The biggest coronavirus news in Oregon this week is of a large outbreak in Union County, in the eastern part of the state, where 236 members of Lighthouse Pentecostal Church have tested positive. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting, the state epidemiologist suspects that the transmission was potentially at a service or other church event. Apart from an atypical Trumpian thought that these folks have really screwed up Oregon’s numbers — though infections have been increasing, we’re still among the least hard-hit states — I also felt a flash of schadenfreude that this had happened in rural Oregon, where resistance to Governor Kate Brown’s coronavirus restrictions has been far stronger than in Portland and other urban areas.
This may be an understandable, human reaction, but it’s certainly also shameful. I don’t know how these churchgoers acquired the virus; no matter what, none of them deserve to have it. More importantly, we are all at a point where we need to redouble not only our efforts to remind friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens about the urgency of basic social distancing steps like, well, social distancing, but also to insist on where responsibility for this health crisis truly lies: a president who has failed us every step of the way.
I strongly urge everyone to read this Amanda Marcotte piece on this very point. She reviews the inexcusably incompetent choices that got us here, so that we now face an “untenable choice between indefinite lockdown and the coronavirus spreading unchecked.” The lockdown, she says, “was never supposed to be the solution. It was an emergency measure, meant to buy time to come up with a real solution,” which the federal government has failed to do. As Marcotte notes, the president’s incompetence continues to the present; just this week, he floated the idea (not for the first time) that the number of coronavirus cases would plummet if we just stopped testing.
In light of the failure to develop a plan in the time we all bought via mass adherence to lockdowns, Marcotte advocates for a strategy of harm reduction, such as was used in the AIDS crisis. Arguing that people can’t be expected to put off basic pleasures forever, she advocates for measures like outdoor socializing and the widespread wearing of masks; since we can’t keep doing the strict measures guaranteed to stop the virus, we can at least do what we can (absent a government plan) to protect our health, our sanity, and our livelihoods.
But just as Marcotte urges a spirit of tolerance and understanding toward our own basic needs while placing the blame for this situation on the proper parties, we should all start thinking more about the way Trump and the Republican Party have, in the matter of the coronavirus, utterly betrayed not just the country at large, but their own voters and constituents. If so many people insist on ignoring the most basic social distancing guidelines, refuse to wear masks, even deny the danger of the virus, they do so in part because some of the most powerful people in our nation, from the president on down, have urged them to ignore scientific reality, social obligation, and common sense. In combination with influential right-wing media outlet like Fox News, the effort to downplay the threat of the coronavirus — for, let’s face it, the sake of the president’s re-election effort and the ability of his big corporate donors to keep making a buck — has constituted the most sustained and deadly domestic disinformation campaign of our lifetimes.
This betrayal opens up another moral perspective for how we might think of political conflict and alignments in the U.S. Without wishing away their agency or personal responsibility, it’s useful to bear in mind how many Americans have been failed by those in whom they placed their trust, as it opens a door to engaging with our own responsibility towards those we might otherwise consider as unreachable and unpersuadable political opponents. While we may never be able to find common ground with some citizens, this doesn’t excuse us from responsibility for their welfare — even in circumstances where they’re engaging in behavior that threatens not only their own health, but the well-being of their larger community as well. I’m not talking about pity or condescension, but something closer to a regard for their lives and dignity that I think most of us are out of touch with as a part of everyday politics. It is of a piece with the principle that all Americans deserve health care, education, housing, and employment, only with a more liberationist spin.
The coronavirus, with its mortal threat to us all, makes this particular perspective combining compassion and liberation easier to grasp and engage with. Under Trump, many millions of Americans have entered into a very dark place, full of delusion and rage and racism; while it is hardly our job to save their souls, I guess I’m arguing that it is still our job to save their lives, as much as possible. No American deserves to die because their president failed them, even when they voted for that president; the degree to which any of us hesitate to agree with this idea is a sign of both the corruption of our politics, and of our bad need for a redemptive spirit. While Donald Trump and the Republican Party require annihilation at the polls for the good of our collective future, no analogous casting out or punishment is due to or deserved by anyone who voted for them.