Brad Sigal
A protester stands at the Minnesota state capitol with a sign reading, "Waltz Traiter to Constitution".
Neel Kashkari has been an advocate for market-based reform initiatives for public education, both as a candidate for governor in California and in his current role as the head of the Federal Reserve Bank ofMinneapolis. In 2019, Kashkari and a handful of high-profile Minnesotans, including as Attorney General Keith Ellison, began lobbying for a revision to the state constitution that critics said would pave the way for school privatization schemes.
Americans have rarely been called upon to put others before themselves during this time of crisis. Instead, thanks to President Trump’s defiant rhetoric and abominable incompetence, we have been advised to defy public health experts and go about our lives as we see fit.
I wrote about this for The Progressive, in a February 2020 piece called “The Weird Plot to Privatize Minnesota’s Schools.” And while Kashkari and I come from pretty different ideological places, I find myself admiring him for one clear reason: his views on how the United States could—and should—get control of the COVID-19 crisis.
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Kashkari did something few other right-leaning public officials have done—argue for an aggressive, “state-by-state lockdown” as a means for containing the virus.
Neel Kashkari in the 2014 San Diego LGBTQ+ Pride Parade.
Kashkari wrote the op-ed with Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert based at the University of Minnesota. (Dr. Osterholm’s podcast about COVID-19 is a must listen.) In the article, the two insist that, with a heavy dose of collective sacrifice, “we could almost stop the viral fire that has swept across this country over the past six months and continues to rage out of control.”
Kashkari and Osterholm are right to point out that the virus is raging out of control in the United States because we reopened our bars, stores, and restaurants too early. Our belief in American exceptionalism is killing us, especially when paired with a stubborn insistence by many that mask wearing is an affront to our civil rights.
If we actually want our kids back in school, then we must work together to make this happen. Stay home whenever possible, avoid crowds, wear masks, and don’t go out to bars and restaurants.
This level of personal responsibility, which citizens in many other countries managed to do as soon as COVID-19 hit, would need to be adhered to for about six weeks in order for schools and businesses to safely reopen, Kashkari and Osterholm argue.
Will we do it? I doubt it.
This past weekend, hundreds of thousands of mask-free motorcycle enthusiasts rallied in Sturgis, South Dakota, with the encouragement of the state’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem. Many of these bikers are not from South Dakota, where the incidence of COVID-19 is low. Rather they came from and passed through other states on their way to and from Sturgis, potentially spreading the virus wherever they went.
A strong whiff of COVID-19 fatigue is evident in news coverage of the Sturgis rally, with revelers declaring they were sick of being cooped up at home. Their annual excursion to South Dakota is like “therapy,” one declared. We are all feeling a bit cooped up.
Local bar owners urged Sturgis-goers to do the right thing and stay away if they’re feeling ill, but of course that didn’t happen. Americans have rarely been called upon to put others before themselves during this time of crisis. Instead, thanks to President Trump’s defiant rhetoric and abominable incompetence, we have been advised to defy public health experts and go about our lives as we see fit.
There’s been no shortage of this in Minnesota and other Midwestern states. A friend laughed recently while describing a trip she took to Iowa from Minneapolis, explaining that it felt like coronavirus concerns stopped at the border between the two states.
No one, she insisted, was wearing a mask in the grocery store or shops she visited—except for her and her companion. Another friend just returned from a trip to visit relatives in Michigan, where Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat and potential vice president pick for Joe Biden, has been subject to ongoing protests over her attempts to contain the virus.
There are anti-Whitmer lawn signs all over Michigan, my friend told me with dismay, including ones that refer to the governor as an idiot and a moron. Wisconsin has its own version of this, with Republican-led attempts to punish Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, for issuing a mask mandate.
I wonder if the people behind these protests and signs are the same ones pushing for schools to reopen this fall for in-person instruction.
If so, they may want to take a few minutes to read the op-ed from Kashkari and Osterholm. They warn that rushing forward to reopen schools too soon will result in “millions more cases with many more deaths,” long before a vaccine might be made available.
This is the time to band together for the common good; I’m glad Kashkari is using his public platform to point this out.