Pence can’t avoid Trump’s virus failures
A few decades ago, the New Republic set about determining the most boring headlines ever written. The title was won by The New York Times: "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." High on the list should also be: "Instructive Vice-presidential Debate."
Yet the Kamala Harris/mike Pence confrontation was occasionally instructive, particularly on their differing approaches to the COVID -19 pandemic. Vice President Mike Pence correctly summarized their main point of disagreement: "President Trump and I trust the American people to make choices in the best interests of their health."
Conservatives are accustomed to this type of argument. Such trust is required for the normal working of an economy. Markets succeed as free people pursue their own interests. It is incumbent on sellers to please buyers, not threaten or hector them. In a capitalist system, the common good emerges without being directly willed.
This is not the end of the matter. A modern economy requires regulatory boundaries (say, to ensure clean air and water). A just society requires some provision for people who are elderly, ill or down on their luck. These are elements of the common good that involve conscious choices and political will. But in the typical, everyday course of events, trusting in the free choices of the American people is justified.
In a public health crisis, however, this is a disastrous misapplication of the ideal of freedom. Normal, expected human behavior — hugging a friend, sneezing on a bus, throwing a party, singing in a church choir — is spreading a deadly disease. Achieving the common good depends on the massive, rapid change of individual choices (mask-wearing, frequent hand-washing, social distancing ). This type of social shift requires 1) complete public confidence that it is necessary 2) a uniform message from all the commanding heights of the culture (state, church, media and public health authorities) and 3) stigma against poor choices.
I imagine that Pence, if released from his Carrie Fisher-gauge chain to Trump, would generally agree to these propositions. It is the most important fact of the 2020 election that his boss does not.
Trump has actively sabotaged an effective public health response in the United States. He has dismissed the destructiveness of the virus — "Don’t be afraid of
Covid" — in a manner that undermines public focus and urgency. His message of complacency directly contradicts responsible public health authorities. In an amazing feat of toxic masculinity, he has encouraged stigma against responsible behavior such as mask-wearing. And he has done all this for a transparently political reason: to put a still-raging pandemic behind him, like a man on fire trying the outrun the flames.
Trump takes great care to cultivate an image of strength, using all the pomp of the White House as backdrop. But the power of the images only makes him look small and ridiculous in comparison. Trump inhabits a building stricken by rampant infection, emptied of most employees all because of his own ignorance, arrogance and recklessness. He rules over an empire of empty props. He rages and dictates to the void.
A recent, unprecedented editorial from the New England Journal of Medicine puts the case against the Trump administration clearly: "The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. ... Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government, causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies."
The editorial concludes: "When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs."
This is a betrayal of public duties so grave that we have really not seen the like. Trump is sacrificing thousands of American lives that might have been saved by responsible leadership. And Pence did nothing to explain or justify Trump’s deadly choice.