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A version of the following essay was submitted to Gabrielle Fullam’s “Untitled Unfinished Stories Project”, which I assume will be debuting at some point in the near future and which I will link to here when it does.

It would have been a bad book, let’s get that much out of the way right now. I was fairly impressed with myself at the time, but it’s obvious in retrospect that the things I liked about it then are exactly what would have made it so cringeworthy. Time travelling detectives!

Exactly what a fifteen year old boy would love! Time travelling detectives. Exactly what a fifteen year old boy would love. The whole thing was a pastiche of all the nerdy obsessions that occupied me in the summer of 2013 – obsessions which I had more or less forgotten about by the autumn of 2013.

The USB containing the draft is somewhere around my house, but my vague memory of the plot nicely illustrates the narrowness of my influences. A gruff, cynical detective is leading an investigation of a major criminal organization (Breaking Bad). One day he is shot in the back by a man he incorrectly assumes to have been one of the gangsters he’s investigating but which later turns out to have been his future, time-travelled self (Twelve Monkeys). The incident puts him into a coma for a few weeks and when he wakes up, his wife decides she needs to divorce him and take custody of their daughter on account of his gruffness, cynicism and dangerous job (Die Hard 4.0, I think?). Later, he is woken up in his divorced-dad apartment by lights flashing “S.O.S.” in morse code from a building across the street (Panic Room). He goes into the building to investigate and finds a portal which takes him back to a specific time in the past (11/22/63), a week or two before he was shot. He teams up with another detective to stop himself from getting shot (Looper, Back to the Future, but it eventually turns out that this other detective knows more than he’s letting on about the whole situation (Primer). I seem to recall there was also some intrigue within the criminal organization, my depiction of which was inspired by Love/Hate, a show I had never seen an episode of.

Non-linear storytelling. One-dimensional characters. None-dimensional female characters. Three different Bruce Willis movies as inspiration. The whole thing was a teen-film-bro starter pack in the making. Ultimately, the work itself is much less interesting than the place it holds in my own personal biography. At the time I wrote it I was an archetypical alienated teenager. I had friends in my all-boys secondary school, but my apathy towards sports, video games, and hardcore pornography left little overlap between their interests and my own. The typical response to such a situation is to take up a hobby. Learn to play an instrument and let that be the thing which makes you interesting to other people. But I never had the discipline to practice every day, so writing became the default option. I drafted the book, titled, “…---…” (ie., morse code for S.O.S. (I was very pleased with myself)), 1,500 words at a time on a tiny laptop I inherited from a recently-graduated sibling. About halfway through the summer I broke the left half of the screen at the Gaeltacht, so I had to adjust the Microsoft Word doc to make the page fit into a space the size of an iPhone screen.

The plan was always to abandon the project after the first draft. The way to get good at writing is to finish things, and books take way too long to finish. It was time to move on. A few weeks after I wrapped up and went back to school, I joined a youth theatre and found my people. Vital, brilliant, beautiful people who wanted to make things with me. For two years we played, and made, and fell in love. When the CAO rolled around, there was talk of a course in Drama and Theatre Studies, but it wasn’t for me. I was confident that I could change the world, and I was confident that stories could change the world, but I was skeptical that I could change the world by writing stories. I gave social sciences my first preference. In any case, I could always keep writing fiction in my spare time.

But then I didn’t. There’s no one good reason for why. I focused on other things, I lost confidence, I slept too much. It would be satisfying to say that I took a step away from fiction to focus on reality, but the truth is there are plenty of people who manage to do both – I just didn’t. Still, it’s a strange experience, abandoning one life path for another. I got to see my old playmates continue their journey into the world of theatre, and meanwhile I was back at the start of a new expedition, trailing behind those who had set their course years earlier. I dropped a lot of things to let myself catch up, and one of those things was my own storytelling.

I was writing again by the end of college, but it’s all non-fiction now. Essays and podcasts and arguments in the comments section. I love it, but now that things have stabilized a bit, I’ve begun to notice an imbalance in my life. People often say that writing is like exercise: You have to do it every day, it’s difficult but it’s rewarding, etc. If that’s true, then I think non-fiction and fiction are two different sets of muscles that each need to be exercised. After years of focusing on evidence and argumentation, I still have no vocabulary for describing the sensation of being alive. I have, in a literary sense, been skipping leg day, and it’s beginning to affect my life. My bedroom is tidy, but not decorated; my diet is healthy, but not nourishing; I listen to podcasts, but not music. I am, to hammer the metaphor into the ground, unfinished.

One of the funny things about the book draft I wrote when I was 15 is how rarely I’ve thought about it since. There was a time when writing that story was a central facet of my self-identity: my first serious effort at writing, the prelude to my life in theatre, the first project I saw through to (some kind of) completion. This is itself a familiar kind of story – the artist as a young man, blossoming into creative maturity. But as I drifted away from theatre, that story stopped being a useful guide to my life. When you’re forty five minutes into a two hour meeting about non-hierarchical governance structures, tales of time travelling detectives tend not to get recalled.

Now when I tell people the story of how I got to where I am, I begin with that fork in the road at the beginning of college. It’s a story I’ve gotten pretty good at telling, emphasising all the sundry moments of conflict and failure and personal growth along the way. But it, too, has come to feel insufficient. If I’m going to move beyond my tidy, healthy, well-informed life, I need to start telling a richer story about myself, one with something to say about artistry and pleasure and romance.

There must be some possible synthesis of these two stories, of politics and poetry. That’s the story I’m trying to write now, one day at a time. It’s going to feel uneven and jarring at first, revisiting a plotline abandoned so long ago. But events have a pleasing way of logically arranging themselves in retrospect. If nothing else, I have role models in my effort to tell this story: in Audre Lorde and Arundhati Roy; in Michael D. Higgins and Fintan O’Toole. I can see that it’s possible. I doubt I’ll ever be “finished” in any meaningful sense of that word, but that’s ok. After all, the pleasure has always been in the writing.

Further Reading:

Uses of the Erotic and Poetry is not a luxury by Audre Lorde

Writing and Politics by Fintan O’Toole

Unwritten by Natasha Bedingfield

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Note: I’m writing this post somewhat on impulse, so it contains less research and more conjecture than usual. In particular, I make some pretty speculative claims about child developmental psychology around the middle section. It’s entirely possible that I’m completely wrong about a lot of this stuff, but right now this is how I’m squaring the circle of my own worldview. Let me know if I make any major mistakes!

Two of the posts in my Lessons from Coronavirus series are about vulnerability.

The first of these posts, titled Intellectual Vulnerability > Intellectual Modesty is inspired by the writings of Brené Brown and depicts vulnerability as something aspirational. A lot of us are insecure about our intelligence, I argue, and so we resort to bluster or cool silence as a way of masking that. It follows that by allowing ourselves to be intellectually vulnerable – showing our ignorance, letting ourselves be wrong – we can foster a healthier, less emotionally charged discourse.

The other post about vulnerability, How Vulnerability Matters, views it as something to be avoided or ameliorated. Particularly in the first half of the essay, vulnerability is treated as being roughly synonymous with social disadvantage. This accords with how the term is used in social policy circles, as in, “This policy is particularly harmful to more vulnerable populations.”

The tension between these two usages should be pretty obvious. A psychotherapist would balk at the idea of equating vulnerability with weakness, but a sociologist would insist that people have a right to the economic and social security that would make them less vulnerable. So what’s the deal? Is vulnerability good or bad?

Well let’s start by revisiting our understanding of what vulnerability is. In How Vulnerability Matters, the more analytical of my two posts, I break vulnerability down into two components: Exposure and insecurity. Exposure is the amount of big shocks you experience in your life, and insecurity is your missing capacity to withstand those shocks. The applicability of this idea to both social and psychological vulnerability should be pretty evident. To get a sense of it, imagine how different people would be impacted by the death of a parent. A child would be emotionally devastated and socially marginalized, whereas a fully grown adult might be basically ok.

In fact, the comparison between children and adults is an illuminating one. We tend to think about vulnerability in different ways when talking about children and adults. The vulnerability of children is often a kind of volatile fragility that they have to grow out of to become functioning adults. Adults themselves, however, search for vulnerability as a path to emotional truth – a path which therapists spend so much of their time trying to get us to walk down. Understanding the relationship between these two perspectives is key to resolving our love/hate relationship with vulnerability.

Consider, for example, what adult vulnerability looks like in practice: loving easily, taking risks, crying – all things that come much more easily to children. Personally, I think my own resistance to expressing vulnerability has come from a desire to act like a grown up. When you’re a kid, learning to regulate your emotions and live independently is an important part of growing up, so any step in the opposite direction feels like some kind of regression. The value of therapy for me, then, was in being given permission to take that step. The cliché of “getting in touch with your inner child” is not without its analytical foundations.

But that still leaves us with a contradiction. If the vulnerability of children is so similar to that of adults, why do we spend so much time trying to grow out of it as children, only to go to such great lengths to recover it as adults?

One intuitive answer is that we simply shouldn’t grow out of it. That our adult instinct to constantly control our emotions is a maladaptive product of evolution or social norms – maybe something that made sense in a different time, but not today. There’s probably some truth to this. In a rigid patriarchal society, the most important thing you can do is keep your head down and work. If you can do that, then it doesn’t matter what’s going on in your heart; and if the problems in your heart become problems in your life, so be it – society can get by just fine without you and your family. But society is more co-operative now. When the chain of branching social interactions gets more complex, it matters more when one of the links in that chain is on the verge of breaking. We have a lot more reason to take care of each other’s hearts now, and that means therapy and vulnerability and getting in touch with your inner child.

But I’m not fully convinced by this answer. To explain why, let me first explore one last contradiction, which is that if vulnerable behaviour is always in some sense childish, then so is the behaviour of those who desperately avoid vulnerability. Think of the way people act when they aren’t addressing their emotional problems: they’re moody, they’re defensive, they’re unreliable. In other words, they act like little children.

It’s nothing original to say that there is a sort of Jekyll and Hyde quality to children. Sometimes they’re cherubic bundles of delight, brightening the lives of all around them; other times they’re tyrannical solipsists, terrorizing whatever authority figures are tasked with helping them grow. I think both of these qualities are symptoms of children’s disregard for their own vulnerability. They take emotional risks that no rational person would take, and then they are shocked by the consequences. From, “Let me go play with that boy!” to, “That boy hurt me. He’s mean. I don’t want any more friends.”

In those wounded moments of defensiveness, children can avoid facing their vulnerability, but they’re not really making themselves less vulnerable. A child who is unwilling to take risks to make friends is a child who grows up to be a friendless adult, and adults without friends can find themselves very vulnerable indeed. So it’s not really the vulnerability of children that we need to hold onto, it’s the capacity that children sometimes have for moving beyond that vulnerability.

But even children could never find such courage in themselves without the right support systems in place. Children are too insecure and reckless to know how to budget risk, so they delegate that task to those around them – parents, teachers, friends, neighbours. In the right environment, with the right people by their side, sometimes holding them in check, sometimes nudging them out of their comfort zone, children can safely learn the hard way what risks are worth taking. By adulthood, this education in the school of hard knocks is every bit as important for your emotional security as academic education is for your social and financial security. It’s what teaches you that it’s ok to fail.

But there is only so much help that any given support system can provide. We live in an uncertain world, and there is simply no way to give children room to grow while also protecting them from all of the worst possible outcomes. Even if we lived in a world designed to help children flourish, things could still go wrong. And we do not live in a world designed to help children flourish. There are no good statistics on the number of children who have experienced abuse in Ireland. 8.1% of children live in consistent poverty. Over 2,000 are homeless.

And as with all education, learning to face vulnerability is that much harder when you have to leave it until adulthood. Those who don’t get the chance to be children when they’re children need to work a lot harder and get a lot more support as adults. That’s why I had go to therapy. Not so that I could be more vulnerable, but so that I could reckon with how vulnerable I already was.

This also resolves another paradox of vulnerability discourse: that it takes strength to be vulnerable. For a long time, this sounded like a trite platitude to me. Like how grown ups call you brave when you get injured as a kid. You’re not actually doing anything, you’re just sitting there in pain. What kind of bravery or courage is that? I certainly didn’t feel particularly courageous when I was letting it all out to a near-stranger in a well-lit office on a Wednesday afternoon. If anything, it felt kind of weak and pathetic, sitting there letting my emotions run loose like a child.

But it’s all about where you’re coming from. Remember that avoiding facing vulnerability is also a childish behaviour – one that my therapist had to train me out of. The point was not to stay vulnerable, but to turn vulnerability from something that I avoided into something that I could move beyond. Really, this talk of letting ourselves “be vulnerable” is a failure of the English language. Spanish speakers draw a distinction between “estar”, which is temporary, as in, “To be awake,” and “ser”, which is permanent, as in, “To be or not to be.” When we talk about letting ourselves “be vulnerable”, we’re using “be” in the “estar” sense of the word – experiencing the state of vulnerability without being defined by it.

This is important because therapy is only ever the first step on a much longer journey. Once I acknowledged my vulnerability, I was still left with the arduous task of actually making my life better. That has meant finally doing all of the things that make me feel vulnerable, including, it should be said, writing this blog. I’m still new to all of this, and I will probably never get to the point where I feel totally secure in myself, but I finally feel like I understand what people mean when they say it takes courage to be vulnerable. Turning to face vulnerability for the first time is courageous in much the same way that taking the first step in a marathon is courageous. It is both the least taxing step of the journey and also the most daunting.

This is the courage that I was really referring to in my piece about intellectual vulnerability. Anyone who spends their time among the masses of the internet will be familiar with the less endearing side of intellectual childishness. Learning to accept a new perspective is a vulnerable position to be in. Much easier is to stay out of the fray altogether, or turn every exchange into a conflict, resorting to snark or name calling if necessary. But the best among us have no trouble engaging in the public discourse as open participants. They oppose, propose, listen, and revise with a grace and dignity which is instantly recognizable to any honest observer. These are the people who have faced up to their vulnerability in the past. They suffered the mortification of being exposed as a dilletante, or a naïf, or simply an ignoramus, and, having realized that the experience did not kill them, gained the emotional security to try again another day. Vulnerability is the crucible in which the metal of our courage is forged.

Post-Post-Script: What does any of this have to do with coronavirus?

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein argues that the course of modern history has been fundamentally shaped by our response to large macrosocial shocks. Wars, revolutions, natural disasters, and debt spirals all represent critical junctures for the societies they impact. For the most part, the shock and disorientation of these moments simply provides cover for the powerful and well insulated to impose their utopian agenda on these newly-vulnerable societies. Sometimes, though, the shock can act as a wake up call, calling into question the inevitability of the status quo by demonstrating how easily it can be interrupted. In such moments, the democratic movements which have made modern society what it is can flourish and take shape.

If there has been a running thread throughout these posts, it is the idea that this pandemic represents just such a shock to society, and that what that shock means for history will depend on our response to it today. The paths ahead are clear because we’ve seen them before.

One path is familiar to us as the austerity of post-recession era. Chastened by our collective shock, we could retreat inwards, cutting off social spending and turning our backs on the most vulnerable. This retrenchment may be tinged by the moral language of sustainability and “consolidation”, but we must remain vigilant of the difference between caution and cowardice.

The other path is modelled for us by the postwar era in the west, or the asambleas barriales of Argentina. Blinking in the wake of our collective struggle, we may be freshly attuned to the possibility of renewal. For the last few weekends, Dublin city has pulsed with a spirit of festive communality, often standing in jarring contrast to the state’s haphazard and draconian response to these gatherings. After a year where we have never been so dependent on both each other and a responsive, compassionate state, last weekend’s images of police wielding their batons against peaceful social gatherings may yet become a powerful reminder of the possibility and necessity of social solidarity.

This is a vulnerable moment. The last year has hit some harder than others, but we are all faced with the question of where to go next. As we consider the treacherous terrain that lies before us, we would do well to also consider our ourselves. Are we secure in our capacity to withstand the shocks to come? Have we really been facing up to the reality of our own vulnerability? What will it take to get us where we need to be? No two people will have the same answers to these questions, and I expect we’ll still be asking them for years to come, but in the meantime there is one thing that I have been convinced of: as we embark on our search for answers, our greatest resource will be our own courage.

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Last September, the U.S. radio station NPR ran a story about a woman named Nellie Riether. Riether, a single mother of two living in small town New Jersey1, lost her job in office building design when the coronavirus pandemic first hit. She got by for a few months by relying on the U.S. equivalent of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, but when the Republican-controlled Congress allowed those payments to lapse in the summer, she had to start relying on her savings. Savings could only last so long, though, and as the months dragged on, Riether found herself with faced with increasingly difficult financial decisions. By the time NPR’s report aired, she was considering moving into her sister’s home with her two teenage children.

There is nothing particularly exceptional about this story. Riether was never among the worst off in America, and as of September she was not among those worst affected by the virus. But her tribulations are all the more revealing for having been partially mitigated. Analysis of social dynamics has a tendency to focus on extremes – the top 1% whose fortunes are guaranteed by the inexorable logic of compound interest; the bottom 10% who would have to raise their incomes by an order of magnitude just to have some prospect of escaping their debts. There is some sense to this: extremes can show us what happens when familiar patterns are played out to their logical conclusion. But such outcomes are rare by definition. Most of us in the developed world live lives like Nellie Riether’s. These are lives lived for the most part in a state of precarious equilibrium, occasionally punctuated by a shocks, positive or negative, which shift us up or down to new equilibria, each one potentially no more stable than the last.

Riether’s story is particularly useful for understanding what it means to be vulnerable to such shocks

Consider first the ways in which Riether was not vulnerable. First and foremost, she lived in 21st century America – the richest country in the world at the richest time in human history. She even occupied a relatively privileged position – white, suburban, educated, and economically secure enough to have emergency savings to dip into (something which cannot be said of nearly half of Americans or one third of Irish people). These privileges would come to offer her some protection from the shocks she faced: savings to use up, family to ask for help, the prospect of another job when the previous one vanished.

But nor was Riether ever invulnerable. Her first vulnerability was her status as a woman in a patriarchal society. She would no doubt have been familiar with many of the liabilities of this position – increased risk of gender based violence, unfair social expectations, petty discrimination – but most pertinent to this story is the association between womanhood and single parenthood. The NPR piece does not tell us how Riether became a single mother, but a look at the statistics suggests a decent probability that her gender played a role – in both Ireland and America, the vast majority of single parents are women.

On becoming a single parent, Nellie Riether would have accrued another source of vulnerability. Across societies, single parents are more likely to experience poverty, more likely to be evicted or become homeless, and more likely to be a member of the working poor. In this case, the absence of a second earner in her household meant that when Riether lost her job, her family was left without any private income. This in turn left her vulnerable to the U.S. Congress’s failure to renew emergency unemployment payments last summer, which itself left her without any income to pay her rent.

If, having exhausted all other possibilities, Riether did decide to move with her children into her sister’s house, that too would have been a source of vulnerability. In his book Evicted, sociologist Matthew Desmond marshals vast quantities of statistical and ethnographic evidence to argue that residential instability is a crucial driver of poverty in the developed world. Even controlling for income, class, and other relevant variables, those who have experienced a “forced move” in the last year (not all evictions are called evictions) are more likely to experience depression, job loss, material hardship and a move to a high crime neighbourhood. Forced moves are also self-reproducing – when people have to leave one home in a rush, the place they move to in that emergency is unlikely to be suitable in the long term.

Three aspects of Riether’s experience are particularly worth noting.

The first is its cyclical pattern. Each adverse shock made the next one both more likely and harder to deal with. If she hadn’t been a single parent, the job loss might not have been so hard; if she had more savings, she might not have had to move. This cyclical pattern is the defining feature of the “poverty trap”, the phenomenon whereby a lack of resources imposes costs and risks which make accruing more resources very difficult. The poverty trap is often a source of alienation across classes – people with money wonder why people without it don’t just save more or work harder, not appreciating how hard it is to work and save when you’re dealing with, say, a physical disability, an addiction, or a mental illness, all of which are themselves made more likely by poverty.

But notice also that Riether did not start off poor. Nellie Riether became poor because she lives in a society which has deliberately made it more difficult for single mothers to prosper. The infamous 1996 U.S. “welfare reform” bill imposed work requirements for benefits to single mothers - inevitably making their lives harder when a recession comes and there is simply no work to be found. Possessing the income but not the security of a successful professional, Riether had essentially been living her life in the poverty trap without being poor. This apparent contradiction suggests that we need a more general theory of vulnerability, one which doesn’t reduce it down to the material conditions it so often produces.

That brings us to the third notable aspect of Riether’s vulnerability spiral, which is that it can be roughly understood as having two key elements: increasing exposure and increasing insecurity. Exposure is basically the total number of strong adverse shocks you experience over a lifetime. For Riether, those shocks would have been becoming a single mother, losing her job, and having to move. Note that not all shocks are negative, and some have mixed effects – Nellie Riether may well view becoming a single mother as the best thing that ever happened to her, but it typically does make people more vulnerable. The opposite of exposure is shelter, as in, “He lives a sheltered life.”

The other source of vulnerability is insecurity, which is sometimes better thought of as the absence of security, and which refers to the total resources available to you for dealing with shocks as they come. Nellie Riether’s sources of security include her savings, her education, and maybe even the ability to get her story published by national news outlet like NPR.

To understand how these two phenomena combine to determine someone’s vulnerability, imagine society as being like a staircase, with prosperity at the top and poverty at the bottom. At the top, the stairs are nice and deep, the steps are short, and the woodwork is sturdy and well-maintained. The bottom half of the staircase, meanwhile, is shallow and vertiginous – more a mountain to climb than a path to follow. The depth of the stairs is like your exposure: How comfortably can you stand on each step? How likely are you to slip and fall? The height of the stairs is like your security: How far do you fall when you get knocked down? How hard is it to climb back up?

I like this analogy for two reasons.

First, it gives you a sense of the dynamics of vulnerability. The closer you are to the top, the easier it is to climb, the less likely you are to fall, but also the less difference it actually makes how far along you are. The further down you are, the steeper the climb, the more precarious your position, but also the more each step makes a difference to your overall wellbeing. In short, it illustrates why Nellie Riether spiralled the way she did: the further she fell, the harder it was to climb back up again, and the easier it was to fall down further.

The other good thing about the metaphor is that you can elaborate on it to describe a more sophisticated model. Does the staircase get narrower as you approach the top, so that only so many people can fit on each step? What damage do you sustain when you tumble down the stairs? When can we lift up those alongside us, or pull up those behind us? When do we push others down to get ahead? Can we turn the staircase into an escalator, so that everyone gets better off at once?

If you want to get really nerdy about it, you can express the framework mathematically, as follows:

(Number of shocks*average strength of shocks)/total resources to withstand shocks = vulnerability

where the numerator describes your exposure and the denominator describes your security. It matters here that the operators in the equation are multiplication and division symbols, rather than addition and subtraction symbols. Maybe you only get one or two big shocks in your life, but if they’re really big then that can be very consequential. Or, conversely, if you sustain a lot of little blows over the course of your lifetime, you might be able to push through them all, especially if you have a lot of resources to deal with them. But if you don’t have any resources at all, even small shocks could leave you very vulnerable.

Hopefully, you’re getting a sense by now of this framework’s wide applicability. The “shocks” which count towards your exposure can include anything from an injury to a job loss to a death in the family. Likewise, the diverse set of potential resources which could provide you with security includes savings, education, social networks, race, family, proximity to population centres, or even your personality.

You don’t even have to focus exclusively on people. There are all kinds of things that we refer to as being exposed, insecure, and vulnerable: minds, military bases, balance sheets, the IT systems of health service executives. The shocks these things are exposed to are all different, as are the resources needed to make them secure, but they are all fundamentally systems which can be made more or less vulnerable by our efforts to regulate and reform them. For the sake of symmetry, let’s illustrate this point with reference to one of the many systems governing the course of Nellie Riether’s life: the American system of legislative democracy.

Democratic governments are the quintessential example of systems which are both highly exposed and highly secure. They are exposed because they are the arena in which all major social conflicts are fought. At every point, every actor has some incentive to subvert the rules of the arena in the name of winning the conflict. If any party does this successfully enough on enough occasions, the arena ceases to matter, and conflict is replaced by the brute domination of the weak by the strong. The norms and procedures of democracy offer security from these efforts by providing a means of processing conflict into consensual government. When it’s possible to lose the fight without losing your head, you can tolerate the possibility of letting the other side win.

American democracy has always been somewhat insecure. Gerrymandering, the electoral college, voting restrictions, a first past the post voting system, divided government, and veto points in the form of a powerful upper house and the filibuster, all jeopardise the people’s capacity to process conflict into governance. However, certain conditions held until recently which ensured that the system was rarely exposed to actors who wanted to deliberately undermine the system. Specifically, the longstanding presence of conservative Democrats from the South made bipartisan legislative efforts appealing enough to be worth trying. The resulting system was not just – it produced compromises like Joe Biden’s infamous 1994 crime bill, which tied funding for domestic violence shelters to an expansion of America’s enormous prison system – but it was stable, with every relevant actor keeping some skin in the game.

But as conservative Democrats began to die off or switch parties, Republicans, who benefit from the system’s distortions, saw less and less reason to observe the norms of co-operation which sheltered U.S. democracy from attack. In the final years of the Obama presidency, Mitch McConnell subjected Congress to a government shutdown, a debt ceiling crisis, and a long deadlock over a supreme court vacancy.

But it’s one thing to not care about democracy, and another to be actively opposed to it. Donald Trump’s entire electoral campaign was based on the premise that the Democratic Party is an illegitimate political actor. In a political system uniquely premised on compromise, such delegitimization was to have stultifying effects. By the time the pandemic hit, Republicans could no more compromise with the Democrats on COVID relief than they could compromise with the Taliban on peace in the Middle East. Donald Trump, who owed his presidency to a distortion in the American political system which occasionally allows the party with fewer votes to win the election, had removed the security of the democratic consensus which made the system functional.

Republican refusal to compromise on COVID relief for vulnerable Americans like Nellie Riether must be understood not only as a failure of American democracy, but also as a symptom of its decline. For Republicans to compromise on such legislation would have been to compromise on the one remaining principle of their party – that the legitimation of the Democratic party is too high a price to pay for democratic governance.

It’s easy to see how this process could compound itself. Without the security of consensus, American democracy will be increasingly vulnerable to those who want to undermine it. Republican candidates who favour compromise will go the way of the Mitt Romneys of the world, increasingly marginalized by the party they once led. The more authoritarian Republicans who do get elected will accelerate the restrictions on voting rights which have returned in recent years, and the vulnerability spiral of American democracy will continue.

But remember, it’s possible to move up the vulnerability staircase as well as down. Last November, America showed the world that democracy could still do its job, punishing Republicans for their complacency during the pandemic and handing both Presidency and Congress over to the Democratic Party. Republican attacks on democracy would continue to shock the system in the months after Joe Biden’s election, but half a year after NPR ran itspiece on Nellie Riether, razor thin Democratic majorities finally gave Congress the security it needed to pass meaningful COVID relief.

This burst of popular legislation should give Democrats the security to pass meaningful democracy reform, reversing the trend of recent years. If the Democrats abolish the filibuster, thus allowing themselves to pass new legislation with majorities of 51% rather than the current 61%, that could pave the way for further action to improve the security of American democracy. The activist group 51 for 51 has been campaigning for filibuster reform as a means of securing statehood for Washington D.C., a diverse city of nearly 700,000 people whose citizens do not have the right to vote in U.S. elections. If the same principle was applied to Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory of 3,000,000 people without political representation, this could go some way towards counteracting the Republican skew of the senate, which appoints two senators to every state regardless of population, making each vote in urban California matter 70 times less than those rural Wyoming. From here, the vulnerability spiral can reverse direction, as the possibilities for electoral reform, enfranchisement, and a genuine progressive agenda all open up ahead.

As it is with American democracy, so too is it with the other systems that govern our lives. If this pandemic teaches us anything, let it be that the equilibria of our lives are not as stable as they seem. What systems are at risk of collapse when the next shock comes? Where could we kickstart the dynamo of prosperity if only we were willing to offer a little more security? I’ve had much to say in this essay about the risks of shock, but I’ll leave you to think about the potential of opportunity.

That said, let me conclude with one more lesson from America, which is that no cascade of events, be it of fortune or misfortune, is inevitable or irreversable. Just as the vast majority of people are neither uber-rich nor desperately poor, the fate of American democracy is likely to be similarly ambiguous. The Democrats have shown us that they are still capable of gaining power, but also of squandering that power while they have it. Centrist democrats have thus far refused to make moves towards filibuster abolition, a necessary prerequisite for further progress. But hope remains. Joe Biden’s various stimulus packages have brought GDP back above pre-pandemic levels and restored employment opportunities for millions, and that much matters on its own terms. Nellie Riether’s LinkedIn page reports that she has been working as a senior designer at a furniture company for the last three months.

FURTHER READING:

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream – short 2017 book by Tyler Cowen – Argues against the notion that we live in an age of disruption and dynamism. The author has since acknowledged that things have changed somewhat.

What are we Waiting for? - Washington post essay by Alex Tabarrok – How to amend regulations to speed up vaccine supply.

Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic – book by Fintan O’Toole - written during the last recession about how to fix Ireland’s political system and address our social problems. The first book I would recommend to anyone interested in getting involved in Irish politics.

References

David Graeber quote from the beginning of chapter two of The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Other Western Intellectuals who have commented on the slowdown include Thomas Piketty in Capital and the Twenty-First Century, and Tyler Cowen in The Complacent Class

Gil Scott Heron

“...81% of the world’s labour force...”

“...1.4 billion students out of education...”

“...The government took over the nation’s private hospitals...”

“...intensive R&D efforts to develop new vaccines.”

“...there was a global financial crisis last march”

History of COVID-19 in Ireland

Safety of school re-openings

Vox Explainer on Human Challenge Trials

“Not essential or ethically justified”

Rosenblatt’s piece

Explanation of vaccine development process

Human Challenge Trials UK

Headline info about each vaccine

AstraZeneca 90% effective depending on dosing

NO DEATHS!

Bill Gates and AstraZeneca

UK Joint Committee on Vaccination

Ireland is dose spacing AstraZeneca but not Pfizer/BioNTech

Pfizer/BioNTech is 83% of our supply

All sources for the fractional dosing paragraph are taken from that Tabarrok piece

Largest fiscal expansion in the history of America

Japan is only just now vaccinating its population

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The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream

Enough Is Enough: How to Build a New Republic

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

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Prologue

We here in Ireland have had a strange relationship with the EU. Ten years ago, the defining event in that relationship was the ECB’s threat to cut off financial support to Ireland if we didn’t incur tens of billions of euro in debt bailing out our toxic banks. This event was itself just one episode in the long saga of the Eurozone crisis during which small countries were repeatedly forced to shrink their economies for the sake of investors in neighbouring countries. The euro threatened to collapse, and the utopian European ideal of international co-operation came to seem like a pretext for the domination of the weak by the strong. You don’t hear about this much anymore, but as recently as 2015 there were serious fears that the EU might disintegrate if Greece finally did what no other small country dared and left to preserve its own self-respect. The portmanteau coined to describe this prospective secession was “Grexit.”

Of course, when the EU finally did face its moment of existential threat, it came not from the working classes being led by Marxist intellectuals against international capital but from a broad coalition of mostly white people being led by international capitalists against refugees and regulations. More bizarrely, the main obstacle faced by these other Eurosceptics on their quest for national sovereignty was Ireland itself. Brexit and the Irish border had transfigured Ireland from a symbol of beleaguered subordination at the hands of European overlords into a symbol of European unity and co-operation against the traitors to liberal democracy in perfidious Albion.

It must have been some relief to all involved when, one year ago last month, Britain formally left the EU. Not everyone was satisfied with the terms of the split, and there was still a trade deal to be negotiated, but the worst was clearly over. Newly secure in our position among our neighbours, the Irish could recover from our whiplash and calmly re-evaluate our European status during this new era of stability.

Lol.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the ultimate stress test for the European Union: it’s a threat to the viability of open borders, an economic catastrophe, and an international crisis which demands multilateral collaboration. Perversely, the chaos of the moment could have been the perfect opportunity to evaluate the Union’s capacity to do what it’s designed to do. Indeed, the EU has been in the news a lot over the past year. Consider the following highlights reel of historic moments:

March - Countries throughout Europe close borders, first to Italy and then to each other, contravening the principle of free movement of people in the union

4th March - Germany bans the export of PPE to other European countries, contravening the principle of free movement of goods in the Union

18th March - The ECB commits to massive bond purchases to keep borrowing cheap for national governments, a move it neglected to make throughout the Eurozone crisis

20th March – suspension of fiscal rules imposed following the eurozone crisis to allow countries in the EU to incur high levels of debt -

26th March – Negotiations for a stimulus package for the EU economy come to nothing -

13th May – EU launches a plan to “reboot tourism” in the EU at a time when there are still 6,000 cases being reported every day (albeit down from 30,000 a month earlier)

June – EU commits to purchasing and distributing vaccines en bloc, rather than letting countries compete for supply individually

27th July – After three months of gruelling negotiations, a €750 billion recovery package is agreed

20th October – Recovery package is paid for by issuing hundreds of billions of euros worth of an entirely new kind of debt

9th December - Hungary and Poland nearly block the recovery package over a requirement in the deal to respect human rights law -

21st December – Commercial Marketing Authorization granted for Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. 500,000 Britons have already been vaccinated by this point.

25th January - “EU threatens to block COVID vaccine exports amid AstraZeneca shortfall”

30th January – Hard border nearly imposed in Northern Ireland to prevent the entry of AstraZeneca vaccines into the UK.

As of today – Data shows that the EU has administered 7.21 doses of the vaccine for every 100 citizens, compared to 21.29 in America, 30.13 in the UK and 92.46 in Israel.

There is good news and bad news in here, but it’s all profoundly relevant to the future of our nation’s place in the world. For every headline listed above there is a corresponding set of questions about what the EU can and should be: How much can we expect rich and powerful states to temper their ambitions in the name of solidarity? How much can we expect weaker states to surrender their sovereignty in the name of unity? To what extent is all this co-ordination even worth the hassle? This is not the first time these questions have come up, and without Brexit to distract us anymore, the pressure to find conclusive answers is only going to grow.

And yet…

There is little indication of any imminent reckoning on this front. Let’s take the Irish Times Inside Politics podcast as a crude indicator of the centre of political attention in the nation. In the last year, only five episode titles have mentioned the EU, not including Brexit coverage. This might seem somewhat reasonable; Inside Politics is a national news programme, so prioritizing specifically Irish matters makes sense. After all, The Irish Times does also have a separate podcast dedicated to foreign affairs. But it’s not as if Inside Politics never concerns itself with matters abroad. In fact, there is one country which has been covered twice as much as the entire European Union, garnering eleven headlines to the EU’s five...

The Mirror of Erised

America is a Godsend for political junkies. No matter your interest or agenda, you can look to America and see whatever your heart desires. This is because the political system there is a) multifaceted, b) dysfunctional, c) polarized, and d) spectacular, so for any given argument you want to make, there will reliably be a U.S. media company willing to supply you with a black-and-white narrative to support that argument. Worried about racism? Look at George Floyd. Worried about black people? Look at the riots. Think we need a left wing revolution? Look at Bernie Sanders. Think the left has gone too far? Look at Bernie Sanders!

When EU officials looked into The Mirror of Erised last year, they saw a Western superpower so spectacularly incompetent that everyone would just assume the sober bureaucracy of the EU was doing fine by comparison. In 2020, America had more deaths from coronavirus than any other country in the world, in no small part because its leader was preoccupied first with running an ugly, divisive election campaign and then with attempting to overturn the results of that election. But times have changed, and without Trump as a foil, it’s becoming clear that a comparison with America is not so favourable to the EU as it once seemed.

Crisis Point

The EU currently suffers by comparison with America in three aspects of its pandemic preparedness: containment, vaccination, and economic resilience.

As late as September of last year it was obvious that the EU’s pandemic response had been superior to America’s. While last summer’s suppression efforts pushed the number of cases down to near zero in Europe, case numbers actually rose in America as underfunded state governments were forced to open up their economies. But when European case numbers quadrupled in October, Europe’s older age structure meant that our death rate rose above America’s for the first time in the course of the pandemic. Cases in Europe have been falling since January, but they’ve fallen faster in America, and unlike Europe, America has been rolling out vaccines at a remarkable pace.

Reporting on the EU’s disappointing vaccine rollout is ongoing, but insistence on securing vaccines at the lowest possible price is worth singling out as a source of delay. Since the EU negotiated its vaccine purchases as a block, it had enormous power as the vaccine companies’ number one customer. Unfortunately, using this power to drive down the price of vaccines proved to be a false economy; other purchasers willing to pay a premium wrapped up their negotiations sooner and are getting their vaccines first. When you’re buying a priceless commodity, the rational move is to let yourself get ripped off.

Even once the vaccine has been rolled out, Europe will still have an economic crisis to deal with. Many commentators, including this one, have been quick to remark on the shift in Europe’s approach to economic firefighting over the last ten years. The emergency measures taken in March and July were genuinely groundbreaking. But they weren’t enough. Again, comparison with America is illuminating. The U.S. Congress passed the $1.5 trillion CARES Act in March and gave it a $0.9 trillion booster in December. Now Biden is trying to get through another $1.9 trillion in relief, to be followed by another ~$2 trillion investment later in his presidency. That might be too much, but the EU’s $0.75 trillion from last July, most of which is coming in the form of loans rather than grants, is definitely not enough.

This is especially troubling given that Europe was much more vulnerable before the pandemic and has suffered a much bigger hit to its economy. The OECD estimates that GDP fell by twice as much in Europe as in America, and even more in the countries which were already struggling. Spend some time looking at the graph below to better understand the last twelve years of economic history. Look first at the 2008 recession. America got off the best, losing about two years of GDP and then promptly resuming its former growth trend. Germany was hit harder, but came back faster. Spain had a milder shock, but suffered under six years of gruelling austerity before beginning to recover. The real tragedy is Italy, which got the same initial shock as Germany, but which hasn’t caught a break since. Even before the pandemic, Italian GDP was lower than it had been in a decade. Now look at the shocks from coronavirus. The next Eurozone crisis is already here.

If our focus on America at the expense of Europe was ever justified by the relative disarray of the American system, that justification is beginning to ring hollow. Even in the most generous of interpretations, comparing Europe only to America represents the narcissism of small differences. Whenever we ask why we have done slightly better than America, we should also be asking why we’ve done so much worse than China. Furthermore, the democratic deficit in the EU makes it impossible for citizens to hold the relevant actors responsible for their failures. Who do you stop voting for when a bureaucrat makes a mistake? The EU needs a new vision for its own future, one which arrives with the support of its own citizens. Until we start acting as if our citizenship means something, no such vision will be forthcoming.

27 Brexits

It is worth taking a moment to consider a worst case scenario. Here is Adam Tooze in Social Europe, summarizing the ECB’s model of what might happen if EU financial support is withdrawn too soon:

Unemployment surges. The economy continues to contract into 2021. Credit falls off a cliff. As recession takes hold, loans turn bad and losses cascade through the financial system.

Europe’s banks, already in a weak position before the coronavirus shock, are caught napping. Their loss provisions in 2020 having been far lower than those made by their American counterparts, in 2021 they suffer a bloodbath. As their loan books deteriorate, weaker banks—above all in Italy—are downgraded to junk status, tightening their access to bond markets, further restricting their ability to lend.

The failure to make good on the promise of 2012 to complete a banking union is exposed. Without credit the euro-area economy is paralysed. Unemployment surges by 2022 to 12 per cent.

It’s not hard to imagine the political consequences of another years long crisis like this. Europe during the Eurozone crisis was like a bad marriage, with everyone involved feeling resentful that they weren’t getting out what they were putting in. Such a marriage can survive if all parties see that meaningful progress is being made, but ten years is a long time to go without growth. Faced with such prospects, imagining the future becomes an exercise of existential importance.

There won’t be anything so simple as an in/out referendum which brings the Union to an end altogether – countries and their institutions are too enmeshed for such a clean break to occur. There is no self-destruct button for the EU. Much more likely is a grand reckoning. As the contradictions of the current paradigm are heightened, Europe will have to decide what kind of Union it wants to be.

In the best case scenario, a plethora of reforms will be suggested and the underlying principles thereof will be debated. We could, for example, abandon the euro, which would deliver flexibility at the expense of economic certainty. Or we could double down on centralisation, giving the European Parliament more power over the composition of the Commission and weakening the veto power of individual heads of state.

Realistically, though, the most likely outcomes are the least conclusive. If the past is any predictor of the future, we can expect a kind of muddling through which leaves no one satisfied and kicks the problem of self-identity further down the road. But we know now where that path takes us: further stagnation, further insecurity in the face of subsequent crises, even less political will to mold the EU into a system capable of justifying its own existence. There comes a point when nations stop asking themselves whether they should leave and start asking how they can possibly stay.

What next?

But the future is still in our hands. Pound for pound, Ireland is among the most powerful and the most Europhilic nations in the Union. We are more likely than average to say we feel like citizens of the EU and more likely to say we know what rights that citizenship gives us, but we are also more likely to say we want to learn more. This Europhilia is reflected in our clout on the continent. Two of the last eight secretary generals of the European Commission have been Irish. The chief executive of the European Medicines Agency is Irish, and so is the Chief economist of the ECB. Taken together with our aforementioned strategic advantages in a post-Brexit world, all this speaks to the potential for an engaged Irish citizenry to push for reform of the EU.

I am not well positioned to say what that reform should look like – this blog is being published four days late because I drastically underestimated the scale of my own ignorance on this topic. Anyway, no one blog post could ever do justice to such a complex system of institutions. I haven’t, for example, discussed the nuances of Ireland’s status as a quasi-tax haven within the EU. Nor have I considered the major international crises of climate and migration which will come to define international relations in the coming decades. But this complexity is exactly why the EU must become the subject of ongoing conversation in exactly the way that America already is. By that token, the most important part of this post will be the “Further Reading” section below. I realise this is the one-eyed leading the one-eyed to some extent, but if you've found this post to be in any way illuminating, then I promise you’ll learn much more by just going straight to my sources.

Alternatively, if you think I’m full of s**t and that people should be directing their attention elsewhere, say so in the comments! Much like the EU itself, the discourse is at its most robust when it functions as a collaborative process. Long may it continue.

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