I noticed an interesting contradiction in public sentiment this week that I want to explore in some depth, because it speaks at some level to just about everything preoccupying politics and American life right now—and to the tasks liberals face in the coming election.
First, the good (in apocalypse-adjusted terms) news: Americans now say the country was better off four years ago than it is today by an overwhelming margin. This is useful for Joe Biden and Democrats insofar as the answer to the question “are you better off than you were four years ago?” being “no” has perfect correlation with Jimmy Carter losing re-election in a landslide. I also see it as a measure of Trump’s true base—not the 40-45 percent he logs in approval polls, but the 30 percent of people who survey the wreckage around them and say “yep, this is good.”
The less-good news is that public opinion has not caught up with the fact that Trump is to blame for the horrific outlook most people now confront. In fact, his approval ratings on handling the economy have actually soared. No president wants to face voters in a climate like this, but we should assume that voters will be more forgiving of a president who oversees an economic calamity if they believe that the crisis was something that happened to him rather than something he is responsible for. Jimmy Carter didn’t have a global pandemic to blame.
It’s early yet, and there are certainly signs that Democrats intend to run a fairly aggressive campaign to convince voters that America's coronavirus catastrophe—not just the economic crisis, but the mass death as well—is an avoidable consequence of Trump’s personal and governing failures. But the message hasn’t been resounding or unified, and now a growing undertone of contrarianism in mainstream thought holds that blaming Trump for the horror unfolding across the United States is gauche and hysterical and maybe even unfair. Something only unseemly partisans would do.
It would be tragic if this thinking took hold more broadly. It would provide Trump the running room he needs to present himself as an unwitting victim rather than an incompetent and corrupt leader. And, in a roundabout way, it would steal valor from the overwhelming majority of Americans who have filled the leadership void with an outpouring of social solidarity and good citizenship.
There’s obviously so much we don’t understand about this coronavirus, and until we learn more, we can’t fully evaluate the totality of the U.S. response to it. It could be that we'll eventually attribute some facets of what now look like local failures to terrible luck, and some facets of what now looks like relative successes to dumb luck. It could be we’ll look back and say, “What do you know, Ron DeSantis was on to something with the sideways mask thing.” But it’s impossible to suggest that the U.S. has done only so-so in its overall response to its epidemic without torturing data. The truth is Trump’s too corrupt and incompetent to address this crisis and that's why our response—in both public-health and economic terms—has been so dismal.
We’ve probably all seen the visualizations contrasting the U.S. response to the response in South Korea, which detected its first case the very same day we did. But we don’t just look terrible compared to the single most successful coronavirus-fighting country. We look terrible in contrast with many nations. It’s fashionable among contrarians to cite European countries with high case number and death numbers to portray our failures as unremarkable. But what that really shows is countries that have failed are either notoriously incompetent and corrupt, or succumbed to temptations that have mired resourceful nations in calamity. It’s a huge indictment of the Trump administration that our response only looks ordinary relative to Spain and Italy. (Sorry, Spain and Italy.) The fact that the United Kingdom and Sweden have also done poorly doesn’t mean that failure is disconnected from quality of political institutions, only that other prosperous countries also have failed leaders. We've done far worse than the most successful nations, and are battling for worst in the anglosphere with the U.K., whose incompetent prime minister adopted a "herd immunity" plan that failed resoundingly and nearly killed him.
Amid this failure, American citizens have shown admirable resolve. They remain overwhelmingly supportive of social-distancing guidelines, even as Trump has squandered the two months we’ve bought for him—through isolation, unemployment, poverty, and loss—to implement a strategy that would allow us to return to passingly normal life. (They are pacing around and starting too many podcasts, but they are supportive.)
This is a genuinely remarkable thing. The things we do know about coronavirus only underscore how remarkable it is. It’s of course merciful that coronavirus mostly spares children. Its one-percent infection-fatality rate is high enough to unleash global chaos, but it could be five percent, and not just for the most vulnerable segments of the population. There could be fewer asymptomatic spreaders, and fewer people who only experience mild illness. But these mercies also make it much harder, socially and politically, to adopt the kind of stringent public-health practices we would adopt unthinkingly if COVID-19 killed five percent of all people equally across demographics. They are cruelly optimized to test our capacity to maintain solidarity with one another—to pit rich and poor, old and young, sick and healthy against one another.
Trump has intentionally exploited these peculiarities, and tried with some success to break the solidarity. Because if 80 percent of citizens grasp what confronts us, then his failures will become apparent to too many people and he will lose. He can only win by blaming his failures on others, by creating a sense that the humane response others agreed to engage in doomed the country to misery. But that only works if coronavirus is a thing that happened to him. It’s not. This is his fault. We should feel perfectly comfortable saying so.
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