When a threat to all humans exists, it would seem irrational for a political party to politicize the matter. But this does happen. One reason is that while it seems Americans are extremely polarized; this is often more appearance than reality. While Americans do disagree strongly on certain limited issues, there is considerable consensus about many issues. Because of this, there is often a need to manufacture conflict in which political points can be scored. Since a threat generates considerable emotional responses it can be ideal for politization—a party can tap into the emotions and manipulate them to its advantage. There are also cases in which taking a threat seriously is seen as contrary to the interests of the influential and they work hard to politicize the matter. If they succeed, they can recruit voters to their side and get them to support policies that put them in danger. Thus, a political party can have two excellent reasons to politicize a threat to everyone: to score political points and serve the interests of those who benefit from allowing the threat to remain unaddressed.
Politicization can be extremely effective at engaging emotions and disengaging reasoning. There are numerous fallacies (such as group think) and cognitive biases (such as in group bias) that feed and are fed by ideology. If you have strong ideological views you were almost certainly thinking of examples of how those you do not like have engaged in the behavior described above—or similar behavior. For example, if you are liberal, then you are likely to have thought of the Republican politicization of climate change. If you are a conservative, you might have been thinking about the sins of the Democrats. If so, then you can see how effectively conflict can be created along party lines.
The COVID-19 virus presents a clear threat to everyone, but it quickly became politicized. Initially the Trump administration downplayed the virus and accused the Democrats of using it to attack Trump. While the administration eventually accepted it as a real threat, the idea that is a hoax aimed at hurting Trump persists. There were certainly some perceived short-term advantages to politicizing the virus—to keep the markets calm through ignorance, to allow business to continue as usual and to hope that the virus would not arrive until after the 2020 election. Political points could also be scored against the Democrats by accusing them of making up a virus threat to hurt Trump and to buffer Trump against accusations of incompetence—he would have solved the problem but for the hateful Democrats.
From the Republican perspective, the Democrats were the villains—doing all that they are accused of in order to harm Trump and impede his efforts. On their view, it was the Democrats who were manufacturing the conflict; first by creating a virus hoax and then by interfering with Trump’s efforts to address the very real virus. It could certainly be argued that the Democrats will exploit Trump’s failings to help them in the 2020 election and this is politicizing the threat to score political points. How one sees this matter will, obviously, tend to shake out along ideological lines—thus politicizing the issue of politicization.
While, as noted above, political points can be scored by politicizing an objective threat this has negative consequences. The most obvious is that time and resources are spent fighting each other rather than uniting against a threat to all of us. Another consequence is that manufacturing a conflict requires that one (or both) sides are engaged in misinformation, thus misleading people and this can have enduring consequences. In the case of the virus, while Fox News and the White House have shifted their position to match reality, the groundwork they laid early on still serves as a foundation for the enduring view that the virus is either a hoax or not very serious.
Some Republicans will certainly want to blame the Democrats; a common narrative is that their impeachment efforts are partially to blame for the virus crisis. As would be expected, one’s ideological lens determines how one sees this matter: Trump and Fox News as the villains who politicized the virus or the Democrats as the villains who distracted Trump from the virus.
There are three solutions. The first is that politicians need to exercise both judgment and restraint before engaging in politization of a crisis. The obvious problem is that politization can be advantageous and it is one of the stock tools of a politician. As such, getting politicians to use good judgment and exercise restraint will be challenging. The second solution is that voters can decide to support candidates who are more likely to exercise such judgment and restraint. Third, voters also decide how they respond. If they resisted efforts to politicize crisis that should be non-partisan, then the efforts of politicians to do so would be far less likely to succeed.
One clear concern is that the charge of politization can be used, ironically, to politicize and issue and to try to silence legitimate criticism. For example, the facts show that Trump’s initial handling of the crisis was terrible and that he was engaged in willfully or from ignorance making untrue claims about the virus and the situation. As such, the legitimate criticisms aimed at these problems could be non-political. But if the critics happen to be Democrats or liberals, then they could be accused of politicizing the matter because they are being critical. To address this problem, critics should endeavor to focus on the facts and try to steer clear of what might appear to be overtly political. This will certainly be challenging, since the other side is almost never going to accept even legitimate and fair criticism and will instead try to cast even such criticism as unfair politicization. As such, the manufactured polarization in the United States that has served the parties so well has done considerable damage to America. As should be expected. Unless we address this, new crises are likely to involve the same problems as the COVID-19 crisis.
I actually laughed when I got to “One clear concern is that the charge of politization can be used, ironically, to politicize and issue and to try to silence legitimate criticism. For example, the facts show that Trump’s initial handling of the crisis was terrible”. Well, chuckled, at least.
I had raised my eyebrows at your earlier link to the WaPo story curring favour with their readers by supplying the feel-superior thrill of mocking the dumbness of Trump-voting deplorables – and don’t deny that was the subtext – but this, as the punch line to an essay condemning politicization, struck me as outright funny.
As always with Trump, you can’t take him literally. Yes, we know you don’t like that.
I don’t excuse Trump’s “What, me worry?” language in the early days, but his actual actions seem to have followed expert recommendations.
If you think his actions were terrible, you might consider listing the terrible actions, and comparing them to the actions of other national leaders. Start with Xi Jinping.
Note reactions from the media, etc. to Trump’s early travel ban with China regarding this virus:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386444.php
Trump acted before the states did. And most of the impacts, good or bad, will come from the states. Did Cuomo act terribly?
The political reaction is largely due to the reaction in media and from pundits. Politicians have no choice, now. Well, except that I still think shutting down the economies of entire states is a very bad idea. Nobody has adequately explained to me the reason for the difference in the reaction to this pandemic when compared to the several I’ve lived through. If this ends up being classified by historians as an overreaction, which side “politicized” this?
Flights from China should have been stopped months ago. Trump wanted to do this. The media freaked. No matter what Trump does, his opponents will find a problem (remember my aesthetics hypothesis).
A fundamental characteristic of leftism is chronic politicization of all things.
And maybe, just maybe, the overreaction was how things were handled terribly. This is quite possibly the worst economic damage done to our system in such a short time, ever. It’s quite possible none of us will know people who die from COVID 19, just as most people don’t know anyone who’s died from car accidents (there were 700 US deaths last week from car accidents). I already know people who’ve lost their jobs.
This brings up an interesting point though. I thought that normally I would be on the side of those who are promoting shutting down society over this. One reason that I’m not is because I literally feel zero fear for my own safety as far as COVID goes. How is the government making older people more safe? Wouldn’t the older people choose to stay away from potential infection once the word is out? No government action is preventing those same people now from meeting with potentially infected people. So how is this protecting older, sick people? It seems that suggestions could have worked, without forcing restaurants to close.
I have been in several life-threatening situations. It could be argued that I’m desensitized to danger. Or it could be argued that I have a fair instinct for what real danger feels like.
The central argument seems to be this: Things COULD be really bad and given the extent of the potential, we must act appropriately since risk assessments not only factor likelihoods, but the intensity of the risk. In this case though, what is the biggest risk? Economic devastation or COVID? We will likely lose 30 percent of our GDP. That is certain. We had nearly three months to watch CV19 and we saw it was retracting. Maybe this was because of China’s draconian response, or maybe it was because these things have a known arc. A draconian response did not help in Italy.
Someone who makes this exact argument is Nassim Taleb, a person who’s influenced my thinking a lot in the past. And he’s saying the opposite thing that I am. I cannot help but notice however how many times he’s been wrong on big issues. Another time was when he denounced that US strikes against the Assad regime in 2018 for using chemical weapons against Syrian rebels, essentially saying that it would result in WW3 and then writing long papers to prove that Assad did not use chemicals (something I know from my job to be wrong). Then regarding CV19, Taleb wrote long posts calling Ioannidis an “idiot” and a “shill for Monsanto”. I’ve noticed Taleb’s patterns: Everyone who disagrees with him is an idiot and a shill for Monsanto. Thing is, I already knew what Taleb would say about CV19 before I looked for his opinions. I just wanted to see if there was some nuance. He recently responded to Elon Musk’s statement that the response to coronavirus is “dumb” by pretty much calling Musk an idiot.
“Note that in 2010, the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote a paper analyzing the 2009 response to H1N1. What did they say?
Despite fear and pressure, these officials avoided their more extreme options. They did not use the national Tamiflu stockpile as a preventive mechanism. They did not mandate vaccination or issue federal orders to close schools. They did not heed Congressman Eric Massa’s call to close the border with Mexico, the source of the epidemic.
They did, however, provide clear news and advice on cdc.gov and flu.gov. Both websites worked to debunk potential causes of panic and the evolving arguments of the anti-vaccine lobby: that vaccination would be mandatory; that vaccines would be untested; that vaccines cause autism or Guillain-Barré Syndrome; that H1N1 is transmitted via pork consumption; and others. According to several experts in the New York Times, the government largely defeated misinformation.”
https://www.csis.org/blogs/smart-global-health/h1n1-influenza-and-us-response-looking-back-2009
So, the response was essentially the opposite of what is happening now and was considered an adequate and well reasoned response. Trump’s initial statements were intended to prevent panic, to point out that yes, there is politicization of the issue. He was right to do this.
I do not agree with acting just because things could be bad, unless those actions have a minimally negative consequence. Taleb always says “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. In other words, he things we should minimize positivist empiricism because, well WHO KNOWS WHAT COULD HAPPEN! Is this really the way we live? Do we not cross streets based on what our senses tell us? Sure, we are cautious. We look both ways like mom said. But do we think to ourselves ” I may not see a car, I’d best not cross”. No, what we do see trumps what we don’t. In this case we had three months to see what happened. The result was, after the initial information was out, death rates dropped, because the primary vector to vulnerable people was through hospitals to people already on ventilators or with only a month to live.
Taleb’s philosophies work when knowledge is very limited. I would argue in this case that our knowledge is not so limited as we suppose.
I already know people who’ve lost their jobs.
Well, you (kinda) know one more now.
Damn. Sorry to hear that. Were you working as a contractor? I forget. As I remember the last time we talked about work you were writing software or code? Any promises of getting the job back when things get better?
I just started working a contract, not sure how everything will change for me. Trump is already indicating that he wants to get the economy going again post 15 day social distancing thing. Not sure what that means. Biggest thing again will be media, because the local and state governments will essentially do whatever the media tells them to do. I cannot help but detect glee in many media articles about this. Really, screw them.
Thanks. Yeah, contracting. Writing code for a major restaurant chain. Their revenues were down 88% last week. Contractors are of course first to go and being on a capital improvement project made it even more tenuous. Kinda was hoping they had enough cash to carry through and finish the project that we really hadn’t gotten much traction on, but nope. They furloughed 1/3 of their own staff so really hard to justify a contractor with all of that in play.
I was inching toward retirement. That was what I liked about this job. The work was lame/undemanding but it was contract work that I only needed through May (under normal circumstances) before making a second attempt at retirement. Or even better was hoping to WFH for them over the summer. I didn’t handle my first attempt at retirement very well several years ago, as not having real-world problems to solve drives up my anxiety factors.
What really starches my shorts was I spent the last week or so fighting the anxiety from this overplayed insanity while trying to do code. I was having a good bit of difficulty thinking more than a couple levels deep. In this god-awful code that they had, written back in 2007 or so, it was such a mess it was very hard to follow. Then things calmed down this morning and I finally kinda, almost had this new feature implemented, got stuck, got a clue from the lead on some ugly configuration nightmare, and was looking forward to finishing it up after lunch or maybe tomorrow. Then I got the call from the project manager.
If the economy comes back online by mid summer, I’m not terribly concerned. But I had promised my wife we’d be able to get into quasi-retirement mode this summer. I had previously promised to do so by last summer but the job I had just before that (which still owes me $30K) fell apart so i had to take this one. On the good-ish side that company booted the previous president and I spoke with the new CEO yesterday. He seemed like a smart guy (a Doctor something scientific…I think math) and we had a good conversation. I feel a little better that I might get paid. I sensed his guilt factor (he had been a rather quiet board member who trusted the president too much) might enable me to hit him up for some sort of work. I’m mulling how to approach that. I’m not crazy about getting into seriously hard comp sci stuff anymore (don’t tell anyone…heh). I’m dreaming that he might be able to hook me up in some analytic capacity. But crap like that never seems to fall into my lap so easily. I always gotta work it, work it, work it.
I think it depends where you live. I moved to the DC area because I got calls from contract recruiters for work. This place is nuts with job opportunities. I went to Kuwait for 5 months and when I got back I met Amazon CEO-types at happy hour. Our conversation ended with job offers even though I’d already signed onto other jobs. When I was in Florida I had a lot of problems finding work. I’ve never had job offers like I’ve had here.
I work as an analyst now for a three letter agency, but as a contractor I know the trickle-down is always possible. Feel a bit guilty about any security have too, given that people who provide food are out of work. I worry about the self-licking ice cream cone that is federal employment. I think it’s why this economic thing bothers me so much.
I’m sorry to hear that.WTP.. I hope you find a spot when the restrictions lift. I hope we all come back to normalcy quickly when the restrictions lift.
Thanks. I’ll be OK so long as everyone else maintains so degree of sanity…heh. If we can all get back to work in some reasonable timeframe. And if they would lift some restrictions on access to 401k or IRA money I would be fine. I was probably more strategically prepared for a situation like this than most, it’s just the limitations on what money can be pulled and/or transferred from where that have me in a cashflow bind. That and healthcare…and having to spend $17K on a new roof that I gotta come up with $14K on before August. But besides all that, ole Mrs. Lincoln (if you know the old joke about the play) here will be fine. It’s just the stress of uncertainty and watching people freak out that worry me the most.
As for Magus’s concerns, I think there are still jobs available here in central Florida. I think you were up in the panhandle area or Tally, yes? The big problem with the job market down here will be with the tourists industry and the lower wage workers. Not that things will be great overall. The impact to the restaurant business is what took me out but fortunately my skills are across many industries. My concern is that old age is starting to slow my thinking a tad and also slow the speed at which I pick up new things. Long term, as far as doing the actual work, it doesn’t concern me. But getting through an interview may be an issue, especially as fast as technology changes and the naive emphasis that people in this industry put on the latest tech vs. the broader skill sets of experience.
Added… I was looking for work back when the 2016 election happened. After a few weeks of so-so responses, the week after that election I had at least one job interview every day.
These problems will be solved in the future, in decentralized ways. The old models to a large degree no longer apply. In the past, information travelled slowly, as did people. This made the outbreaks probably less likely to happen, but more deadly when they did. The opposite is true now. China’s clamp down on information did irreparable damage, because even the hospitals could not learn quickly enough of the disease’s existence. The Chinese government actually arrested people for mentioning sick people that they knew of or that they themselves were ill.
Governments will not solve this so much as individuals and smaller organizations. Government solutions must be the sledge hammer for the fly. The best role of the government will be in regards to publishing up-to-date studies and offering suggestions, and also providing medical supplies as needed as Washington is now doing. And also keeping the population calm.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-outbreak-how-it-spread-nationwide-from-washington-state-nursing-home/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in&utm_term=first
The Coronavirus Task Force was created on January 29.
What were the Dems doing on January 29? Impeachment, of course.
Was there even one Dem who suggested that impeachment be postponed so the president could focus on Corona? Of course not.
They were also busy politicizing Soleimani’s death.
The numbers do not support that the US acted “terribly”, aside from the economy. We have the lowest death rate next to S Korea. Canada was still traveling to China like three weeks ago.