This is great. Sandel’s new book is said to argue that elites need to learn humility to facilitate interconnectedness. In place of such moral orientation, this article shows how infrastructure - taxation, public things, neighborhoods — orients people /1 https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/

/2 in relation to each other and from this positioning the virtues follow. But It is not correct to claim that Canadian health care is radically egalitarian where all kids get what Trudeau’s kids get (that is a moment of Canadian exceptionalism to which i myself am prone!)

/3 But there is nonetheless a vast moral and political difference between American “you’re on your own” healthcare and Canada’s health care system which is universal - but not equal. In the US, even for those who are insured, there is little of the good of insurance:

/4 we pay insurance up front for years & then we spend precious time trying to get payments out of companies, whose work product is non payment. They are designed not to pay up on what we have purchased — & so we don’t get what we paid for: not just health care but peace of mind

/5 In the US , freedom is assumed to be like theHobbesian state of nature. Only those with the wealth to privatize security get to experience the benefits of the promised social contract. But since they do not actually enter the contract, even they also live with fear ...

/6 — because it is a fragile peace they have purchased. Even their fancy old age home might get covid. It is no accident as it were that Hobbes’ frontispiece features two plague doctors with beak-masks. The plague exposes what the veils of ideology try not to disclose.

/7That truth? We are on our own, certainly since Reagan, and —without his sunny calls to freedom and in the wake of his and others’ dismantling of the remnant of the FDR infrastructure of social democracy such as it was — it is more obvious and has brought us the political

/8 the political outcome we deserve: the “whats in it for me” presidency of Trump who likes to put his name on everything but that is all.

/9 Branding forges the thinnest kind of community - the consumer demographic. It is enough to win an election with. But not enough to build a society on and certainly not enough to thread a fabric tough enough to survive a plague. (Fin)