Veteran's benefits in the COVID war

     "To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan."

          Abraham Lincoln. Veterans Administration motto and mission

Americans were draftees in the war on COVID. 

Biden's COVID relief act reflects a change in the balance of thought on who bears the risk and responsibility for misfortune. This is a process underway, not one completed. Trump is part of the story. He is leading the GOP toward agreement with Democrats, although that cannot be said aloud or admitted.

The COVID crisis accelerated something out there in the political wind, ready for Trump to sense and articulate. It let him remake the GOP and win the White House. He sensed that many White working-class Americans considered themselves to be victims. Democrats were treating Blacks, Hispanics, women, LGBTQ and others as victims--and Whites as victimizers--and Trump understood that not only did Whites resent being thought racist, they considered themselves victims of misfortune, too. They faced prejudice. They were losing out to Mexican and Asian factory workers. They lost jobs to people fussing about climate change. Trump was their advocate.

A early signal of the change in the political wind was in the bipartisan response to the opioid crisis. The "war on drugs" mentality had embedded a racial and criminal idea of drug abuse. Sure, there were White drug users, but the "real" drug problem was among urban Blacks, in their crack houses and Latin American drug lords. The response was to deal it as a crime, to stop them. Opioids were different. The hotspots were in rural America, in Trump country and among Trump voters. Pundits and policy-makers--Republicans, too--spoke of self-destruction and suicide; deaths of despair. The bi-partisan attitude was empathy, not condemnation. Republican voters did not consider that soft-on-crime to be squishy liberalism. They blamed the drug companies, not the addicted. 

Then came COVID. Small businesses did not shut down because the owners were lazy or foolish. They were shut down by the government. The controversy over shutdown made battle-lines and motives clear. Many people were reluctant draftees into the war on COVID. 

Government programs to help the newly-unemployed workers were inadequate. Unemployment insurance fit well people who lost full-time jobs, but less well self-employed people and those in the gig economy. Trump's CARES Act made unemployment more much generous and added a big policy change by providing direct money to employers to compensate them for keeping people on payroll. It was a watershed in policy thinking. The risk of economic disaster for businesses shifted from the entrepreneur to the public. But there was logic to it. The government shut them down so the public owed them.

Americans discovered, too, empathy for "essential" workers: People doing the work getting food to grocery stores, giving care to nursing homes, providing health care. We expected grocery stores to stay open and staffed, even if grocery employees were paid poverty wages and lacked health care. That seemed wrong, too stingy. We owed them more.

On the political margins, the public sense of duty shifted. What might have seemed liberal and "socialistic" two years ago now seemed "only fair." Hard times did not just happen to an ethnic "other," or to the lazy and improvident. 

Trump did what Bernie Sanders tried to do but could not. Trump said regular working Americans, White and Black, deserved a much bigger break from the American government, and he brought along a majority of a political party to agree with him: Republicans. Democrats who find Trump morally disgusting and guilty of attempting an overthrow of the republic may find it difficult to credit Trump with something important and positive. There is a silver lining in the slavish belief and support Trump engenders among GOP voters. He can get his White working-class supporters to change their minds.

Remember the Georgia Senate race. Mitch McConnell was blocking the Democrats' effort to give every American $2,000. McConnell wanted $600 and no more. That was the GOP position in the senate and they dug in. Trump said heck with that, go with $2,000. Trump is far, far more popular than McConnell. Trump understands and leads the hearts and minds of GOP voters.

Now we have two political parties that have embraced the socialization of risk and misfortune for poor and middle-income Americans. Democrats embrace it because it is in their nature and tradition. GOP voters embrace it because so many of their own were hurt, and Trump led them to see themselves as victims deserving the help.

Both parties are populist now. We are fighting multiple wars, against drugs, against low wage manufacturing countries, against radical Islam, against prejudice, against COVID, against something. Americans have all become deserving veterans. The political balance has tipped.