Last week, The New York Times published an article highlighting Republican efforts to blame President Biden for the persistence of the covid pandemic while opposing the very measures that could bring this crisis to an end. To its credit, the piece acknowledges the basic cognitive dissonance of the GOP’s attacks, but fails to reach the obvious and logical conclusion: that the GOP is actively undermining the fight against covid as a way to sabotage the Biden presidency and win back political power. That is, the GOP strategy is not absurd, but sinister and murderous. Instead, the article frames GOP criticism as founded in good-faith disputes about how best to fight the coronavirus, when in fact Republicans advocate approaches to ending the pandemic that have no basis in either science or basic logic.
We need look no further than the final year of the Trump administration for proof that the party’s leaders are comfortable with inflicting mass death and suffering on the American people in the name of preserving their political fortunes. President Trump openly embarked on a strategy of downplaying the threat and damage of the coronavirus out of a belief that doing so would prevent the sort of sharp economic downturn that could harm his re-election chances. This strategy received broad support from GOP elected officials, and so we were treated to a barrage of propaganda, originating in the White House but echoed by his political allies, that American workers must sacrifice their health and their lives in order to keep the economy humming along. All this in the pre-vaccine era, when masks and social distancing were our sole protections. This cynical strategy was our reality, and is a matter of public record.
With a Democrat in the White House, the script has flipped, but the immorality remains the same. Now, a primary Republican goal is to prevent an economic comeback, and key to that is prolonging the pandemic. The Times notes that the GOP has made this obvious connection between the health of the economy and the state of the pandemic: “Republican strategists believe Mr. Biden’s approval ratings on the economy — the key to his party’s prospects in next year’s midterm elections — cannot improve until voters are more satisfied with his performance on the pandemic.” And so we have Republicans in Congress and state houses continuing to spout the familiar nonsense about masking and vaccine mandates — but this time, not in the name of pretending the pandemic is no big thing, but to help ensure America’s economic recovery is hobbled as much as possible.
Further evidence that the motivations for doing so are deeper than just reflecting mistaken arguments about “freedom” generated by the Republican base is that GOP politicians continue to oppose vaccine mandates and bleat on about natural herd immunity despite the clear evidence that vaccination opposition is killing and sickening Republican voters in unconscionable numbers. The Times reports that, “The most Republican counties have 2.78 times as many new cases than the most Democratic counties, down from three times as many a month ago [. . .] The death rate in those Republican counties is nearly six times as high as the death rate in the Democratic counties.” The links to vaccine resistance are clear: two months ago, “90 percent of adult Democrats had been vaccinated, compared with 58 percent of adult Republicans." A force more powerful than protecting its own constituents is at play here — the desire to destroy a Democratic presidency at all costs.
But even if you disagree with this assessment (and if you’re not persuaded, I would encourage you to read Brian Beutler’s powerful indictment of the GOP on this front from mid-summer, as well as Amanda Marcotte’s more recent piece making a similar case), if you can’t bring yourself to believe such cold-blooded calculation by the GOP, I would argue that the necessary Democratic response remains the same: to publicly identify GOP obstructionism as the single largest obstacle to America getting free of a pandemic that is ravaging the public health and undermining the economy with high inflation and uncertainty. It is somewhat heartening that the Times got responses from the White House along these lines, but of course this has not nearly been a consistent, emphatic line from the Biden administration in the way it needs to be.
Now, though, with the emergence of the omicron variant and escalated GOP efforts to blame Biden for the pandemic, it’s political folly as well as health policy malpractice not to up the Democrats’ refutation and denunciation of Republican pro-covid policies. As with other matters where the Democrats have ceded the initiative to the GOP, this is clearly a matter of great political advantage and moral high ground for the Democratic Party. Every day, more and more people receive vaccinations, and the anti-vax message becomes increasingly revealed as outlandish and extreme. The GOP finds itself standing on thinner and thinner ice, its anti-vax attitudes a sign of desperation as well as cruelty.
It’s understandable that Biden and Democrats wouldn’t want to further politicize the covid response in ways that threaten our ability to get more people vaccinated, or that could reinforce the idea that it’s a stamp of political resistance among the right to defy vaccine recommendations and mandates. But this attitude doesn’t make a lot of sense when the GOP is actively trying to further politicize the issue (and again, this is putting aside the case that the GOP is not just politicizing but outright attempting to sabotage the covid fight). Democrats can’t simply assume that most Americans will know the GOP is full of shit and malice. Our efforts to get past the pandemic and get the economy going full steam are being actively sabotaged by the GOP — but even if the Democrats do not want to call it sabotage, they have a profound duty to push back on the GOP’s willingness to propagate junk science and magical thinking. This is a legitimate political issue, on which the GOP is extremely vulnerable, and it would be foolish on both fronts — public health and political self-interest — not to hammer the GOP’s pro-covid policies and rhetoric. Alongside this, Biden surely needs to keep pushing on the vaccination front — among other things, it’s far past time to mandate vaccinations for U.S. air travel.
I will agree with the Republicans on one thing — the American people will definitely, and rightly, judge Joe Biden on whether or not he ends the pandemic, and that he and the Democrats will suffer mightily at the polls if they judge his work a failure. President Biden has a fundamental responsibility to defend the American people against a pandemic that constitutes a threat to our lives and livelihoods; and as the omicron variant demonstrates, the coronavirus is not yet done with us. When the opposition party is actively opposing the most basic, commonsense measures that will get us out of this crisis — is indeed arguably the primary reason why we are still caught up in this pandemic — then defense of the United States necessarily involves a full-throated denunciation of the anti-science, pro-covid policies of the GOP. Make the GOP the face of the extreme anti-vax resistance, and Biden can both protect America and help remind people why the country voted the Democrats into power at this perilous time.