In a crisis like this, some people only want to escape it as much as they can. Others want to learn and try to come to grips with it. Neither way of coping is better than the other; it’s just a matter of what works for you. This post is for those in the latter group. If you’re in the former, scroll on past.

The terrible paradox of the moment is that we is that we are inundated with facts but have so little useful information. Anyone can obsessively refresh a counter and watch the numbers of cases and deaths go up, hour after hour, day after day, but those numbers, while tragic and horrifying, don’t tell the full story, because they can’t. Some of the increase is just the fact that we’re testing more people, but we still don’t have the kind of testing capacity to know what percentage of cases we’re identifying. This, in turn, limits efforts to determine crucial factors like how rapidly the virus spreads and what hospitalization and mortality rates look like. On the global scale, it doesn’t help that certain authoritarian countries may be under-reporting cases and deaths in a ghoulish effort to appear in control, but in a crisis like this, even countries that are trying to be transparent aren’t always going to provide adequate data.

The shift in how we live has been so rapid that it feels strange not to know more by now, but the reality is that in the United States the response to this crisis is just beginning. The increases we’re seeing now are the results of infections that happened before social distancing and shutdowns went into effect. It’ll be several days more at least before any curve-flattening is visible. Certain impatient politicians who think leading a country is like marketing a golf course might want to have to it all over by Easter, but Easter is unlikely to be the end, and more likely to be the end of the beginning. By then much of the country will have three weeks’ worth of data from increased testing and three weeks’ worth of limited transmission thanks to social distancing. Then, we can start thinking about how to be more tactical and less universal in our efforts to combat the virus. It’s not going to be as simple as there being one single moment when everyone everywhere can “go back to normal.” That’s a lovely image, but this isn’t a war, and there’s not going to be a V-COVID-19 Day.

I’ve said all along that people shouldn’t be panicking. But we should be prepared for bad outcomes, so that they’re less shocking if they do come. In New York, where about half of all US cases are located, the hospital system is badly strained. If cases continue to surge there, it could overwhelm the system, which is what leads to higher death tolls. When there aren’t enough resources, people die whose lives might have been saved. Now, it’s not guaranteed that that will happen. The authorities are working to bring new supplies in, professionals are improvising alternatives, and new technologies are being developed. Retirees and other volunteers are coming in to take up the slack. People are working hard, and they should keep working hard, and the rest of us should honor them for it. But there’s only so much they can do. And because we have no way to know how many cases tomorrow will bring, we have no way of knowing how close they are having to make ghastly decisions about who lives and who dies.

The most important thing to remember, whether that happens or not, is that where we are, right now, on the precipice, is the result of infections that happened before ordinary Americans had really begun to grasp what was going on. It doesn’t take much time for a pandemic to create an enormous burden on our hospital system. The people who are making noise about “the cure being worse than the disease” are acting as though there was some moment at which we had a choice between an economic crisis and a public health crisis. We were always going to have both. We had the choice of waiting until the virus was everywhere and millions of people were sick, which would have completely collapsed the social order and wrecked the economy, or grinding the economy to a halt in the hope of keeping people alive and healthy. That’s never going to be an easy choice, but economic crises are less difficult to address than health ones; you can stimulate an economy with legislation, but there’s no law that will bring the dead back to life.
If, as I hope will happen, we begin to see evidence in the coming weeks that this crisis is winding down in the United States without becoming apocalyptic, there will be those who will say, “We wrecked the economy for nothing.” (Or, more likely, they’ll say “YOU wrecked the economy for nothing,” and point at their political enemies.) But that’s like a child who, having been told to tie her shoes because she’ll trip and break her neck, ties them, then complains at the end of the day that she never even fell over. Precautions always look ridiculous, until you see what can happen if you ignore them. I don’t think that will happen here, but I do worry about how people will react if there’s another pandemic a few years down the line, or if this coronavirus dies down now, then makes a comeback later in the year. But that’s a concern for the future. For now, we wait, we watch the numbers without reading too much into them, we stay safe, and we take care of each other.

I didn’t want to have to write this post.

That’s why I’ve been putting it off. There was a case for writing it after Super Tuesday, but I thought, Wait until there are a few two-person contests. There was a better case for writing it after March 10th, but I thought, Wait until there’s been a two-person debate and some voting after that. Then there was an ever better case for writing it after March 17, but there were also signs that the right thing might happen shortly, so I thought, Just wait. But now that he’s made it clear he intends to contest the New York primary, currently scheduled for April 28, the time has come to say: Bernie Sanders needs to suspend his campaign for president.

I understand that that’s a hard thing for Sanders, and his supporters, to accept. It’s always painful to deal with the failure of your preferred candidate and the success of someone you consider deeply inferior, and in a case like this, with a candidate who is plainly not going to run again and who has no obvious political heir, it’s an especially bitter pill. I get that many Sanders backers feel like a Biden candidacy will produce a rerun of 2016 and would do anything they can to avoid that. To have seen Sanders’ insurgent candidacy seem on the verge of victory and then collapse, in not one but two successive primaries, must be heartbreaking. But part of leadership is making difficult, self-sacrificing decisions when the situation requires it, and this primary, more than any in recent American history, is that kind of situation.

It’s not just the usual problem, that extending the primary inevitably creates bitterness that we’ll all have to get over when it comes time to turn our attention to the general election, although with the stakes as high as they are that would be reason enough. It’s also that continuing to contest the primary will inevitably drive up turnout in the remaining states, and in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that’s a very bad thing. Citizens in states that have yet to vote should be pushing their legislatures to institute or expand voting by mail, but no matter what there’s going to be plenty of in-person voting, and it’s in the public interest to reduce crowding at polling places by not encouraging people to go out and cast votes for a lost cause. Sanders supporters attacked Biden, reasonably enough, for sending out a tweet encouraging healthy people to go the polls on March 17th, but at this point the very existence of the Sanders campaign is that tweet, times 1,000.

I’m aware that some Sanders supporters, including those with influence on the campaign, see the coronavirus pandemic as a reason for him to stay in rather than get out. They think that this national crisis demonstrates the need for the kind of sweeping healthcare and economic reforms that Sanders supports, and that Joe Biden has not done enough to provide leadership. This points to a fundamental weakness of a campaign shaped by passionate ideologues: the habit of getting high on your own supply. People not already presupposed to these ideas just don’t want to hear them right now. There may be a case that the reforms Sanders proposes would have prevented the present crisis, but when your house is burning down, you don’t want a finger-waving explanation of how it happened because the house was shoddily constructed; you want someone to put out the fucking fire. And Sanders, who unlike Biden has a current role in the federal government, was not in Washington this weekend to help negotiate the stimulus, but in Vermont, campaigning via livestream. I understand that some people see this “organizer-in-chief” approach as the right one, but to think that it’s going to help him overcome a 20-point deficit in the polls is to delude yourself.

And Sanders doesn’t just need to take the lead in the polls; he needs an overwhelming lead, on about the scale of the one Biden currently has. At this point, the kinds of scenario where he becomes the Democratic nominee (a) are ghoulish and (b) don’t require him to keep his campaign going right now. Nor is there an argument that he’ll somehow gain influence over the convention and the platform by continuing to fall behind in the delegate count. The die-hard Sanders devotees who are spreading absurd rumors about Biden having dementia or being dead are, in a sense, more in touch with reality than his more conventional supporters; the devotees, at least, understand what it would take to turn this thing around for him.

Bernie Sanders has a key role to play in the general election campaign, and in shaping the Biden administration if there is one. And he has vital work to do in continuing to influence the next generation of Democratic politicians, so that he won’t be the lone voice he often seems like now. What he doesn’t have is a meaningful chance of ever being president himself. The more he denies that, the more he feeds the caricature of himself, and of other committed leftists, as stubborn, selfish, and detached from reality… and the more he runs the risk of turning his supporters’ conviction that a Biden nomination means a Trump victory into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stephen Sondheim, the unparalleled genius of American musical theater in the late 20th century, turned 90 yesterday. His work is known for its complexity, its darkness and its ironies, but as is often the case, scratch an ironist and you’ll find a sentimentalist. His memories of attending the opening night of Carousel are instructive: “I remember how everyone goes off to the clambake at the end of Act One and Jigger just follows, and he was the only one walking on stage as the curtain came down. I was sobbing. [Dorothy Hammerstein] had a specific fur stole that she wore to every opening of Oscar’s for good luck, and I cried so heavily I stained it.” Even heavily stylized or abstract shows like Pacific Overtures and Assassins are shot through with raw human emotion.

The first Sondheim show I really connected with was Into the Woods. (I saw a Maine State Music Theatre production of Gypsy when I was very young, but the only thing I can remember of it is that the girl covered with balloons in the first scene was played by an elementary school classmate on whom I had a little bit of a crush. How things change.) Into the Woods, with its delightful interweaving of famous fairy tales, is great fun for children who love stories, and it was definitely my gateway drug for musicals long before I knew enough to be thinking about who was behind the music and lyrics.

I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite song by Sondheim– maybe a favorite from each show, though even that would be difficult– but for this moment in history, there’s only one possible choice. The song/video cuts out abruptly at the end because of how the story is structured. Here, from an invaluable American Playhouse recording of the original Broadway production, are Kim Crosby, Danielle Ferland, Chip Zien, and Ben Wright, performing “No One is Alone.”

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something about how fitting it is that a man as self-evidently devoid of generous impulses as Donald Trump should wind up at the head of the Republican Party. The Republican elites who spent early 2016 baffled about what their base was thinking should have realized that an arrogant bully is the most natural symbol of a party whose message for about four decades now has been that the only proper role of the federal government is punitive. Has Donald Trump done anything good for his working-class and middle-class supporters? Not really, but they don’t expect him to. They take for granted the truth of Ronald Reagan’s message: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”

What can a politician offer people who don’t think he can use the government to help them? Well, he can cut their taxes, but Trump’s tax cut was so obviously tilted toward the rich (and the withholding changes involved so bungled) that the Republicans didn’t even bother to campaign on it during the 2018 midterms. What Trump did instead was to whip up fear about migrant caravans, which brings us to the main thing a Republican politician can offer his supporters: punishment for other people. Create the assumption that prosperity for those who aren’t rich is a zero-sum game, and you can make it seem like a crackdown on immigration (illegal or otherwise) is good for your supporters, even if the evidence for that idea is spotty at best. This is the modern Republican agenda in a nutshell: pursue policies that are bad for the vast majority of the population, and placate those who might notice by saying, “Yes, but I’m keeping women/non-whites/the lazy poor under control!”

Now, of course, we have a pandemic, a situation that by its nature demands federal rather than state leadership, and Donald Trump has proven himself as unequal to the task as some of us have spent the past four years warning he would be. Sadly, Americans’ sense of what a responsible government response might look like is so atrophied that Trump has retained not only the approval of his base but higher-than-usual numbers among Democrats and independents. Some of that is probably a rally-round-the-flag effect as people began to realize how serious this situation is; some of it is probably also grading on a curve, acknowledging that Trump has at least admitted a crisis exists and started taking steps, although there’s still plenty he could do be doing that he’s not, and his daily press conferences are the same mix as ever of unwarranted, petulant self-praise and exaggerations that competent officials immediately have to walk back.

I think a larger reason Trump’s coronavirus-response approval is somewhat high is that ordinary Americans, having by and large failed to take the situation seriously themselves, are inclined to give the president a pass for his lack of foresight. That might be a charitable impulse, but it’s the wrong one. The presidency is a job, and one of its qualifications is the ability to anticipate and prepare for national crises. Nothing in Donald Trump’s record suggested he would be any good at that, and he’s not. Indeed, he’s extraordinarily bad at it, so bad that, as is often the case during his presidency, a simple recital of the facts feels like an attack. You can see why many of his supporters, living within the bubble of Fox News (which is, these days, a very dangerous bubble), assume that reports from elsewhere in the press are malicious lies. It’s hard to believe that anyone could bungle things that badly. But he did. It’s what he does. The only question now is, as the case count increases and the economy teets on the brink, will he finally be held to account for it?

I received my absentee ballot in the mail yesterday. Imagine my surprise on finding a referendum question, not about sticking it to big pharma, or about the sacred principle of bodily autonomy, but about routine vaccination requirements for people choosing to attend public schools or seek employment in certain settings. It’s almost as if the forces behind the referendum, recognizing that few people support their desired outcome, are working (with a lamentable degree of success) to obscure what is and isn’t at stake here.

Individual laws do specific things, and should be evaluated on the costs and benefits of those specific things. Perceived weakening of a general principle is a potential cost of a given law, but a credible argument along those lines duly weighs the scope of the law and its likely effect on the principle. This law itself is modest in scope. It removes an abused exemption to a mandate for a routine and overwhelmingly safe procedure, and leaves in place the option of home-schooling for those whose objection to vaccination is genuinely strong. Turning to the principles, the idea that a yes vote will strike a blow against the pharmaceutical industry requires a belief that vaccination is central to its profit margin, which is certainly not the case. (It is, in fact, a common false claim of the anti-vaccination movement.) The loss of the comparatively small boost to pharmaceutical profits that would come from the law’s marginal increase in vaccination rates is not something that would cause wailing and gnashing of teeth. The Yes on 1 campaign’s suggestion to the contrary is, like the argument that you could stick it to the elites by supporting Donald Trump or Brexit, an attempt to take legitimate anger and manipulate it for selfish ends.

Then there’s the question of bodily autonomy. It is, indeed, an important general principle that you control what happens to and in your body or your child’s body. But in a complex society, any general principle is subject to certain exceptions. That’s why we have a society: to limit individual freedoms in certain ways and at certain times in the name of the greater good. What we have to consider here is, on the one hand, the likelihood that the law will lead to meaningful infringements on bodily autonomy, and on the other, the severity of the threat posed by declining vaccination rates. As for the former, I’ve seen no evidence that there is some great appetite to pass laws mandating or banning medical decisions that only a Yes vote on this particular law can check. (There is, of course, the desperation of the Republican Party to deny women control of their own bodies, but that’s obviously a phenomenon beyond the scope of the present law.) The more people pontificate about slippery slopes without identifying a single other sign that we’ve left level terrain, the less you should believe them. And as for the latter…

The great danger of the present historical moment is that Americans who grew up in an environment of extraordinary stability and safety take it for granted and dismiss warnings about its fragility as paranoia. But yes, declining vaccination rates do pose a serious risk. And you can’t entirely avoid that risk by getting vaccinated yourself. People who think that their personal willingness to get vaccinated means they can treat Question 1 purely as a philosophical dilemma are forgetting that there’s a reason it’s called public health. Even setting aside the fact that others you care about may have legitimate reasons not to be vaccinated and will therefore be at risk if breakdowns in herd immunity cause outbreaks, there’s a more basic calculation. Medical resources are finite, and outbreaks of preventable disease consume those resources, increasing the costs and risks of all treatment. In other words, you may well actually be doing the unscrupulous side of the pharmaceutical industry a bigger favor by opposing vaccinating mandates than by supporting them: there’s greater urgency, and greater profit potential, in sickness than in health.

I understand the appeal of treating this as a matter of principle. It’s nice to go to the polls and feel like you’re standing up for freedom, or the little guy, or anything else Jimmy Stewart once embodied in a movie. But life isn’t like that. It’s full of compromises and imperfections. As I said in my earlier blog post about this referendum, I regret that this law was necessary. But it was, and just as you do when you vote for the better of two candidates even if you don’t like either one, you should vote to uphold it, even if you would prefer to pretend that the other, easier answer is the right one.