A Triumph of Ill-Will: American Politics and Culture in the Dark Pandemic Winter
...even more damagingly useful for the Right have been the twin triumphs of the annihilation of the non-partisan fact and the extreme radicalization of individualism fused to the idea of “freedom.”
By Jim Miller
The election is over and contrary to the claims of the American Right, the Covid-19 pandemic is not only still here but raging to new heights, infecting and killing more Americans than ever before. As we watched Trump’s perverse campaign of overt denialism and anti-science jihad, it wasn’t hard to see this coming. Indeed, the last several months have been like watching the beginning of a horror movie where all the characters deny the existence of the threat until its too late.
And yet the criminal stupidity goes on and on as Covid-19 case and death record after record are broken locally and in states across the country as if we hadn’t seen this movie before. It’s beyond demoralizing and, for some, utterly baffling.
Why, after all we have learned, do we still have so much overt refusal to take basic public health measures seriously? How can anyone take resistance to life-saving common sense when we now have vaccines on the horizon as anything but murderous selfishness?
Last week, in an insightful column in the New York Times, Will Wilkinson argued that while he failed to save himself, Trump’s denialist, death cult blitzkrieg succeeded in buoying Republicans nationally through an effective strategy that mixed pervasive misinformation, scurrilous but equally effective attacks on actual medical expertise and fact-based policy, and a cruel bread and butter appeal to those who, minus continuing aid, should have the “right” to “earn a normal paycheck, pay the rent and feed their kids.”
It’s not the disastrous public health response that did this or those who won’t provide sufficient relief, it’s the people who won’t let you get back to work and “normal life.” In other words, don’t blame the maker of this disaster for your problems, blame those who have been forced to deal with it.
As Wilkinson points out:
Mr. Trump abdicated responsibility, shifting the burden onto states and municipalities with busted budgets. He then waged a war of words against governors and mayors — especially Democrats — who refused to risk their citizens’ lives by allowing economic and social activity to resume.
He spurred his supporters to make light of the danger of infection, made the churlish refusal to wear masks into an emblem of emancipation from the despotism of experts and turned public health restrictions on businesses, schools and social gatherings into a tyrannical conspiracy to steal power by damaging the economy and his re-election prospects.
He succeeded in putting Democrats on the defensive about economic restrictions and school closures. As months passed and with no new relief coming from Washington, financially straitened Democratic states and cities had little choice but to ease restrictions on businesses just to keep the lights on. That seemed to concede the economic wisdom of the more permissive approach in majority-Republican states and fed into Mr. Trump’s false narrative of victory over the virus and a triumphant return to normalcy.
But Democrats weren’t destined to get quite as tangled in Mr. Trump’s trap as they did. They had no way to avoid it, but they could have been hurt less by it. They allowed Republicans to define the contrast between the parties’ approaches to the pandemic in terms of freedom versus exhausting, indefinite shutdowns.
In essence, Wilkinson is arguing that Trump took the backlash populism approach that I discussed in last week’s column and cleverly applied it to public health, making those who wished to save people from scores of unnecessary deaths into snotty elites whose so-called “facts” were all about stealing power from him and taking away the average Joe and Jill’s freedoms and livelihoods.
And, of course, prominent Democrats like Gavin Newsom and Nancy Pelosi shamefully aided this strategy by getting caught breaking or bending the public health rules themselves, thus proving the backlash populists right in their resentment of elite hypocrisy.
But even more damagingly useful for the Right have been the twin triumphs of the annihilation of the non-partisan fact and the extreme radicalization of individualism fused to the idea of “freedom.”
With regard to the first phenomenon, it speaks volumes that even in the midst of what was inarguably a catastrophic national response to the pandemic, millions of Americans could be so easily manipulated into accepting Trump’s ham-handed bait and switch that turned states and localities that were the victims of his incompetence into oppressors of the freedom-loving masses.
It was a miracle of propaganda that Trump managed to get enough of those very same masses to blame for their economic troubles the public health officials whose efforts to check the virus were the only way to get the economy to work for everyday Americans. And to afflict the elitist public health advocates, the oppressed masses voted for the Republicans who were actually screwing them in the service of the interests of the affluent who were profiting while they suffered.
Bamboozling, it’s good work if you can get it.
Side bar: The bad old Marxists who aren’t Joe Biden used to have a phrase for this: false consciousness. That’s a kind of thinking that prevents people from understanding the true nature of their social and/or economic situation. Now please, dear reader, promptly throw that down the memory hole so as to keep the country safe from socialism.
But that’s what happens when Democrats are too afraid of their New Deal populist legacy to protest the rich getting obscenely richer on the stock market while ordinary Americans line up at food banks. It’s the predictable response when the party of the people are too afraid of being called socialists to loudly and convincingly demand more robust public relief, policies that address our historic level of economic inequality, and taxes on the wealthy to fund a more just America.
The terrible consequence of this is that when the public square is abandoned by those of good will, it is open for murderous demagoguery. And this pernicious erosion of belief in verifiable facts unless they can be confirmed by partisan sources or tribal allies is one of the most serious threats to American democracy this country has ever seen.
When it comes to the notion of “freedom” as currently constituted, it is instructive to ask whether the kind of freedom proposed would be appropriate in other contexts. If it might kill your neighbor to do something, is it oppressive to restrict said activity? One would think that, in a civilized country, the answer would be no. Your “freedom to” engage in an activity needs to be balanced by my “freedom from” being harmed by your actions.
We like to think that is the case when it comes to things like driving drunk or throwing bowling balls off freeway bridges, but in the situation of this pandemic, the idea of freedom has been radicalized to such an extent that childish petulance and atomized selfishness have been elevated to the status of virtue.
By this logic, any insistence on collective responsibility becomes a kind of repressive measure. Indeed, the notion of a community where people have any obligation to one another other than as competitors in the marketplace is suspect. In such a world, the idea that the government could be an instrument of public good is an anathema. The view that I might need to sacrifice anything for you is an affront.
This sad circumstance is not just the outcome of rightwing ideology but of the pervasive power of our religion of consumerism that enshrines immediate gratification and shuns long-term thinking or any ethos of other-regardedness. The never-ending NOW of ME rejects the idea that I have to think about you at all, particularly when your concerns might inconvenience me, even in the slightest of ways.
At present, this is the terrain on which our politics, our economy, and our culture is being played out as we watch the death toll rise, like it or not. Thus, in our darkest of winters we are left to wander a barren social desert, looking for a light to guide us to a better place.
We don’t just need a vaccine for the virus, we need a cure for our larger social malady.
Lead image: fernando zhiminaicela via Pixabay