Late last week, The Washington Post reported that, “Democratic leaders accused Republicans [. . .] of refusing to confront the dramatically worsening coronavirus pandemic and instead acquiescing to President Trump’s false insistence that he won last week’s presidential election.” As I argued a few days ago, this is exactly the tact that Democrats should be taking — only turned up to 11, and also leveled at GOP state leaders who continue to unforgivably sabotage the pandemic response. There is no defending the public health at this point without exposing and discrediting the many ways in which Republican politicians have failed to support common-sense policies to reign in the pandemic. Tying the worsening coronavirus situation to the president’s anti-democratic assault on the election results is correct — these two things are connected, in a way that’s easy for the public to grasp, including for many people who voted for Trump but are concerned about the coronavirus. Once again, the president is setting aside his responsibility to govern in favor of his personal obsessions, and the GOP is going along for reasons of its own.
There is no risk of overstating the catastrophe that the GOP’s support of the president’s coronavirus incompetence and denialism has inflicted on the country. Across the nation, coronavirus is surging in states led by GOP governors who have refused to take the virus seriously enough, putting the interests of business and ass-backwards ideas of personal liberty ahead of protecting public health and the long-term health of the economy. Because of these governors’ bad decisions, hundreds of thousands of citizens have become sick, and thousands have died. Holding them to account for their murderous policies isn’t politicization — it’s democratic politics, plain and simple. When politicians’ actions lead directly to mass death and suffering, it is the other party’s responsibility to hold them to account. This is literally the substance of democracy. In this case, good politics and just politics go hand in hand. Those in the Republican Party who oppose mask-wearing, basic social distancing precautions, and life-saving restrictions on business occupancy and operations are not just in the wrong, like on a question of tax policy, but in the wrong on a matter of life and death. They deserve no courtesy or second chances.
News from North and South Dakota hammers home the deadly toll that bad policies by bad governors have wrought on the populations of those states. North Dakota had a record 2,270 new cases on Saturday; The New York Times reports that the state “has critically understaffed hospitals and the highest rates of new cases and deaths per person in the nation.” How can this be happening? Well, among other things, Republican Governor Doug Burgum refused to order lockdowns the last time the state was seeing a surge of cases, back in the summer; he had continued his malpractice until Friday, when the horror show unfolding in his state finally moved him to implement various restrictions he clearly should have ordered weeks or months ago.
You may remember Governor Burgum from a Hot Screen post last month; he’s the one who shed tears during a press conference at the thought of all the people who might die from covid, even while he asserted that ordering restrictions exceeded his authority as governor. His about-face is an admission not only that he was wrong before, but dead wrong, in the literal sense of the term — his incompetence has meant unnecessary deaths and illness have plagued his state. His adherence to badly confused ideas of what constitutes personal liberty and the limits of government’s responsibility has proved murderous. It does not matter that he’s finally made the right decision; the point was always to keep things from getting so very bad (as yet another indication of how belated his moves are, there is such a shortage of nursing staff that he has declared that “medical workers who test positive could stay on the job to treat Covid-19 patients as long as the workers show no symptoms.”)
Then there’s South Dakota, which yesterday hit a new seven-day average case count of 1,458; the seven-day average positivity rate has crossed 20%, meaning one-fifth of people tested actually have the coronavirus (as a reference point for the severity of this figure, New York City is considering closing its public schools if this rate rises above 3%). Along with North Dakota, it has the highest covid death rate in the nation. Yet, as in North Dakota, the state’s Republican Governor, Kristi Noem, has been adamantly opposed to the basic approaches that have saved lives in other states. As USA Today reports, “Noem has cast doubt on whether wearing masks in public is effective, saying she would leave it up to the people to decide. She has said the virus can’t be stopped.” Let that sink in for a moment. As anyone paying attention to the news could tell Noem, the virus can indeed be stopped, by basic measures like mask-wearing and social distancing. It is a virus, not the Terminator. North Dakota is paying the price for her decision to effectively surrender to the virus. One health expert told USA Today that, “The rates of infection and deaths per capita in South Dakota and previously restriction-free North Dakota are what [he] would expect to see in a war-torn nation, not here” in the United States (the article has other refreshingly outraged commentary from health professionals thoroughly appalled by the mass suffering taking place in the Dakotas).
Remarkably, Noem has been considered a rising star in the Republican Party, a strong reminder that the inane ideology leading directly to mass illness in South Dakota is hardly an outlier, and how very low the bar now is to be considered up and coming in the contemporary GOP. If this is the best the GOP has to offer us after Donald Trump shuffles off the stage, god help us all.
I understand that politicians like Noem and Burgum are from highly conservative states, but even if their respective publics are more inclined to resist government guidelines and mandates, this hardly means that their governors need to indulge inappropriate resistance to life-saving measures in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century. Just the opposite — leadership in this case could well involve doing something that’s unpopular. Instead, like Donald Trump, they bring out the worst in their citizenry, giving free reign to deranged ideas about personal responsibility and the reality of science itself.
One of the Democrats’ main roads to reasserting the primacy of democratic rule in the United States runs through exposing, berating, and holding accountable those GOP politicians whose incompetence renders them unfit representatives of the American people. Nowhere today is that incompetence more glaring than in the willingness of GOP politicians to defy science and babble about the sanctity of personal liberty while watching passively as thousands of American die and permanently lose their liberty. There are no gray areas when a Republican politico casts doubt on the efficacy of masks, as Noem has. This is talk of a fool and a fraud, not someone deserving of high office in the 21st century United States of America.