Adam Johnson has written a great elucidation of how, through the course of the pandemic, commentators and politicians have anthropomorphized the coronavirus into a sentient, malevolent entity akin to a terrorist group or crazy regime. This rhetorical gambit, he argues, has powered all sorts of misguided and perniciously bad takes on public health strategies. Johnson notes that, “It’s not just a quirky cultural framework that’s interesting to note in its own right, but part of a larger epistemological regime in American political discourse: So much of how we speak about the world is based on tough-guy bullshit, solipsism, martial posturing, hyper-individualism, and triggering the libs.”
Kudos to Johnson for drawing our attention to this glitch in the discourse, and how it enables all manner of nonsense — such as Republican politicians arguing that we shouldn’t live in fear of the virus, or rants about how people are “done” with the virus, as if we were in an abusive relationship that it’s in our power to break off (news flash: you can’t dump a pandemic).
But where Johnson really gets cooking with gas is in connecting this anthropomorphization of covid with a right-wing effort to blame the suffering that covid has wrought on liberals who purportedly want public health measures against the pandemic. Of columnist Bari Weiss’ recent appearance on Bill Maher’s Real Time show, in which she proclaimed herself to be “done” with the virus, he writes that:
What’s notable about this rant, aside from the fact that it’s presented as edgy or subversive truth-telling when it’s basically bipartisan conventional wisdom at this point (sans, perhaps, mask mandates), is that what she’s spewing is 100 percent, uncut demagoguery. She’s taking genuine and understandable frustrations and re-positioning the cause of the audience’s suffering as not the virus itself, but liberal scolds lobbying for modest mitigation efforts. This re-positioning gets a major applause from Maher's audience, and of course it does: It deliberately appeals to our reptilian brain—the part that’s mad, mad at all the sacrifice and suffering, mad at all the missed birthdays, funerals, and trauma we’ve all suffered over the past two years—and gives it a human face. It’s not Covid, it’s those goddamn Covid-weary liberals who want to shut everything down.
A parallel phenomenon plays out when GOP politicians talk about not living in fear of the virus: by behaving as if the virus is a conscious enemy that’s trying to psych us out, the GOP can then point to progressives as the real enemies, for supporting measures that would purportedly have us upend our lives out of fear of this actively malevolent force. The GOP thus makes the terms of debate such that “the force we’re standing up against is not the virus, but oppressive and overly paranoid protection measures,” which are presented not just as a needless, harmful surrender to the virus, but even more politically potent, to crazy liberals who favor such measures for their own sinister ends. As Johnson summarizes: “Take vague anger over the disruption to normal life, and don’t blame a non-sentient, non-intelligent, agency-free virus, but those calling for public health interventions to delay or reduce its spread.”
Two things stand out to me in Johnson’s observations. First, he’s identified something that arguably constitutes a major engine of right-wing resistance to common-sense anti-covid measures — the way that right-wing politicians and opinion shapers work to channel very justifiable anger at the ravages of covid into anger at their political enemies for the alleged crime of being the ones who are actually causing the suffering. Second, he gets at something that Democrats and progressives have been slow to grasp: the sheer amount of existing anger that the right is thus able to tap, and, more specifically, the underlying irrationality of these emotions, which constitute a vast reservoir of resentment that the Democrats ignore at their peril.
Once again, I’m reminded of the disparity in political approaches between our two major political parties. Not just on the pandemic, but on issues of crime, immigration, and, most prominently, race, the GOP as a party appears fully conscious of, well, the unconscious and emotional motivations of Americans — that appeals emotion and irrationality can rouse and motivate voters. In contrast, the Democrats still seem largely wedded to a rational, policy and fact-based approach of appealing to voters’ rational and material interests. What’s particularly enlightening about Johnson’s essay, and the way that covid has ripped not just through our population but through our politics, is that this pandemic has helped revealed the fatal limits to the Democrats’ overly rationalist approach.
The truth is, from the very start, the U.S. approach to this pandemic was deliberately politicized and thus undercut by a Republican White House eager not to harm the economy in the run-up to the 2020 election. Not only did Donald Trump insist that the coronavirus was not a threat to the United States, his instinct for self-preservation hindered the necessary governmental and societal mobilization that could have bought us precious time in the pandemic’s early days. Just as perniciously, the GOP’s need to cover for Trump’s mistakes created a massive incentive for the party to double down on Trump’s efforts to downplay the seriousness of the virus. Then, once Joe Biden became president, the GOP’s focus went full bore on undermining measures to fight the virus, in the hopes that the economic harm and societal damage would increase their chances of success in the 2022 midterms and beyond. As Perry Bacon Jr. summarizes in a recent column, “While the president was running a massive campaign to get Americans vaccinated, GOP officials and conservative media effectively ran an anti-vaccine countercampaign, promoting doubts or playing down the importance of inoculations. Mask-wearing, vaccines and every other part of Biden’s covid strategies have been broadly undermined by Republicans, including GOP-appointed judges." Most catastrophic has been the combination of outright and tacit support for the anti-vaccination movement, which has helped ensure that the U.S. has seen death rates and infections that surpass many of its peers.
In the face of this sabotage, and the resulting literal death count, the Biden administration’s continued insistence on treating the fight against the pandemic as something that must rise above politics must be deemed a failure. What Johnson’s piece helped illuminate for me is the sense that Democrats are courting disaster if they fail to confront a GOP strategy that redirects Americans’ anger and fear towards the virus and necessary mitigation measures — irrationally conflated, as Johnson describes — onto Democrats. Key to the party protecting itself is making sure that all that rancor, resentment, and rage roiling in American hearts and minds over the pandemic are properly directed at a Republican Party that has made itself an accomplice to covid’s continued prevalence and deadliness across the land.
While it’s understandable that the Biden administration would want to keep the vaccination effort in particular as free of politics as possible, so as to increase the chances of persuading reluctant Americans — particularly on the right — to get vaccinated, plateauing vaccination rates demonstrate the limits to the current approach. Beyond this, the unacceptably high infection and death rates we’ve been seeing are signs of a strategy gone terribly wrong. In failing to counter the GOP’s one-sided politicization of the covid fight, President Biden and the Democratic Party more broadly are helping bring about a situation in which the GOP’s deliberate use of the pandemic as a weapon to undercut the fortunes of its political opposition are inflicting deadly, serious harm on the nation. In failing to defend the country against such sabotage, the Democrats are failing their basic purpose as a political party — to serve the public interest — and inexplicably allowing a full-on assault against their own political fortunes to proceed unchallenged.
This is not to say that the Biden Administration hasn’t made mistakes outside of failing to confront the GOP over pandemic sabotage, or that it bears no responsibility for the continued ravages of the coronavirus. Among other things, it’s now clear that Joe Biden’s declaration of victory over the coronavirus back in the early summer of 2021 was both premature and counter-productive, and that the administration displayed stunning flat-footedness in anticipating the dangers of both the delta and omicron variants. The lack of better guidance around what type of masks to wear, and the extremely belated provision of very limited numbers of N95s to Americans free of charge, only appear more mind-boggling as time goes on.
Yet the Biden administration’s unforced errors and failures have occurred under a larger good-faith, science-based effort to bring the pandemic to an end — an effort opposed at multiple points, over the course of the last year, by much of the Republican Party. At long last, then, the Democrats need to take all the justified anger that people are feeling about the pandemic still upending lives, and direct it squarely at those most responsible for prolonging the pandemic: a GOP that dementedly behaves as if the virus is a conscious, sentient enemy, and that urges American to “defy” both the virus and opposes commonsense measures like vaccination and mandatory masking. Not only is this the right thing to do, it’s the politically smart move — not just for the sake of countering GOP efforts to place the blame on Democrats, but because majority opinion remains strongly in favor of the effective, science-based approaches that Democrats generally advocate. On this front, it’s telling that the GOP and right-wing commentators revert again and again to the idea that Democrats are pushing “lockdowns” and other such onerous restrictions, when the truth is that the current mitigation measures are limited to mask-wearing requirements in public places and a continued push for vaccination. In many ways, the GOP is pushing back against alleged Democratic policies that don’t actually exist. The opportunity exists to paint the GOP as a party of extremism, anti-science, and indifference to mass suffering.
On the specific issue of prioritizing vaccinations, the Dems have a moral as well as political obligation to rethink their approach. As Jonathan Chait writes, the anti-vaxx wing of the Republican Party has now grown so large that it’s essentially an unshakeable element of the GOP coalition; even Republican politicians who officially support vaccination provide space for anti-vaxx disinformation and activists to spread their poison. Opposition to vaccines on made-up grounds is a public health threat in its own right, and Democrats must speak and act based on this fact: first and foremost, for calling out Republican politicians who engage in anti-scientific and anti-public health rhetoric, and who promote such policies. Republican politicians are in a vulnerable position, in that what’s popular or acceptable within their own coalition is rightly seen as simply crazy by the rest of the country. Democrats need to exploit this element of Republican extremism, and implicate the larger GOP in the insanity of its anti-vaxx elements.
Among other things, no Democrat talking about vaccination efforts should ever fail to remind listeners of the hideous differential between Democratic- and Republican-leaning counties in covid deaths. It should be a basic talking point that the GOP is pursuing policies and encouraging ideas that are killing its own voters. The purpose of this, apart from communicating the truth, is to pry apart GOP voters from the politicians who have betrayed them. Equally importantly, it would serve as a wake-up call to disaffected Democrats unnerved by high inflation and perceptions that Joe Biden hasn’t been able to deliver on his most ambitious campaign promises: if the GOP returns to power, the country risks seeing the death rates of red counties sweeping the whole nation.
One might argue that there’s no reason for a shift in Democratic strategy, given that the omicron wave is peaking and the possibility that we may be through the worst of the pandemic. But this is not just a fight over the present state of things: it’s both a fight over the past, and over how we set ourselves up for the future. Even if the omicron variant ends up being the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, we can’t allow the GOP to re-write history in a way that assigns blame for these horrific death tolls on the Democrats. Likewise, given the very real possibility of an equally bad or even worse variant in the future, Democrats have every incentive to defend public health policy that emphasizes the importance of measures like vaccination and masking as basic tools for fighting this and similar pandemics. Ultimately, this goes far beyond pandemic preparation, to a very real fight over what sort of country we want to be: one in which everyone does their part to advance the public good, or one in which each person is valorized for acting in the most selfish ways possible, whether it’s refusing life-saving vaccines or harassing public health officials for doing their jobs. Democrats need to come to grips with the fact that this is not just one more random “culture war” fight, but a struggle essential to the continued health and prosperity of the country far into the future.