The New York Times - USA (2020-06-28)

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020 SR 9

WASHINGTON

F

ORa long time, Republicans have
brandished the same old narrative
to try to scare their way into the
White House.
Their candidates were presented as the
patriarchs, protecting the house from in-
vaders with dark skin.
With Nixon, it was the Southern Strat-
egy, raising alarms about the dismantling
of Jim Crow laws.
With Reagan, it was launching his 1980
campaign on fairgrounds near where the
Klan murdered three civil rights activists.
With Bush senior, it was Willie Horton
coming to stab you and rape your girl-
friend.
With W. and Cheney, it was Qaeda ter-
rorists coming back to kill us.
With Donald Trump, it was Mexican
rapists and the Obama birther lie.
For re-election, Trump is sifting
through the embers of the Civil War, prom-
ising to protect America from “trouble-
makers” and “agitators” and “anarchists”
rioting, looting and pulling down statues
that they find racially offensive. “They
said, ‘We want to get Jesus,’ ” Trump omi-
nously told Sean Hannity Thursday night.
But Trump is badly out of step with the
national psyche. The scary narrative grip-
ping America is not about dark-skin men
coming for whites. It is, at long last, about
white men in uniforms coming for blacks.
In the last election, Trump milked white
aggrievement to catapult himself into the
White House. But even Republicans today
recognize that we have to grapple with
systemic racism and force some changes
in police conduct — except for our presi-
dent, who hailed stop-and-frisk in the
Hannity interview.
The other scary narrative is about our
“protean” enemy, as Tony Fauci calls
Covid-19, which Trump pretends has dis-
appeared, with lethal consequences. With
no plan, he is reduced to more race-bait-
ing, calling the virus “the China plague”
and the “Kung Flu.” Nasty nicknames
don’t work on diseases.
The pathogen is roaring back in the
South and the West in places that buoyed
Trump in 2016. Texas, Florida and Arizona
are turning into Covid Calamity Land af-
ter many residents emulated their presi-
dent and scorned masks and social dis-
tancing as a Commie hoax.
Is Trump’s perverse Southern Strategy
to send the older men and women who are
a large part of his base to the I.C.U.?
The president showed off his socio-
pathic flair by demanding the repeal of
Obamacare — just because he can’t stand
that it was done by Barack Obama. Mil-
lions losing their jobs and insurance dur-
ing a plague and he wants to eliminate
their alternative? Willful maliciousness.
And this at the same time he has been
ensuring more infections by lowballing
the virus, resisting more testing because
the numbers would not be flattering to
him, sidelining Dr. Fauci and setting a ter-
rible example.
The Dow fell 700 points on the news that
Texas and Florida are ordering a Covid-
driven last call, closing their bars again,
and the virus is revivifying in 30 states.
In 2016, the mood was against the status
quo, represented by Hillary Clinton. But
now the mood is against chaos, cruelty, de-
ception and incompetence, represented
by Trump. In light of our tempestuous,
vertiginous times, Joe Biden’s status quo
seems comforting.
It is a stunning twist in history that the
former vice president was pushed aside in
2016 by the first black president and put
back in the game this year by pragmatic
black voters.
Bill Clinton was needy; he played a
game with voters called “How much do
you love me?” Do you love me enough to
forgive me for this embarrassing personal
transgression, or that one?
But Trump has taken that solipsism to
the stratosphere, asking rallygoers in
Tulsa to choose him over their health, pos-
sibly their lives, recklessly turning a medi-
cal necessity into a tribal signifier. I wasn’t
surprised that so many seats there were
empty, but that so many were filled.
In a rare moment of self-awareness,
Trump whinged to Hannity about Biden:
“The man can’t speak and he’s going to be
your president ’cause some people don’t
love me, maybe.”
It’s not only the virus that Trump is will-
fully blind about. A Times story that broke
Friday evening was extremely disturbing
about Trump’s love of Vladimir Putin.
American intelligence briefed the presi-
dent about a Russian military intelligence
unit secretly offering bounties to Taliban-
linked insurgents for killing coalition
troops in Afghanistan, including Ameri-
cans. Yet Trump has still been lobbying for
Putin to rejoin the G7.
Trump had a chance, with twin exist-
ential crises, to be better after his abomi-
nable performance in his first three years.
But then, we’ve known all along that he is
not interested in science, racial harmony
or leading the basest elements of his base
out of Dixie and into the 21st century. Yes,
the kid from Queens enjoys his newfound
status as a son of the Confederacy.
A Wall Street Journal editorial Thurs-
day warned that he could be defeated be-
cause he has no message beyond personal
grievances and “four more years of him-
self.”
But Trump has always been about
Trump. And the presidency was always
going to distill him to his Trumpiest
essence.
I asked Tim O’Brien, the Trump biogra-
pher, what to expect as the man obsessed
with winning faces humiliating rejection.
“He will descend further into abuse,
alienation and authoritarianism,” O’Brien
said. “That’s what he’s stewing on most of
the time, the triple A’s.”
Good times.

Trump,

Not So

Statuesque

MAUREEN DOWD

CORNELIUS, ORE.

S

CHOLARScall it the “Hispanic

Paradox”: Despite poverty and

discrimination, Hispanic Ameri-

cans live significantly longer than

white or black Americans.

Latinos also appear to have lower sui-

cide rates than whites, are less likely to

drink alcohol, are less likely to die from

drug overdoses and, at least among immi-

grants, appear to commit fewer crimes.

Researchers have puzzled for decades

about why this is. Strong families? Sup-

portive social networks? Religious faith

and active churches? A hard-driving im-

migrant work ethic?

It’s a paradox because the disadvan-

taged normally live shorter lives. Hispan-

ics in the United States endure discrimina-

tion, high poverty, lower rates of health in-

surance than both whites and blacks —

yet they enjoy a life expectancy of 81.8

years, compared with 78.5 years for

whites and 74.9 years for blacks.

This resiliency is now tested by the co-

ronavirus, which has hit Latinos particu-

larly hard: The Centers for Disease Con-

trol and Prevention reported that 33 per-

cent of Americans testing positive for the

virus have been Hispanic, almost twice

their 18 percent share of the population.

I came here to Cornelius, a town west of

Portland with a large Latino population, to

gauge the impact of the crisis, and the vi-

rus predictably has struck Hispanics

hard. Many are undocumented and thus

aren’t receiving federal relief payments.

Yet what struck me, in keeping with the

Hispanic Paradox, was how the communi-

ty pulled together to ease the suffering.

Francis, 50, who does not want to be

identified by her full name because she is

not documented, lost her job as a recep-

tionist because of Covid-19, but her daugh-

ter and son-in-law took her in.

Meanwhile, Francis is volunteering for

the community, driving boxes of food from

a church to needy families. “My car over-

heats,” she said. “But I make it work.”

A Brookings Institution study found

that since the start of the pandemic, one in

six U.S. households has young children

who aren’t getting enough food, so I asked

Francis about hunger. She acknowledged

that there must be hungry children but

added: “If people knew kids were hungry,

they would help. The community would

step up.”

In New York City, Latinos display a sim-

ilar resilience. Dr. Carmen Isasi, an epide-

miologist at Albert Einstein College of

Medicine who has studied LatinX popula-

tions, said that lately she has seen signs on

Spanish-speaking churches offering food

for the needy.

Scholars have been debating the His-

panic Paradox at least since 1974, when re-

searchers found that the neonatal mortal-

ity rate in Texas was lower for people with

Spanish surnames than with English sur-

names.

Researchers have found another para-

dox within the paradox: First-generation

Latino immigrants tend to live longest,

and their children — while better edu-

cated and earning more money — die ear-

lier. Moreover, Latinos in ethnic enclaves

seem to do better than those who live in

heterogeneous neighborhoods.

Part of the explanation may be that

what many white Americans think of as

“traditional American values” — an em-

phasis on faith, family and community ties

— are disproportionately found among

Latino immigrants, but then fade as their

children assimilate.

“If we find that someone needs help, we

help them,” Raúl González Hernández,

who works in a plant nursery and has just

recovered from Covid-19, told me. He said

that others had helped him when he ar-

rived from Michoacán State in Mexico, so

he wants to pay it forward.

I’ve been long interested in the His-

panic Paradox because I grew up in a

mostly white farm town in Oregon that

has been devastated by lost jobs “deaths

of despair.”

Latino families in the area have seemed

more resilient because of their greater

“social capital” — bonds of family, home

region or church. Instead of being “crimi-

nals, drug dealers, rapists,” as Donald

Trump alleged of Mexican immigrants in

2015, Latino immigrants often seem to be

models of civil society.

“Our community, we rely heavily on

each other,” Petrona Dominguez-Fran-

cisco, who works with a program called

Adelante Mujeres that empowers women,

told me.

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of global mi-

gration and demography research at the

Pew Research Center, emphasized family

ties as part of the basis for the paradox.

“There’s a lot of support in my own family

for those who are facing challenges, such

as those who lost their jobs,” he said.

“That’s how Latinos help each other.”

Another element may be faith and

church connections. There’s some evi-

dence that religious beliefs reduce behav-

iors like drug and alcohol abuse, risky sex-

ual activity, violence and suicide, and a

Harvard study found that church attend-

ance, daily prayer or meditation corre-

lates to better health and greater life satis-

faction. Churches also offer services and

social ties that can buffer hardship.

Family and community ties also protect

from a pandemic of loneliness in Western

countries. One scholar has found that so-

cial isolation is more damaging to health

than smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

This social fabric also isn’t a perfect

shield from a pandemic. But it helps, and

perhaps there’s a lesson in that for all the

rest of us.

Learning From Hispanic Americans

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

Unlike Trump’s belief, they

are often models of society.

Employees and

volunteers with

Centro Cultural

de Washington

County prepare

boxes of food for

migrant workers

in Cornelius,

Ore.

LEAH NASH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

T

HERE is something peculiar

about time during the pandemic.

One the one hand there’s a feeling

that the normal calendar has sim-

ply stopped, school schedules and sports

seasons evaporating, one homebound day

passing much like another. It’s a feeling of

hiatus, intermission, like the days be-

tween Christmas and the new year, or

some extra season invented by a Renais-

sance pope to fix a lagging calendar.

Yet at the same time there’s a feeling of

acceleration, of changes that might have

otherwise dragged out across a decade

piling one atop the other. The George

Floyd protests and their electoral conse-

quences, the transformation of liberal in-

stitutions by internal agitation, the

changes happening to cities and corpora-

tions and colleges and churches — in each

case, trends that were working slowly

have seemingly speeded up.

This means that when the coronavirus

era finally ends, there will be a Rip Van

Winkle feeling — a sense of having been

asleep and waking to normality, except

that we will have time-traveled and the

normality will resemble the year 2030 as it

might have been without the virus, rather

than just a simple turn to 2021 or 2022.

What will this 2030-in-2022 look like?

First, certain key cultural institutions will

be increasingly consolidated and concen-

trated, academia and journalism espe-

cially. In the newspaper industry much of

this process happened already, but Covid

is delivering a swifter coup de grâce to

midsize daily newspapers and online

start-ups, and handing advantages to a

few national entities (ahem) that they

might have otherwise taken five or 10

more years to gain.

In higher education a similar transfor-

mation is being pulled forward: Colleges

were expecting a grim landscape in the

later 2020s, because 2010s birthrates were

so low, but now a decline in foreign enroll-

ment and an acceleration of online learn-

ing will threaten marginal state schools

and possibly close small liberal-arts col-

leges much sooner. (The coronavirus ex-

perience is also likely to push birthrates

still lower, delaying any higher ed recov-

ery by years or decades more.)

The likely winners will be the prestige

schools and big state campuses, who will

have the resources to survive and expand

and the name brands to leverage in new

online markets — though so long as pan-

demic fears keeps kids close to home, the

state schools may gain some ground at the

prestige schools’ expense.

In religion, the pandemic may strength-

en certain forms of faith, but that won’t

save institutional churches from what

Fordham’s David Gibson calls a “religion

recession” caused by falling donations

and shrunken attendance. Smaller

churches may suffer most, for the same

tight-margins, high-overhead reasons

that restaurants are going under. But big

religious bodies like Roman Catholicism

and the Southern Baptists will probably

decline as well, in a hurried-up version of

the decay that awaited them with the next

decade’s worth of generational turnover.

(Any Catholic diocese that had a 10-year

plan for closing or consolidating schools

or parishes, for instance, can expect to do

the same thing but much faster.)

In politics, similarly, what was likely to

be a slow-motion leftward shift, as the

less-married, less-religious, more ethni-

cally diverse younger generation gained

more power, is being accelerated nation-

ally by the catastrophes of the Trump ad-

ministration, which is putting states in

play for Democrats five or 10 years early.

A political shift is certainly accelerating

within elite institutions, where the young-

er generation is trying to establish a new

ideological consensus, a new set of stand-

ards and boundaries for behavior and

opinion, that otherwise would have ad-

vanced more slowly, with more contesta-

tion, over the next 10 years. (That these

institutions are subject to the consolidat-

ing forces described above makes the bat-

tle to control them more important, and

the professional stakes more fraught.)

Finally in corporate America, there

may be trends toward both consolidation

and dispersal. The former, because even

federal intervention probably won’t pre-

vent small businesses from going under

while bigger businesses ride things out,

accelerating the pre-existing drift toward

a less entrepreneurial, more monopolist

America.

But the latter, because the remote-work

experience, pandemic fears and possibly-

rising crime rates may encourage more

companies to abandon the great consoli-

dated hubs of the digital age, or at least

fling more satellite campuses out to Idaho

and Iowa and other lower-cost-of-living

states, dispersing talent back into the

heartland for the first time in two genera-

tions.

Of the trends I’ve described, only this

last one seems like a hopeful sign that

post-pandemic America might become

less sclerotic, less decadent than the

America of 2019. If one wanted to be espe-

cially optimistic, one could add that may-

be — maybe — a corporate dispersal will

reduce social stratification, and help cre-

ate new intellectual, journalistic and even

religious centers.

But overall, the pandemic seems likely

to bring us more quickly to a future of con-

solidated power, weakened human-scale

institutions and growing ideological con-

formity. Along with far too many lives,

that’s what’s likely to be lost in this

strange between-time: a decade’s worth

of chances to take an off-ramp, choose a

different direction, or just stand athwart

2030 yelling stop.

Waking Up in 2030

ROSS DOUTHAT

The pandemic has put

history on fast-forward.