bond drives, and how
everyone learned to live with rationed food and commodities. It was
a time when American industry converted from building cars and
consumer products and built jeeps, tanks, warplanes, and bombs. Why
can’t we, some governors are saying, have industry make ventilators
and protective gear right now, not next month.

We look at the 1930s and 40s as profound decades of change. They
were tough times for sure, for some. But for others not directly
affected by war or depression, they were the best of times and the
nation’s wealth exploded by the end of the war. When Franklin
Roosevelt spoke in his first inauguration speech in 1933, he said
we had nothing to fear but fear itself, and he said we could beat
the crisis before us because “We are stricken by no plague of
locusts.” Well, this time it is a plague, not of locusts, but a
deadly new virus.

Comparisons to these historical decades are almost useless for the
current situation because it is a plague we are dealing with. It is
the plague that has caused markets to collapse and that has thrown
people out of work and out of their usual life habits.

During the Great Depression you could go outside of your house.
During the Great Depression, two-thirds of the nation was still
working. We see the Great Depression in black and white photographs
and film, as if everything was grim, but it wasn’t something that
overwhelmed everyone. People lived through it in full technicolor,
not black and white.

The Great Depression did reveal one important historical lesson.
For the first time since the Civil War, and on a much more massive
scale, the full power of the federal government was used in ways
that affected the lives of everyone. The federal government came to
the rescue with bold experimentation once Franklin Roosevelt was
elected in 1932. The government took immediate action, some of it
controversial and some of it declared unconstitutional, but the
idea was to use the full faith and credit of the United States to
put people back to work, to modernize rural America with
electricity, to save American agriculture and industry, to build
infrastructure, to make sure poor people and those too old to work
still had a stake in society, and to bring back market stability.

Some things worked, others didn’t. Unemployment remained high after
seven years of effort. But along the way the nation experienced
action designed to address longstanding problems. In the end, the
Great Depression was not fixed by government action alone. The
economy was transformed by American mobilization and the full
employment needed to fight a world war. What the Great Depression
and mobilization for war had in common was that they left us with a
strong legacy of government action to benefit ordinary citizens.
And the central importance of the federal government to lead in
times of national crisis. This legacy remains, although we have
been fighting politically over the legacy since then.

State governments cannot do it alone. No group of states can
coordinate and mobilize resources on the scale needed for great
challenges. Only the federal government can spend the money
necessary to respond, even if the spending leads to vastly greater
debt. Only the federal government can pass laws, or implement
existing ones, to order industries to stop making cars and start
building tanks. Or in our current situation to stop building
consumer goods and start building ventilators. new hospitals, and
protective gear for nurses and doctors. And to see the invisible
enemy, we need massive testing for the virus.

The history of human civilization is filled with many examples of
plagues and pestilence that virtually destroyed whole civilizations
and radically altered others. Smallpox, the variola virus, was a
scourge for thousands of years. It was officially eradicated just
40 years ago. No cure was ever found, but vaccinations worked.
Smallpox came to the New World with the conquistadors in the 15th
Century and whole civilizations in the Americas disappeared. We
look back on these catastrophic events and say, if only they knew
science and medicine the way we do, this would not have happened.

Yet here we are, a thriving, scientific and technologically
sophisticated nation and a world filled with the wonders of modern
science and medicine and in the year 2020 we are confined to our
own homes, fearing contact with friends and relatives, and told by
our governments, federal and state, to quit going to work, quit
going to church, quit going to school, and maybe we will have a
vaccine for this new virus in the year 2021.

It is time to shed the old political ways as quickly as we can. We
must free ourselves of the political blinders that come from
hardened political ideologies that divide and conquer human
progress. We cannot let outmoded political thinking blind us to
what we need to do. Our entrenched extreme partisanship is standing
in the way of action. Recently a freshman member of the House,
Katie Porter of California, had to virtually browbeat the head of
the Center for Disease Control and remind him that he already had
the authority to act under existing law.

The people of ancient times did not have the science to deal with
plagues. We do. But we might as well be locked in ancient times if
we cannot free ourselves of what is holding us back. We need to
remember that government exists to serve and protect its citizens.
It is so easy to blame our self-absorbed president who is still
running this crisis as a day-to-day news cycle that is part of his
campaign for re-election. He is now calling himself a wartime
president because there is an adage that you don’t change horses in
the middle of the stream. He wants to be elected again. The voters
of this nation, enough of them, put him in the White House and we
are stuck with him until January 20, 2021.

Trump is our plague president and he is a political plague. So
let’s face the fact that we must deal with many things things
simultaneously, the virus and the ineptitude of a president and his
top officials, who are in way over their heads. Congress and the
rest of the government must find ways to work around the president
to minimize his negative effects while science, medicine, and saner
political leaders deal with the virus. Congress needs to assert its
own powers, over the desires of the president. But the current GOP
members are sticking with the president all the way, even as some
of them come down with the virus.

The recent negotiations between Speaker Pelosi and Secretary of the
Treasury Mnuchin, appear to be one of the work-arounds, that was
deftly designed so it could be sold to the president. We still need
his signature on legislation. State governors need the federal
government and they all say so. But many of them are already taking
steps ahead of our president to meet the emergency. From what I can
tell from news reports, a lot of the government decision making on
the pandemic at the presidential level must first pass through the
office of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, as if Trump
was still running his real estate business. Shakespeare could not
write a stranger tragedy.

We are a nightmare from nature and a nightmare by the failure of
our political system. Yet, we can pull through this, defeat the
virus and build up our economy and our nation again. Even as we
fight through the unknown, we should be thinking clearly that the
old politics will no longer work. We cannot be at each others'
throats over things that now seem inconsequential, when the whole
world is at risk.

Lincoln said during the Civil War that to save the Union we had to
disenthrall ourselves of old thinking. Time to heed Lincoln again,
even as we are stuck with Trump. The virus will pass. And so will
Trump’s presidency.

We will have much to lament and much more work to do when we beat
the virus. The fall elections as difficult as they may be, will be
a major event for change. We must un-elect the president and a good
number of members of Congress. We need a fresh start, with new
leaders, and new thinking about how we govern ourselves and protect
the people. We cannot ever allow a future president to get rid of a
unit of our national security apparatus that was there to protect
us from pandemics, just because that unit was created by a previous
administration.