The trouble with normal is it always gets worse

There is a 1980s song by the Canadian folk poet Bruce Cockburn that portrays a notion of an ominous threatening normality and seems to resonate with humanity’s present dilemmas particularly well:

Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it’s repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs ‘Security comes first’
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse¹

The official monologue coming from the mainstream media, and almost all of the global political class, is that we need to return to ‘normality’ from the Covid-19 crisis. That this narrative has resonance more widely is not surprising. As well as the suffering of those unlucky enough to catch the virus, it entails a vast swathe of collateral damage: bereaved families, workers dumped from precarious work into unemployment, those already marginalized pushed to the very edge of starvation, healthcare workers stressed beyond endurance in institutions lacking the basic tools to cope. No wonder the normality of a more routine life of a few short months ago holds such an attraction.

Neoliberal healthcare

But we need to look a little deeper at this normality if we want to locate the roots of our current predicament. The mandarins in charge of fighting the pandemic are deeply committed to a metaphoric war against ‘an invisible enemy’. But unlike the lavishly funded military and police forces (whose enemies are often hypothetical) those on the medical frontlines have quickly run out of the most basic health supplies, particularly simple masks, gowns and ventilators. The decisions made by states in thrall to the austerity recipes of neoliberal governance are the bitter fruit we are reaping today. Take Italy, for example, which despite a lower infection rate has almost four times the number of deaths that Germany has. While comparison of cause is complex, one principal factor cannot be ignored. Writing a trenchant essay in Italy’s Il Manifesto, Marco Revelli makes this clear enough: ‘If we have only 5,000 [ventilators] in Italy, compared to 28,000 in Germany and over 20,000 in France, this is as a result of choices: the choices that have cut €35 billion [$37.8 billion] from the healthcare budget and 70,000 hospital beds over the past 10 years. If our first responders are forced to face such “deadly dilemmas” [lists of who will live and who won’t], this is because others, above them or part of their institutional structure, have determined the scarcity that forces such a selection and makes it so pitiless.’²

It is not just Italy. In country after country the neoliberal mantra of ‘cut, cut, cut’ has eaten away at public health and other social provision, from the vaunted National Health Service in Britain to the debt-strapped countries of the Global South, like Argentina. There, back in March 2019, 30,000 health workers walked off the job to protest draconian cuts in healthcare provision. More than 30 per cent of social spending was lopped off the 2019