The Faculty Achievements Luncheon Series invites Hamilton professors to give talks on recent scholarship in the Burke Library Reading Room. This Tuesday’s luncheon highlighted Alan Cafruny, Henry Platt Bristol Professor of International Relations. In his talk, Cafruny outlined the contributions he made to The Political Economy of Global Responses to Covid-19. This book, published in 2022, highlights the work of several scholars writing on key countries’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Cafruny’s chapter, entitled “Populism, Neoliberalism, and the Pandemic: The Tragedy of U.S Policy,” focused on the United States’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cafruny began by asserting that he and his fellow scholars “wanted to go beyond simple political commentary such as science versus MAGA, and tried to relate this in broader trends in global capitalism.” After briefly describing the goal of his scholarship, Cafruny asked the audience: “Is COVID over?” Cafruny explained that it would be reasonable to believe the pandemic was over, explaining that “there has been a lifting of virtually all restrictions, isolation guidelines, reporting requirements. There have been a number of court cases and laws at the state level that would prevent the kind of state interventions that we had with COVID.” Yet, when Cafruny asked the audience whether they thought COVID-19 was over, many audience members shook their heads. Cafruny validated the audience’s general consensus that COVID-19 is not over, sharing that 2.7% of the population is infected and 60,000 people are showing signs of “long COVID” every day. He also shared that there are low rates of vaccination, with only 13% of the population receiving the updated vaccine.
After polling the audience on the question of whether the pandemic is over, Cafruny pivoted to a discussion of his chapter on the United States’s response to the pandemic. He bluntly asserted that he is extremely critical of the U.S’s handling of the pandemic. He shared a quote from the the British Medical Journal on the United States’ response to the pandemic: “the lack of political attention to social determinants and inequities that exacerbate the pandemic results in social murder.” In his chapter, Cafruny argues that there were two factors that contributed to this “social murder” in the United States, namely neo-liberalism and right-wing populism, which are “mutually reinforcing” according to Cafruny. He asserted his belief that capitalism, being such an intolerable economic system, breeds right wing-nationalist movements. Cafruny defined neoliberalism as “the bipartisan dismantling of the welfare state that was built in the 1930s in the New Deal, the commodification and privatization of all aspects of health care, assault on trade unions, the deregulation of finance…alongside industrialization.”
Cafruny asserted that U.S citizens’ resistance to efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 contributed to the overall death toll. He explained that those who resisted mitigation efforts were acting based on the argument that we should privatize young people’s well-being over old people’s lives. According to Cafruny, the sentiment of “old people are going to die anyway” fueled people’s resistance to COVID-19 regulations. Cafruny argued that this view of the elderly is intimately connected to neoliberalism and the “commodification of human beings that when people aren’t productive anymore in a market sense then they have less of a right to existence.”
Cafurny also discussed his criticism of the United States’s healthcare system. “Overall the United States spends 17% of our GDP on healthcare, this is between 30–50% more than all the rest of the OECD countries, but we have by far the worst outcomes of all OECD countries, there are racial and class disparities,” said Cafruny. Cafruny explained that the United State’s poor healthcare infrastructure impeded people from receiving vaccinations. “It was not just the anti-vax sentiment that prevented people from getting vaccinated, it was that they had no doctor to go to anymore, or the pharmacy was 30 miles away,” Cafruny continued.
To close his talk, Cafruny shared a valuable takeaway from his research on the U.S’s response to the pandemic. “Amid a tremendous stock-market crash of March 2020 and April 2021…under Trump and continuing to Biden, there was constructed what the Washington Post called a European-style welfare state — a social safety net, expanded medicaid, medicare, food stamps, stimulus checks, rental assistance. This shows that this can be done in the United States but by June 2023, Biden disbanded just about everything.” But, on the other hand, Cafruny also noted that these “crises and disasters enable big capital to take charge and to benefit enormously.” Harkening back to his opening question, Cafruny asserted, “I agree with you all that it’s not over, and even if the COVID pandemic is over, there are other pandemics that are coming and we have dismantled so much of our health infrastructure, so this is the situation and it certainly needs to change.”
The next installment of the Celebrating Faculty achievements lunch series will take place on Apr. 24. Celeste Day Moore, Associate Professor of History, will present on their 2021 book
Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France
.
