One of the long-running themes of this blog is that as horrific a president as Donald Trump has been, his malice, incompetence, and racism have been supported by Republican elected officials nearly every step of the way, and that in key ways his particular behaviors and policies were simply accelerated versions of long-running tendencies within the GOP. For instance, there’s a direct line from decades of increasingly blatant GOP attempts to deny the vote to African-Americans, to Donald Trump’s explicit white nationalism and racism. Another important continuity lies between years of growing Republican resistance to democracy —as evidenced in voter suppression efforts, partisan gerrymandering, and attempts to pack the federal courts to serve as a bulwark against a Democratic Party that has now won 7 of the last 8 national elections — and Trump’s open authoritarianism, which has culminated in undisguised and unprecedented efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Over nearly the past year, the confluence between the attitudes of Donald Trump and the GOP has appeared most destructively in the catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic. Apart from an unwillingness to challenge the president’s coronavirus denialism, and a frequent willingness to embrace it outright, the GOP has also followed the president in a general attitude of rejecting an ongoing governmental responsibility to fight the pandemic or to assist Americans harmed by the accompanying economic downturn. Yes, the CARES Act passed Congress and was signed into law by the president in March — but as the months have gone by, the GOP has broadly rejected any sort of systematic approach to mitigating the virus and resulting economic harm in a meaningful, nationally-unified way. Among other things, the idea that the United States should essentially pay people to stay home while we institute severe measures to bring the virus under control has been completely off the table, leading inevitably to our current rout in the face of the pandemic, with the nation hitting new highs in infection and death rates almost daily. The American people are being slaughtered by this wholly avoidable failure of governance.
Much to the Hot Screen’s relief, Michael Lind and Sammi Aibinder have written an analysis that systematically lays out the connections between the conservative ideology of the Republican Party and this failed coronavirus response by the president and his party. While acknowledging that Donald Trump’s personal failings have played a part in our ongoing crisis, they argue that conservative ideology itself has proved incapable of dealing with this pandemic and its attending challenges:
[F]ocusing solely on the ousting of this particular president and his friends — and on their considerable failures as leaders — risks missing a deeper, more fundamental point: that though Donald Trump lost reelection, the ideology and belief system underpinning so many of the debacles of his presidency prevails, and was always doomed to fail the country in the face of a disaster like this one. A response to COVID-19 and the economic crisis it triggered guided by and grounded in a conservative worldview would always have failed us, regardless of who was in the White House. At base, conservative ideology itself was just as responsible for the failure to appropriately and effectively respond to this crisis as Trump’s personal failings were. And that ideology will still be present — rife, in fact — in our government long after Trump is gone.
Lind and Aibinder identify three particular elements of this conservative ideology that have fated the United States to an ineffectual coronavirus response:
First, conservatism posits that that government itself tends to cause more problems than it solves, and that free markets — unencumbered by government intervention — are always best positioned to allocate resources and improve society. Second, modern conservatism argues that the economy is primarily driven by capital and its owners, and as such, the interests of capital owners are paramount; related to this is then mistaken idea that if the stock market is rising, the economy is unquestionably doing well. And third, conservatives tend to see differences and disparities along racial and gender lines as either irrelevant, temporary, or — in the most pernicious form — deserved.
As you sit with these three points, and read through Lind and Aibinder’s supporting evidence, you begin to realize that even having just one of these concepts structure the U.S. response to the coronavirus would lead to disaster. Certainly the idea that government in and of itself is a problem, and that the free market can solve all challenges, would alone have corrupted efforts at a robust pandemic response. But when it synergizes with a bias towards business owners and against workers rights, and an indifference to or even embrace of structural racism? Such a horrific outcome is now before our eyes.
Among other things, Lind and Aibinder’s framework goes a long way to explaining why the United States couldn’t simply pay Americans to stay home for a couple weeks early in the pandemic so that we could get the virus back to a baseline and then return to more or less normal living in conjunction with a regime of contract tracing, social distancing, and other preventative measures. A virus that soon seemed to be disproportionately affecting lower-wage workers, and particularly minorities, summoned no particular sympathy from a Republican Party that views workers as secondary to economic health, and sees no particular societal obligation to recognize disparities due to race. Likewise, such an activist role for the government, in which it fundamentally replaced the market even for a mere matter of weeks, would be unthinkable to those who see no positive role for government in comparison to the free market.
A couple particular points the authors make resonate strongly with some of The Hot Screen’s recent obsessions. Elaborating on basic conservative thinking around a free market, rather than democratic government, being the better determinant of what the public really wants, they note how “conservative economic and social ideology puts its premium on the individual above all else — the world is defined by individuals acting in their own self-interest, in the market society alike. Communal welfare is borne not out of collective action, but out of each individual ‘pursuing his ambition or her desire, whatever, with excellence,’ in the words of Rush Limbaugh.” Lind and Aibinder connect this emphasis on individual rather than collective action and responsibility with the “‘personal responsibility’ ethos” propounded by conservative politicians and activists in the face of the pandemic. They point to “conservative state legislators in Texas declaring it each ‘individual Texan’s responsibility’ to keep themselves safe,” but this is also clearly the belief system that has led the Republican governors of North and South Dakota to repeatedly argue that the government has no responsibility to mandate measures to fight the coronavirus, since individual citizens can be relied on to make the correct choices. (It is also, not incidentally, a mindset that works to persuade people that their only power is as individuals, not as citizens acting together to assert their collective power — a perspective that essentially robs Americans of the power and meaning of democracy itself.)
The two authors also tie this mindset to “conservatives’ passing the buck to the “free market” — insisting that the only way for the American people to survive is to ‘reopen the economy,’ when in fact it’s just that that gives the virus the reins.” For anyone who has felt that their head might explode when they heard this prioritization on reopening the economy above all else, there is some relief in Lind and Aibinder tracing back to where this flawed logic originates.
They also help clarify the determined resistance of conservatives to the advice of scientists and medical professionals as to the appropriate response to the pandemic. They note that the cigarette and fossil fuel industries have long made it a priority to discredit scientists to protect their profits, and that conservatives, being deferential to the interests of business, have adopted this same pose of hostility to expert opinion. Such hostility, we now see, has resulted in a wholesale effort to disregard the advice of health professionals in favor of businesses’ desire to keep the profits flowing in.
But Lind and Aibinder also make a related point that has stuck with me: in the case of attempts to discredit climate scientists, businesses and conservatives weren’t just worried about reduced profits, but about the larger threat posed by acknowledging the validity of real-world climate concerns; doing so would expose actual market failures, which in turn “required one to concede the need to reform capitalism.” The two authors don’t apply this same point to the conservative response to the coronavirus pandemic, but I think it’s safe to say that something of the same fear is operative today; acknowledging the need for government intervention in a time of pandemic makes clear that markets aren’t the perfect self-regulating and society-fulfilling machines that conservatives claim. It is as if any opening of the door to the idea of government intervention threatens to send the whole edifice of conservative political and economic ideology tumbling down. To defend this fragile structure, which is arguably built on a fantasy of human nature and how markets operate, conservatives in the Republican Party now seem more determined than ever to hold the line against a more humane and effective government, even at great real cost to an economy they claim to revere.
To give conservatives a little credit here, though, I actually think they’re correct in this intuition — the more Americans see that government can actually protect them from the coronavirus and protect their jobs, and, for example, demonstrate that protecting workers’ health and livelihoods is more important than a business’ ability to generate maximum profits, then the more everything is indeed up for debate. Why not universal health care to protect us all against this and future pandemics? Why not have the government pay for every American who wants it to attend college, if it helps overcome educational setbacks due to the coronavirus? But the fact that their intuition is right doesn’t make their failed ideology any less wrong; in fact, it makes their stubborn resistance to common-sense democratic intervention in the economy and in health care appear all the more murderous and deranged, born less out of principle and more out of an unbridled belief that there should be no limits to the ability of the rich and powerful to aggrandize themselves, even if the cost to the public at large can be measured by a body count in the tens of thousands and countless livelihoods and individual potentials avoidably lost.
I wrote last week about the difficulty of witnessing “the individual choices that millions of American have made to participate in a mass denial of science, common sense, and common responsibility,” a spectacle that almost seems like a society-wide insanity. Having read the Lind-Aibinder piece shortly afterward, it’s clearer that what we’re seeing is not simply craziness but a society permeated by the conservative ideology the two authors describe, which in its inappropriateness to our current moment has proven itself tragically detached from reality.