YES, OF COURSE, WE SHOULD ‘POLITICIZE’ THE PANDEMIC

Congressman-elect Luke Letlow of Louisiana died of COVID-19 on Tuesday at only 41 years old. Although dozens of members and staff in Congress have tested positive for the virus, he is the first elected federal official to die from it.

As soon as it happened, Republicans went on the lookout for anyone “politicizing” Letlow’s death, lest it reflect poorly on President Donald Trump and the entire party.

When Vox reporter Aaron Rupar tweeted: “I mean it sincerely — Letlow’s death is tragic. It was also avoidable. It shouldn’t take tragedies for policymakers to treat the coronavirus pandemic with the seriousness it deserves.”

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas tweeted in reply:

“Sad. Leftist Vox ‘journalist’ — absent any facts whatsoever about this tragic death — immediately uses it as an excuse to push his political agenda.

“Last I checked, this infectious disease has no political party. People have tragically died in blue states and red states. #Humanity”

Hold on — now you don’t want anyone to politicize the pandemic?

Like so many people, Cruz has been politicizing everything about the pandemic all along.

To take just one example, in July Cruz predicted that if Joe Biden were to win the election, “I guarantee you the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors will say, ‘Everything’s magically better, go back to work, go back to school,’” because “they will have accomplished their task” of “destroy[ing] people’s lives and livelihoods.”

This is one of those times when insisting that something shouldn’t be political is the most political thing someone can do. We hear this argument whenever there’s some kind of event that poses a threat to GOP orthodoxy, never more than after a mass shooting. “We shouldn’t politicize this tragedy,” Republicans say, when the truth is that a moment like that, when people’s attention is focused on an issue, is exactly when we should be talking about the policy implications of what has just occurred. Just like after a hurricane is precisely when we should talk about disaster preparedness.

Whatever the details of Letlow’s illness, his was one of more than 341,000 American deaths from this pandemic, with thousands being added every day. Every infection is the result of an accumulation of choices made at the national, state, local and individual level, many of which involved politics to one degree or another.

“Politicization” isn’t a dirty word.

Politicization doesn’t have to mean partisanship, where the only goal is scoring points for your team. It can mean simply drawing that link between the individual and the collective. Letlow’s death was just as political as every COVID-19 death. Your child’s education is political, because it’s affected not only by her teachers but by political decisions made in your town, your county, your state and in D.C. Politics affects all our lives in countless ways, and it’s absurd to pretend it doesn’t.

But you can politicize issues in terrible ways too, which is just what Trump did with mask-wearing. He made masks an emblem of partisan identity, so the best way to tell liberals to go to hell was to not wear one. Cruz and others helped by characterizing public health measures as a sinister Democratic plot to take away your freedom.

That’s not the only reason the death toll in the United States has been so horrific, but it made a significant contribution. Yet the idea that no one bears responsibility for the misery and destruction the pandemic has wrought on America is essential to the Republican project. They’d like us to believe that its arrival was unforeseeable and its effects inevitable, and that no other president could have done a better job dealing with it than the one they’ve spent the last four years cheering and apologizing for, and to say otherwise is to “politicize” the disease.

But that’s just false. We aren’t the only country to have catastrophically bungled its response to the virus, but we’re one of the worst.

We could have had different leaders who made different decisions. Politics put us where we are now — including the fact that we have to wait three more weeks for a president who was elected in no small part because voters knew he’d do a better job with the pandemic.

Politics is where we come together to identify and solve problems, where we choose and then judge our leaders. And if one of those political leaders tells us not to politicize something, it’s usually because if we do it will make them look bad.