Cotton in the vanguard

Politico broke a story last week about a 57-page memo from the Republican National Committee distributed to Republican candidates nationwide and advising them to run against China.

“Don’t defend [President Donald] Trump other than the Chinese travel ban—attack China,” the memo urged.

Call Joe Biden “soft on China” and throw Democrats in with him, it said.

So, on a video podcast Monday, Roby Brock of Talk Business and Politics invoked that memo and asked if I thought our U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton was merely a practitioner of that tactical politics or distinctive in the principled vanguard of its design.

Without much hesitation, I put Cotton in the principled vanguard.

He was well out front—first, so far as I know—in calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus.” He was first in advancing unsubstantiated allegations that China either created and released the virus or incompetently let it float out of a lab or otherwise failed in ways both negligent and sinister to tell the world the truth about all the havoc it had wreaked in the originating country.

Cotton can always be counted on to rise from seeming personal principle to embrace the simpleton narrative of 1950s-1960s American television vintage.

And that simpleton narrative is that America is Marshal Matt Dillon or Ben Cartwright and the rest of the world is the hideous villain seeking to do harm in this week’s episode to the citadels of virtue that were Dodge City and the Ponderosa.

Cotton’s worldview is simply American. His sense of right and wrong is geographic. He is from Yell County, and Yell County is virtue. I would call him the male Mattie Ross except that I tend to think Mattie could see nuance and subtlety as well as grit.

Thank goodness Cotton did not get hatched in a bad country.

The fact is that America is almost always right in concept. As an ideal, the U.S. is unparalleled.

And it is right far more often than not in practice. But it is not uniformly so. Marshal Dillon could make mistakes. Pa Cartwright had at least one flaw, surely. Introspection has its place, or ought to in a moral country.

Rival nations need not be pre-emptively condemned on the basis that a virus never would have infected American innocence if it had not been foisted by foreign evil.

By “pre-emptively,” I mean before we have joined with allies and world organizations to dig as deep as we can into facts as to what happened and whether truths or lies were told.

All Cotton knows for sure is that the Chinese are totalitarian communists and we’re not.

Now he is saying their smart graduate students should not be allowed to come to our superior country and milk our great institutions of higher learning for science, math and technology with which to go back home and plot sophisticated harm against us.

There must be retribution, Cotton says, even before he knows specifically for what.

He may be entirely correct. It may be that China either bungled or weaponized a virus and then conspired with the World Health Organization to downplay its human menace so that it would be freed to do maximum harm on New York City’s wide and jampacked sidewalks.

But a great country like the United States ought to investigate that before alleging it. It ought to extend the due process to others it reserves for itself. It ought to bring along its allies, European and otherwise, to seek facts in pursuit of responsibility and accountability.

Then it should share with others the imposition of sanctions if they are called for.

But to go on Fox News on Sunday and assign wholesale blame while saying Chinese college students in America ought to be limited to studies of Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers … that is a little, shall we say, premature.

Blaming China is not going to keep any American from getting sick, or restore our economy, or administer a single virus test.

But Cotton’s politics are probably in another vanguard. The world is likely to become a more isolated and suspicious place post-virus, with people turning more chauvinistic toward their geographic location and more distrustful of persons inhabiting other geography.

I think that what Cotton is saying is certainly good politics for a future Republican presidential primary. It is so good that the RNC is sending it out in how-to form.

And it is ideal politics for the contemporary provincial resentments of Arkansas.

Someone asked on social media Sunday how a state could move in 60 years from a senator like J. William Fulbright introducing the bill for an international studies program to one like Cotton fretting about the Chinese getting smart in our colleges.

The answer is that Arkansas is the same, but with Fox and the Internet now.

You let old J. William try to spend taxpayer money to send college graduates to Pakistan now. That “Just Plain Bill” brand he would drag out for re-election every six years wouldn’t get him safely across the state line now.