Things To Come

At Politico John F. Harris muses over a “backlash” that may emerge over the “stay at home” directives. Much of the piece consists of chortling about supposed discomfiture of Rand Paul in contracting the virus but he then turns to more substantive observations:

Now that Paul has recovered—he says he felt fine and symptom-free the whole time—it is a good time to ask: Are we sure that the pandemic joke will ultimately be on him?

What if the opposite is true? Far from rendering Paul’s brand of politics irrelevant, it seems possible, even probable, that the wake of the coronavirus will be a powerful boost to the animating spirt of libertarianism: Leave me alone.

Among the questions looming over American politics is about the nature of what promise to be multiple backlashes over different dimensions of the coronavirus crisis. Most obvious is what price Trump pays for his administration’s tardiness in responding to the contagion in its early stages. Less obvious is what price supporters of activist government pay for the most astounding and disruptive intervention in the everyday life of the nation since World War II.

The imminent libertarian surge is not a sure thing but it more than a hunch. In informal conversations, one hears the sentiment even from people I know to be fundamentally progressive and inclined to defer to whatever health officials say is responsible and necessary to mitigate the worst effects of coronavirus. It is possible both to support the shutdown and powerfully resent it — the draconian nature of the response, and the widespread perception that to voice skepticism of any aspect of its necessity is outside respectable bounds.

The absolutist nature of the country’s shutdown and the economic rescue package have democratic consent—enacted by a bipartisan roster of governors and overwhelming votes in Congress—but it was the kind of consent achieved by warning would-be dissenters, Are you serious? There is no choice!

Many people concluded that for now there is nothing to do but suck it up. It won’t be surprising if some of those people eventually have an intense desire to spit out.

If so, this would be entirely consistent with the history of crises, both recent ones and more distant. Very often, after some cataclysmic external event, politics responds in ways that scramble normal divisions and create the impression—as in that recent 96-0 vote—that familiar ideological dynamics have been suspended.

Almost always, this is an illusion. Ideology hasn’t been suspended. It has been forcibly suppressed—in ways that inevitably will come roaring back, sometimes in highly toxic ways.

He then turns to a comparison I think is completely specious:

The most vivid example in American history likely was around World War II. As the world was aflame, but the United States not yet engaged in hostilities, the country was bitterly and intensely divided over the all-consuming question of that era: intervention or isolation. Then came Pearl Harbor, and the debate ended in an instant. Isolationism looked to be a defunct ideological force. Except it wasn’t really. The movement’s essential spirit—fear of corrupt and scheming interests beyond American borders—found new and malicious expression in McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

That’s basically nonsense or else he’s using an eccentric definition of “isolationism” to mean, presumably, “beliefs held by people I don’t like”. The attack on Pearl Harbor killed isolationism as a political force in the U. S. There was more than one kind of isolationism (basically Jacksonian and Jeffersonian) and all varieties have largely been silenced as a consequence of the attack. The U. S. could no longer shut itself off from the rest of the world and there was a fear that the Atlantic and Pacific could no longer protect the U. S. mainland. That and the American Civil War are the sources of our present trigger-happiness. We do not want to fight a war within our borders and have decided that the best way to prevent that is to ensure that wars that start elsewhere end elsewhere as well.

It is not isolationist to think that when a foreign power has infiltrated not just your government but many other of your institutions as well that something should be done about it. But Joe McCarthy was no libertarian and conflating him with libertarians as this article does is not constructive.

IMO the longer, the stricter, and the more hypocritical “shelter in place” directives are, the greater the chafing against them will become. The scene yesterday in Lansing, Michigan was a mild preview of what is to come.

What do I mean by “hypocritical”? Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was called out, embarrassingly, on having her hair done. She blurted out a feeble explanation of being the “face of Chicago” which I guess was better than “Suck it up, peasants” but everybody knew that’s what she meant. Police officers not following “social distancing” guidelines or facemask directives are other examples. You can’t make one set of rules for politicians and public employees and another for everybody else.

Arbitrary determinations of what are or are not essential businesses are problematic as well. Here lawn services are on the list of “essential businesses”. ‘Splain me, Lucy. Are clothing stores that sell candy bars at their sales counters essential while those that do not aren’t?

I continue to hear claims about “bending the curve” but still see that as mostly wishful thinking. Consider this graph from the Illinois Department of Public Health:

Each succeeding bar of that columnar bar chart is taller by a few than the preceding. That is not “bending the curve” and the state has had a “stay at home” directive in place for nearly a month now.

If “stay at home” directives remain in place long enough, they will inevitably disrupt the food supply chain and elected officials will have much, much more to worry about than not overloading the health care system.