THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-EDTHURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020 N A25B
ORIS JOHNSON was supposed to
be the prime minister to “liber-
ate” Britain, not to lock it down.
When he was elected in De-
cember, his mandate was simple: “Get
Brexit done.” But on Jan. 31, as Britain for-
mally left the European Union, it quietly
recorded its first two cases of Covid-19.
Covid-19 has now officially claimed
more than 43,000 lives in Britain. That’s
more than anywhere else in Europe, and
one of the highest death tolls per capita in
the world.
As Britain reopens — a major loosening
of restrictions was announced on Tuesday
— the conclusion is unavoidable: Mr.
Johnson and his cabinet have mishandled
the pandemic, with devastating conse-
quences. But as the death toll mounts, the
dream of Brexit and its toxic legacy live
on. The fantasies behind Brexit — of na-
tional captivity and liberation — have pro-
pelled Britain toward its current calamity.
In the fever dreams of many British
Conservatives, the country has been in
lockdown for decades. Long before the co-
ronavirus forced everyone to shelter in
place, they believed the entire country
was a captive of the European Union,
which wielded a power both arbitrary and
pervasive over a once sovereign state.
Escaping captivity was a central theme
of the 2016 Brexit campaign and of negoti-
ations with the bloc. In March 2019, Mr.
Johnson called on Prime Minister The-
resa May to “say to Pharaoh in Brussels:
‘Let my people go.’ ”
Alas, Mrs. May failed to free our people.
But Mr. Johnson, her successor, promised
to deliver our long-awaited liberation. He
campaigned for the December general
election on a promise to “unleash” Britain.
Under a Conservative government led by
Mr. Johnson, Britain would break free.
The Conservative Party romped home.
With a towering new majority, Mr. John-
son appeared to be unassailable.
Then came the pandemic. Unable to
tamp down his trademark combination of
bluff and bravado, Mr. Johnson struggled
to match the seriousness of the situation.
Boasting of shaking hands with Covid-19
patients, he demurred from imposing a
nationwide lockdown, even as cases be-
gan to stack up.
“We live in a land of liberty,” Mr. John-
son said on March 18, as countries across
Europe followed Italy into lockdown. Two
days later, as he announced the closing of
pubs, bars and restaurants, he noted “how
it seems to go against the freedom-loving
instincts of the British people.”
The people disagreed. When a lock-
down was declared on March 23, public
support for the policy was at 93 percent. It
remained high for the next two months,
even as much of the press focused on eas-
ing restrictions. Britons, it turned out, did
not value their liberty above their lives.
But Mr. Johnson did, to lethal effect.
Twenty thousand people, according to one
estimate, would still be alive if the prime
minister had imposed lockdown sooner.
It was a calamitous misjudgment, but
not necessarily a surprising one. Mr. John-
son’s reluctance to institute a lockdown
and his enthusiasm for Brexit are of a
piece. Brexit is born of a mind-set that, at
root, doesn’t like being told what to do: It
imagines a dream state where neither the
island nation nor its citizens are responsi-
ble to anyone except themselves.
This freewheeling style of politics
comes naturally to Mr. Johnson, but it is ill
suited to dealing with a pandemic. One of
the infamous claims of the Brexit cam-
paign was that “the people in this country
have had enough of experts.” Now Mr.
Johnson, who contracted Covid-19 in
March and has since recovered, and his
band of true believers appear at news con-
ferences flanked by scientists from SAGE,
the Scientific Advisory Group for Emer-
gencies.
The dissonance, jarring to observe, has
produced an incoherent response. Claim-
ing at all times to be “led by the science,”
the government has frequently changed
its position and then denied doing so, of-
fering the public confusing and ambigu-
ous guidance.
Testing was the order of the day, and
then it wasn’t, and then was again. Masks
were not to be worn, until they were (and
then only sometimes). People were told
not to go to work, unless they could.
Schools could safely return, and then
they couldn’t. Britain would have a “world
beating” tracing system, except it would-
n’t. And so on, for everything from quaran-
tining new arrivals to pursuing a policy of
“herd immunity.”
Even now, with so many dead and
around 1,000 new cases of infection each
day, it’s Britain’s lockdown that animates
Brexiteers more than anything else. No
surprise there: They have been locked up
for decades, trapped in the prison of their
own anxieties, and still hanker to be set
free.
The irony is that, according to mod-
eling, Britain’s lockdown would have been
briefer if it had been imposed earlier. Lib-
erty and lives were lost because of Mr.
Johnson’s avowed love of liberty.
It’s a grim irony, and it exposes an un-
happy truth. The biggest threat to Brit-
ain’s freedom is Britain itself. 0
The Deadly
Fantasy
Of Brexit
Britain’s lockdown
animates Brexiteers more
than anything else.
Samuel Earle
LONDON
SAMUEL EARLEis a journalist.
S
EATTLE’S police-free “autono-
mous zone” is coming to an end.
After two largely peaceful
weeks, shootings over the last sev-
eral days near the Capitol Hill Organized
Protest area, CHOP for short, left a 19-
year-old man dead and three others
wounded. Mayor Jenny Durkan an-
nounced on Monday that the city would
retake the abandoned police precinct at
the heart of the zone and wind down the
occupation.
In its brief life, CHOP has reinforced Se-
attle’s reputation as a quirky left-coast
bastion of strong coffee and strong pro-
gressive politics. Many white Seattleites
like to think of their city that way too. But
its progressive appearance is deceiving.
It is a city and region with a long history
of racism, of violent marginalization, and
of pushing back against more radical
movements for social change. It is, in
short, much like the rest of America.
The global protests of the last few
weeks have rightly generated the feeling
that the world is at a turning point on re-
dressing racial inequities. This moment
has great possibilities, but the history of
Seattle and other seemingly progressive
places should make us realize that change
is not that simple.
A 2008 report found that black people
make up less than 10 percent of Seattle’spopulation but well over half of the drug-
related arrests. The Police Department
was placed under federal oversight in 2011
after incidents of excessive use of force on
nonwhite residents. The public schools
here are more segregated than they were
three decades ago. Less than three weeks
ago, the police sprayed protesters with
tear gas on the same streets now given
over to the teach-ins and community gar-
dens of CHOP.
There is, to be sure, a radical streak in
the city’s history. In 1919, Seattle shut
down for five days as 60,000 unionized
workers walked off the job in a general
strike. In the 1930s, the Communist Party
was so ascendant here that James Farley,
a close adviser to President Franklin
Roosevelt, said that “there are 47 states in
the Union, and the Soviet of Washington.”
Huge anti-globalization marches
greeted delegates to the World Trade Or-
ganization meeting here in 1999, causing a
partial shutdown of the conference and
such a ferociously violent police response
that the chief was forced to retire.
But these movements often have been
squelched by pushback from political
leaders, even those who once were allies.
Mayor Ole Hanson, who led Seattle during
the 1919 general strike, once had been a la-
bor-friendly moderate, but quickly turned
into an implacable union foe. “The Soviet
government of Russia, duplicated here,
was their plan,” he wrote in an essay pub-
lished on the front page of The New York
Times shortly after the strike’s end. Now,he assured anxious readers, “law and or-
der are supreme in our city.”
Paul Schell, who was mayor during the
1999 protests, was less pugnacious in his
analysis but remained reluctant to con-
demn the police. “I wish everybody had
behaved themselves,” Mr. Schell later re-
flected. “And that it would have been more
civilized.”
But the story here goes beyond political
leadership. It involves deep, systemic ra-cial inequalities baked into the fabric of
this overwhelmingly white city.
“For most of its history,” James Greg-
ory, a historian, observes, “Seattle was a
segregated city, as committed to white su-
premacy as any location in America.”
Discriminatory mortgage lending and
racially restrictive covenants limited Se-
attle’s nonwhite population to a single
neighborhood, the Central District. Fair
housing laws opened up new parts of the
city and suburbs to minority homeowners
and renters after the 1960s, but Seattle’s
overwhelmingly single-family zoning lim-
ited the housing available to new buyers.
Such zoning has been remarkably diffi-
cult to change. The region’s homeownersmay vote Democratic and plant racial soli-
darity signs in their front yards, but often
resist higher densities that can increase
the affordable housing supply.
Civil rights issues, particularly meas-
ures to combat anti-black racism, can be
subsumed by broader social justice agen-
das. The city’s most prominent voice on
the left in recent years is Kshama Sawant,
a socialist elected to the City Council in- She has focused much of her ire on
Seattle’s high-tech employers and the poli-
ticians who support them. As protests es-
calated in recent weeks, Ms. Sawant frus-
trated some allies by renewing her push
for an “Amazon tax” on large employers to
bolster homelessness initiatives. After the
tax became a rallying cry at a recent Sa-
want-led demonstration at City Hall, one
protester asked in exasperation, “I want
to tax Amazon too, but can we please for
once focus on black lives?”
Similar patterns have shaped politics
and opportunity in other seemingly pro-
gressive cities. In Minneapolis, the pov-
erty and police violence that killed George
Floyd are legacies of a century of racial
segregation, enforced by restrictive cov-
enants, zoning and an Interstate highway
that sliced through the city’s largest black
neighborhood. A comparable mix of public
policies and local prejudice have main-
tained segregation and inequality in Oak-
land and San Francisco, Chicago and
Washington, Los Angeles and New York.
Nevertheless, this looks like a moment
when Seattle and other cities like it might
move past their histories of racism and ex-
clusion. Almost every day for weeks, Se-
attle has had peaceful marches, organized
and led by black and minority activists,
but drawing heavily white crowds. Silent
marches organized by Black Lives Matter
brought nearly 85,000 people to the re-
gion’s streets one recent, rain-drenched
Friday. “B.L.M.” and “Silence=Violence”
signs have sprouted along the roads in af-
fluent suburbs. Similar scenes are playing
out across the country.
This extraordinary swell of activism is
happening in Seattle for many of the same
reasons it is happening elsewhere: horror
at police violence, anger at Covid-19’s in-
equities, the pent-up energy created by
months of lockdown. Another factor is the
energy unleashed during the Trump era.
From the Women’s Marches to March for
Our Lives to Black Lives Matter, progres-
sives have gotten familiar with inking up
protest signs and putting on their march-
ing shoes.
What comes next? Will Seattle and
other cities embrace the changes neces-
sary to end racist policing? Will citizens
change their everyday lives to match the
ideals that propelled them out into the
streets?
Clearly something remarkable is
blooming in this season of pandemic and
protest. It is forcing our city to reckon with
truths that can and should make white cit-
izens like me uncomfortable, and that re-
mind us just how much Seattle is like the
rest of America: impossibly divided, and
impossibly full of hope. 0
RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMESSeattle Is No Progressive Paradise
MARGARET O’MARA is a professor of his-
tory at the University of Washington and
the author of “The Code: Silicon Valley
and the Remaking of America.”The city has a history
of racism. This could
be a turning point.
Margaret O’Mara
SEATTLEPRESIDENT TRUMP SAYSthe coronavirus is “fading
away” and pats himself on the back for “a great job on
CoronaVirus” that saved “millions of U.S. lives.”
“It’s going away,” Trump said Tuesday at a packed
megachurch in Phoenix where few people wore masks.
That’s what delusion sounds like. We need a Churchill
to lead our nation against a deadly challenge; instead,
we have a president who helps an enemy virus infiltrate
our churches and homes. Churchill and Roosevelt
worked to deceive the enemy; Trump is trying to deceive
us.
For a reality check, look at this map by my colleague
Nathaniel Lash showing how much of America is trend-
ing in the wrong direction.
A few glimpses of the challenge:
■Texas, California, Arizona and four other states re-
ported record numbers of cases this week.
■Some 27 states, by the count of the Times tracker, are
reporting increasing numbers of new cases. Ten states
and Washington, D.C., are reporting declining numbers,
with the rest holding steady.
■Arizona, where Trump held his rally, now has the high-
est number of new cases per day per million population,
and the highest share of positive test results.
Black Lives Matter protests do not seem to have
spread the virus much, perhaps because they were held
outside and many participants wore masks. The virus is
spreading most quickly in Trump Country in the South
and Southwest and in both red and blue states in the
West.
“The next couple of weeks are going to be critical in
our ability to address those surges that we’re seeing in
Florida, in Texas, in Arizona, and other states,” Dr. An-
thony Fauci told a congressional hearing on Tuesday.
The rest of the world is watching aghast.
“What’s happened in the U.S. is utterly tragic, and
seems like a consequence of appalling leadership and in-
competent government,” said Devi Sridhar, an Ameri-
can who is a professor of global health at the University
of Edinburgh. “Those of us abroad are watching in hor-
ror, disbelief and pity.”
“This is a warning to other countries of the dangers of
the virus going out of control,” she said.
The European Union is even preparing to bar Ameri-
can visitors because of the United States’ failure to man-
age the coronavirus properly. Visitors from countries
that have controlled the virus better, like Vietnam, Cuba
and Uganda, will be welcome.
That’s humiliating for the United States, but it should
be a wake-up call as well. Europe is right to fear Ameri-
can visitors. The United States hasn’t brought down case
numbers the way European countries have, and seems
to simply accept a vast continuing toll of deaths.
Look at this graph of new Covid-19 cases in the Euro-
pean Union versus the United States, with Canada and
Australia thrown in for good measure:
The United States is now reporting new cases at nine
times the rate of Europe, per million people.
In the New York region, memories are fresh, people
are scared and the virus is under control. But in much of
the rest of the country, the virus initially seemed remote,
and people relaxed in ways that are now leading to a cri-
sis.
I passed through Phoenix twice last month to report
on Covid-19 cases in the Navajo Nation, and I was horri-fied then by how few Arizonans wore masks. Now we see
the consequences.
Deaths are still below their peaks because for now it’s
disproportionately younger people getting sick. That
may change.
“I wonder how many fathers got a Father's Day
present from their kids — this virus,” reflected Michael
T. Osterholm, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist.
While some epidemiologists expect a second wave to
arrive this fall, Osterholm foresees more of a relentless
toll of sickness and death. He anticipates spikes in this
city or that — he fears Houston may become the next
New York — but not much of a reprieve.
“I think it’s going to keep going on,” he told me. But he
also emphasizes that even the experts don’t really un-
derstand the virus or know what to anticipate.
His advice: Be humble and be bold, and make rigorous
preparations.
We don’t know for sure, but the post-peak experience
from New York and Europe as well as from street pro-
tests offers some guidance: If people wear masks, dis-
tance as much as possible and avoid mixing indoors, it
just might be possible to keep the virus in check.
Instead, our president refuses to wear a mask and
brings people together indoors to cheer his newest pro-
posed strategy, which in his words is “slow the testing
down.” After aides rushed to say he was joking, Trump
denied that, saying, “I don’t kid.” He amplified in a tweet:“With smaller testing, we would show fewer cases!”
Yes, and by ending cancer screenings, we would re-
duce cancer rates. By locking hospital doors, we would
reduce hospitalizations. And if we stopped issuing death
certificates, Americans would achieve immortality!
That’s the kind of strategizing that has led the United
States, with 4 percent of the world’s population, to expe-
rience one-quarter of the deaths worldwide from the co-
ronavirus — and instead of “fading away,” it’s surging. 0NICHOLAS KRISTOFTrump Is Feeding America’s Coronavirus Nightmare
-75 0 +25 +50 +75%Change in new casesIn 11 states,
new cases
more than
doubled.The hardest-hit states in the Northeast and Midwest saw declines, but most saw cases rise in June.Covid-19 Cases On the RiseTHE NEW YORK TIMESNote: Compares the average of new cases for the 14 days ending June 8 with the 14 days ending June 22.
Source: New York Times collection of data from state and local health agencies and hospitalsMarch 1 (^5) June 2 4
20
40
60
80
Canada
European Union
United
States
Australia
100 new cases
per million people
Other regions that saw a similar steep rise in cases have
brought their epidemics under control.
United States Failing to Flatten the Curve
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Note: Shows 7-day rolling average of newly reported cases.
Source: Our World in Data
‘It’s going away’ only in
the president’s delusion.