It’s a rare occurrence for a writer to reissue an older work because it has acquired new relevance, but such was the case for Mike Davis. His 2005 study of the risks of an avian flu pandemic, The Monster at Our Door (New Press), has come back with a vengeance in the emergence of COVID-19, under a new title, The Monster Enters.
It was a book Davis himself no longer even owned a copy of. “I wanted it off my bookshelf in order to exorcise the anxiety involved in its writing,” he writes in the new introduction, while in lockdown in his home in San Diego, California.
Davis’s forty-four-page intro is, by itself, worth the price of admission. Crafted in his distinctive prose (“I write this . . . bunkered in my garage with innumerable cans of Chef Boyardee, a few pints of Guinness, and some virology textbooks.”), he takes the reader through an analysis of our present moment that is part history lesson, part detective story, part science class, and most of all, cogent political analysis.
The book is well researched, with twenty-three pages of notes and citations, but nonetheless accessible, with a penetrating look at the intersection of threats from new diseases as they mix with the much older maladies of capitalism, greed, and inequality.
“This new age of plagues, like previous pandemic epochs, is directly the result of economic globalization,” Davis writes. And that means it will take more than vaccines to conquer. It will require, he writes, “revolutionary reforms in agriculture and urban living that no large capitalist or state-capitalist country would ever willingly undertake.”
Davis is unsparing in his criticism of President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus. “Someday—if and when we emerge from our pandemic fallout shelters—diligent journalists will reconstruct in detail Trump’s craven abdications, tantrums, lies, and sundry high crimes and misdemeanors during this crisis.” (For an early stab at such an exercise, see “Smoking Gun” on pages 10-11.)
Trump’s instinctive response to the present pandemic has been to further isolate the country by “continuing to build its border wall despite the health risk to workers, cutting off vital medical aid to North Yemen in the midst of a famine, doubling down its economic blockades of Cuba and Iran, and turning a blind eye to the imminent disaster in Africa.”
Davis argues that there is much that the United States could learn from the response of other countries. China and Cuba are “rising to the challenge of providing significant medical aid and expertise to poorer nations.” Many other nations are having apparent success curbing the spread of COVID-19 by bringing in “the heavy artillery—a promised conveyor belt of medical experts, test kits, protective gear, and so on.”
But, he cautions, “we should avoid learning the wrong lesson: state capacity for decisive action in an emergency does not necessitate the suppression of democracy.” He cites some repressive actions taken by the Chinese government; emergency powers used by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and a “coronavirus coup” that enables Hungary’s President Viktor Orbán to now rule by decree and muzzle opposition press.
“That’s why,” Davis concludes, “we need to be debating democratic models of effective response to present and future plagues, ones that mobilize popular courage, put science in command, and use the resources of a comprehensive system of universal health coverage and public medicine. Otherwise, we cede leadership in this age of constant emergency to our tyrants.”
The Monster Enters is available for purchase June 18.