Neglect, from Benign to Malignant
Origins
In the late 1960s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was working as Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson Administration. In that role, he was trying to develop policies that would invigorate urban ghettos that were mostly composed of Black Americans. He worked hard to look at the data and apply the ideas from urban and social advocates to assist the people who were trapped by race, redlining, and poverty into the poorest neighborhoods in the country. When Richard Nixon became president, Moynihan shifted to become an urban affairs advisor and continued to think and write about urban economic and social problems. This period in the late 1960s and early 1970s was one of political and civil upheaval where American cities experienced annual rites of race riots featuring full-blown battles between citizens and the police who were often augmented by the military. (Yes, it’s got a familiar ring.)
In the melee, Moynihan authored a memo advocating a policy of “benign neglect” which in his thinking was meant to take a break from the super-heated rhetoric and action in the streets. As he put it,
The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.’ The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides. We need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.
His was a good-faith effort to draw a social breath to ease tensions that had escalated to pitched battles in the streets. Unfortunately, in the hands of Nixon and his aides, the policy proposal became a call to abandon urban (meaning Black) neighborhoods and move away from government-activist programs for social and economic development. In a parallel thrust, police forces were re-equipped and retrained to handle the perceived social pathologies of drug dealing, homelessness, and family decay with the outcomes of arson and crime. As one police officer told the tale, the force had become a well-equipped army of occupation.
Looking back across the subsequent fifty years, we can now see the evolution of those efforts. They came in laws criminalizing addiction in the name of a war on drugs, adding mass incarceration that put Black men at extreme risk of lives marked by the term ex-convict, and piled on lifetime prison sentences for a “third strike” against the law. The concept of the “superpredator” came into being to characterize juvenile criminals who acted violently without remorse and encouraged the hard response in criminal law enforcement. Public figures ranging from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton embraced the concept as they expressed their fears of our urban centers. At the same time, government investment in urban areas to address housing, jobs, and education have not been up to the challenge. Tax cuts from Reagan to Trump have reduced marginal rates on higher incomes to their lowest levels since the 1930s, producing the growing gap of wealth and income inequality we see today. Clearly, benign neglect has evolved into successively uglier versions of the policy.
The Evolution of Government Neglect
The global pandemic of COVID-19 has allowed us to see where the federal government is today along the spectrum of neglect. As we have seen in Europe, parts of Asia, Australia and New Zealand, rigorous lockdowns followed by aggressive programs of testing and tracing infected individuals have both flattened the disease curves and generally kept them flat. These were ambitious efforts on the part of central governments to use their powers and capabilities to address the disease with resources going to where they were needed most. Until an effective vaccine can be administered to most people, these are the only tools we have to keep the coronavirus at bay.
So, how are we in the US doing? In a word, badly. It did not have to be so. A story in Vanity Fair reveals the inner workings of the White House in planning and abandoning a coordinated national response for testing and tracing. As the plan was being developed in March and into April, the virus was ravaging northeastern and western coastal states. States that were perceived to be politically blue to the red-state partisans in the White House. An announcement of a testing plan from the president on April 27 bore no resemblance to the earlier comprehensive approach. Rather, each state was on its own, especially those run by Democrats.
Why were the states abandoned? There seem to be a couple of factors in play. One was magical thinking that the virus would just evaporate like water on the pavement beneath the summer sun. This was not just Trump’s magical mind, but a view shared by White House coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx. Her internal disease models had overly optimistic assumptions and rosy outcomes — results that misled those naive to the use of models to represent reality. As the statistician George Box famously noted, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” The modeling was indeed wrong, but that would not be revealed for weeks. In the meantime, there were decisions to be made about the response plan. In the absence of a reality-based picture of the outbreak, partisan politics got a turn at bat.
Trump and his advisors, buoyed by the belief of the imminent disappearance of the virus and noting that only blue states were hardest hit realized that their political opponents were the ones suffering. Not their fellow Americans, but people whom they identified in purely political terms as opponents. Partisanship in America had become lethal as thousands and then tens of thousands died while the virus spread undetected, untested, and unchecked. These leaders were okay with that outcome because they shelved the plan for a coordinated national approach to testing and response while their perceived political opponents suffered.
Today: Malignant Neglect
The White House’s neglectful response became intertwined with the inerrant chief executive, a man incapable of admitting error much less redressing his mistakes. As the unchecked virus marched forward to infect millions in red states as well, the president withdrew from his visible role leading the coronavirus briefings and then abandoning them altogether from April to late July. This withdrawal was just after his absurd recommendation to test using “the [ultraviolet] light inside the body” and “then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it [the virus] out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning.” Those remarks got readily translated into inserting lights and drinking bleach in our frenzied, mile-a-second media environment. But the blowback was brutal as serious scientists effectively joined forces with late-night comedians to mock the ignorance of the president. Soon after, and perhaps not coincidentally, Trump held his last coronavirus briefing for weeks.
In the meantime, the virus infection rates started spiking in red states and continued to climb. Partly due to Republican state leaders prematurely lifting the national lockdown, partly due to the lack of leadership guidance by the White House, and partly due to the inexorable path of the virus seeking every vulnerability to exploit. Bereft of a coordinated response, the red states began to see infection and death rates that rivaled what the Northeast had experienced earlier. But this time, their state leaders had staked out public positions difficult to retract. Without the president offering leadership in correcting his earlier mistakes, the suffering has continued and grown.
So now we have achieved malignant neglect as our government at the federal level fails to take the steps to help our people, a failure repeated in several states as well. Adding a traditional American sting to the pain, people who are Black or Latinx get infected and die at far higher rates than white people. Our national government through its refusal to act has effectively targeted segments of our people based on where they live, the politics they hold, and the color of their skin.
Our government now practices malignant neglect, not just ignoring our problems but selectively choosing where they refuse to act to inflict pain. The worry is that the next step along this spectrum does not involve neglect of any sort, but does include malignancy. Portland does not bode well.
