Review: Disposable – America’s Contempt for the Underclass

It was May 2020.

The first Scottish case of Covid-19 had been confirmed on 1 March; by the end of that month, Scotland’s first lockdown had commenced.

That day, during my one permitted excursion outdoors, I was heading to the supermarket to secure the fixings for chili dogs, which to my mind fit the definition of “essential purposes”. The streets were almost empty, though every so often one could see a figure in the distance, alone and indistinct. That was how I first saw him.

There was a man lying on the pavement. He had one foot in a cast, and beside him lay two crutches. He had fallen, and he couldn’t get up.

Just as I reached him, a woman emerged from the shop the fallen man had been heading towards and aided me in getting him upright. As his hand took mine, it occurred to me that this was the first time I had touched another human being in the better part of two months.

You may remember certain desperate measures undertaken in the early days of lockdown, which might seem absurd in retrospect, though few were laughing at the time. Some would try to disinfect their groceries, while others made valiant if chemically suspect attempts to brew their own hand sanitiser out of vodka. We knew so very little, except that we were afraid.

To my shame, then and now, taking the fallen man’s hand – even clad in the disposable vinyl gloves I didn’t leave home without – frightened me. Nevertheless, the choice was between reaching out to help or not. The latter option did not seem thinkable.

As workable summations of society go, it’s as good as any: when you fall, someone should help. As workable summations of socialism go, try this: everyone deserves help, among other things, and it must be available to all.

One brutal revelation of the pandemic and its aftermath was that neither of these contentions are universally agreed upon. Instead, from Downing Street to the White House, those who occupy the seats of power share a different understanding: sometimes, people fall – and that’s their tough shit. To our ruling class, a world in which no one reaches out to help is not only necessary, but more desirable than the alternative.

This was the lesson so many were forced to learn over the course of the pandemic: Do not fall. There may well be no one to help you get up again.

* * *

It is not an exaggeration to describe Sarah Jones, a senior writer at New York magazine and previously the New Republic, as one of the best journalists at work in the United States today. It is rare enough to find a socialist commentator that has managed to forge a career beyond the cloistered ecosystem of American progressive media, especially one of Jones’ wit, eloquence and insight; it is rarer still to encounter a journalist who both writes about and understands the realities of class in America.

In recent years, Jones has perhaps become best known for those polemics and analyses to which she has been able to bring a well-earned personal perspective. She was among the first and the most merciless critics to comprehend the comical yet sinister grift of “white trash-splainer”-turned-Trump vice-president JD Vance, in part because she grew up poor in the same Appalachian hinterland the Hillbilly Elegy author made the setting for his dubious personal mythology. Having been raised in the powerful, paranoid world of American evangelical Christianity, Jones has similarly been able to dissect its curious, symbiotic relationship with the Trump administration far better than most.

None of us lack a personal perspective on Covid; the idea that the pandemic can be approached with anything nearing objectivity is risible, and Jones does not pretend to do so. Many readers may find echoes of their own experiences in her recollections: “Morgue trucks waited outside overflowing hospitals, and as my husband and I fought off a mysterious respiratory ailment at home, we listened to sirens, all day and into the evening. The virus was no longer abstract; it was sickening and killing our neighbors.”

We cannot pretend that some – so many, in truth, they are virtually beyond enumeration – did not lose more than others. Jones was one of them. Her new book is both a tribute to all those who suffered such vast and tragic loss, and a furious reckoning with how it was allowed to happen to the poorest and most marginalised in American society.

Covid robbed Jones of her grandfather. The circumstances of that loss are not for me to summarise; it would be an insult to Jones as both a writer and a grieving granddaughter to rephrase or condense the astonishing, heartbreaking eloquence and courage with which she writes of her grandfather’s life and death. Grief, however, provided her with clarity. “His death is as political as it is biological,” she writes. “And I am furious.”

A great deal of contemporary political commentary suffers from a kind of analytical apophenia, confident that the disparate obsessions and bugbears of its interlocutors can be tied together into a single, explicable framework which justifies the prejudices upon which it has been built. The pandemic threw gasoline on this tendency, and birthed among the American Right a conspiracist cosmology that encompassed and amplified its many eternal suspicions – the federal government, vaccines, China, nebulous threats to ‘individual liberty’, and anything which could, even more nebulously, be considered ‘socialism’.

In detailing how this paranoid fantasia took root and its deadly consequences in the realm of reality, Jones’ polemic actually does draw a coherent, compelling armature of the pandemic, the intersecting threads of which – the Kafkaesque nightmare of the US healthcare system, the stubborn resilience of social Darwinism, the cynical exploitation of pseudoscience, the never-ending war on organised labour, the demand that people work until it quite literally kills them – almost invariably lead back to capitalism.

Jones’ grandfather was covered by UnitedHealthcare, the obscenely profitable health insurance giant that may be most familiar to readers outside of America for last year inspiring Luigi Mangione’s propaganda of the deed. Her grandfather’s health problems necessitated frequent visits to the emergency room, where risk of infection from Covid was high; conversely, he was “not allowed to stay in rehab for as long as it would have taken him to recover,” Jones writes. “The lengths of his stays were governed not by his medical needs, in our view, but by UnitedHealthcare’s profit margins.”

Many felt their profits threatened by the pandemic, and for those in power, this was far more terrifying than the prospect of mass death. When prominent voices started calling for America to be re-opened, they made plain the ignoble truth of American capitalism: the people – the millions it regards and Jones terms as ‘disposable’ – exist to serve the economy, not vice versa.

Jones recalls Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick arguing that senior Americans should be “willing to take a chance” for the sake of the US economy, while the Catholic writer R.R. Reno suggested there was “a demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost”. Jones, despite not feeling much like a sentimentalist at the grandfather’s deathbed, knew there were those who agreed with such views: “My grandfather wasn’t one of them, but in a sense he got overruled.”

“Trump was the willing servant of capital,” Jones argues. “The horrors we lived through weren’t contained to one man. If they were, Biden would have been our savior. Instead, the horror is systemic. To know the lives and premature deaths of America’s disposable class is to see the true face of capitalism.”

For a writer of Jones’ powers, it would have been all too easy to fill an entire volume skewering the disingenuous discourse that quickly became one of Covid’s most reliable by-products, and where necessary, she does so. in February of 2022, the perennially insufferable commentator Yascha Mounk took a break from bleating about identity politics to demand America “open everything”, even though much of America had already re-opened by that point. Despite this, the presence of “the cautious individual, who might choose to mask where Mounk would not, who might also experience risks that he did not” offended him, along with plenty of other fulminating pundits, with a threat of guilt they refused to tolerate.

“People like Mounk look past the disposable to the dinner parties of the future,” Jones writes. “Capitalism is not a terrible machine, but a benevolent god to appease. The people capitalism destroys can only ever be afterthoughts.”

Jones can drag clowns like Mounk in her sleep, and it is to her credit that she resists the urge, because to do so overmuch would distract from the very underclass Mounk dismissed so casually. Disposable has already drawn comparisons with Matthew Desmond’s superlative Evicted and the work of Studs Terkel, arguably the preeminent oral historian of the 20th century, whose interviews revealed America through the common humanity which comprises it. This is an intimidating standard to live up to, yet Disposable sets the bar even higher; through the many poignant and painful stories of those who struggled throughout the pandemic that Jones records, she allows the veracity of her own arguments to naturally emerge.

Key among these is the contention that those early responses to the pandemic which “offered glimpses of another, more generous country” were intolerable to those whose wealth and power depend upon the exploitation and immiseration of the disposable. That brief period – wherein the idea became tantalisingly real that people could live without fear of eviction, receive money simply because they needed it, or be entitled to the healthcare necessary to live – was far too dangerous to be allowed to persist. As Jones puts it: “A direct relationship exists between the right’s war on welfare and its attacks on public health measures during pandemic. Welfare and public health interventions offer egalitarian possibilities, a direct threat to the right.”

“Scottish readers will not need it explained that the appalling deficiencies of care homes during the pandemic, or the lack of care for the elderly that persists today, are not purely American phenomena.”

Though America is the book’s focus, its relevance does not end at the US border. Scottish readers will not need it explained that the appalling deficiencies of care homes during the pandemic, for example, or the lack of care for the elderly that persists today, are not purely American phenomena. Those who keep track of right-wing discourse in the UK meanwhile will note how much of it has been devoted since the pandemic’s height to condemning even the mildest of positive reforms it engendered. If any response to Covid lessened the power of bosses and capital, the response is always the same: ‘Never again.’

Disposable would be impressive enough if it were merely a stunning work of journalism, detailing how the historic and systemic injustices of America were often intensified by the pandemic, whilst simultaneously allowing its US death toll to spiral beyond a million. Yet in Disposable, Jones has also produced one of the most compelling and powerful socialist polemics to emerge from the United States in a generation. At a time when it is supremely unfashionable to do so, Jones argues that we cannot and should not return to ‘normal’, because even before the pandemic, normality was killing us. Social murder, as Engels identified it, is not merely the consequence, but the point.

* * *

Early this month, as part of a UK-wide day of reflection, Scotland commemorated the five-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic. In Scotland alone, over 16,000 died. At a ceremony in Glasgow Green, mourners carried photographs to those they lost; for reasons which remain mysterious to me, a choir performed a rendition of ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon. First Minister John Swinney commented that it was his duty as a leader and a public servant “to ensure that those who died are remembered.”

This is not nothing – “memory is what the living owe the dead,” Jones contends. And yet, writing even as Covid still kills hundreds across the US every week, Jones finds that clinging to our memories has become a battle in itself. Echoing Mike Davis, Jones suggests that those bereaved grieve twice: “They are afflicted first by the virus, which has stolen a loved one, and then by society, which will not mourn with them. In the rush to move on, the dead are not merely an abstraction but a hindrance. Their memories betray an uncomfortable truth: there is no return to normal. Something new beckons.”

The possibility of something new can be both terrifying and inspiring. Despite her grief and rage, Jones never permits herself to lapse into hopelessness. On the contrary – all we have seen and felt and suffered demand the opposite.

“There is no justice”, she tells us, “but a fairer future.”

Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass by Sarah Jones. Published by Schuster & Schuster.