The Partisan Pandemic

There’s nothing like a crisis to bring out in bold relief the differences between left and right. The coronavirus bailout passed by Congress and signed into law just a couple of days ago presented a facade of cooperation between Democrats and Republicans: the bill passed the Senate 96 to 0. But I have been struck by how differently the two parties have approached their responsibilities to Americans and America in this unprecedented medical and economic disaster. There has been nearly blindered media focus on Trump and the lying incompetence with which he has proposed one bad idea after another, while not doing what everyone thinks should be done, then bragging about it. It’s worth looking beyond him to the political struggles across the country to save lives and win votes.

It’s important to see that the coronavirus has affected Democratic states much more heavily than Republican states thus far, because Democrats control urban states where the virus struck earlier and more rapidly. That partially explains the partisan differences in response to the pandemic at the level of state governments. The first states to issue statewide stay-at-home orders were California (March 19), Illinois (March 21), New Jersey (March 21), and New York (March 22), all states with Democratic governments and large urban populations.

The next wave of statewide orders between March 22 and March 29 included 22 states: New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Louisiana, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska. This group includes 8 states under Democratic control, 10 where the state government is mixed, and 4 Republican states.

The final group over the past couple of days includes 3 Republican states, Arizona, Kansas and Tennessee, two mixed states, North Carolina and Maryland, and one Democratic state, Virginia. Still with no statewide orders are two Democratic states, Maine and Nevada, 2 mixed states, Iowa and Pennsylvania, and 14 Republican states across the South and West. Summarizing, only 2 out of 15 Democratic states do not have statewide orders, 2 out of 14 mixed government states, but 14 out of 21 Republican states.

Within states without statewide orders, there are many counties or cities where local stay-at-home orders have been issued. Again, these tend to follow partisan differences. In heavily Republican Mississippi, the only municipality to issue a stay-at-home order was Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi, whose mayor is a Democrat. The 6 states where no jurisdiction has issued an order, as identified by the NY Times, include 4 of the states which voted most heavily for Trump in 2016.

Some people have gotten news coverage for their seeming indifference to reasonable precautions and other people’s health.  We might call them outliers on the spectrum of responses. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt faced wide criticism after he tweeted a photo of himself and his family at a crowded restaurant on March 14. The next day he declared a state of emergency for Oklahoma. Pastor Tony Spell in Baton Rouge defied the state’s orders about social distancing to hold massive services twice last week. He told a reporter that he is not concerned about his congregants contracting the virus. “The virus, we believe, is politically motivated.” Devin Nunes, Congressman from California, urged Americans to go out to eat on March 15: “it’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant.” Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, an opponent of the stimulus bill that was just passed, forced many representatives to travel to Washington to vote for it, earning even Trump’s criticism. Within the media, FOX News is an outlier, because of the lack of concern about the spreading virus broadcast by some, not all, of its stars. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Trish Regan downplayed the dangers and blamed Trump’s opponents for whipping up unnecessary “hysteria”. That is, until Trump declared a national emergency, and they changed their tune. All of these outliers are Republicans.

Meanwhile, the most politically active Democrat has been New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose daily media briefings have displayed constantly updated statistics, careful reasoning, and concern for the victims of the disease. His briefings have been broadcast live by the major news networks, making him a media star. He is exhibit A for what government can do and should do in a crisis.

The background of these widely differing political responses is the gulf between Republican and Democratic voters in their views of the pandemic. A Gallup poll in early March showed that 42% of Republicans were very or somewhat worried about the virus, versus 73% of Democrats. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll in mid-March showed that 54% of Republicans, but only 20% of Democrats thought the coronavirus threat had been blown out of proportion. The demographic groups with the greatest allegiance to Trump are the same that have taken the least precautions to prevent the spread of the virus: white males without a college education, people from small towns and rural communities.

These partisan differences reflect the circular interaction among mutually reinforcing causes: the early virulence in a few cities and the lack of cases in rural areas; the suspicion among Republicans across the country of the “elites”, the medical professionals who have provided accurate information and warnings for months; and the official Republican messaging, led by Trump, that there was nothing to worry about.

Less easy to explain is why the recent sharp reversal in Trump’s message has not led to skepticism among his supporters. After suggesting that everything would be over by Easter, Trump on Sunday said that 2.2 million people might die unless preventative measures are taken. “And so if we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000, that’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 and 200,000, we all, together, have done a very good job.” In China, there have been less than 3500 deaths. Worldwide the death toll just passed 40,000. Thus his new message is that if 200,000 Americans die, he, Trump, has “done a very good job”.

And Republicans will believe that.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

March 31, 2020

Hand-Wringing about Bernie

Now that the Democratic primary campaign is all but decided in favor of Joe Biden, the wailing of Bernie Sanders’ supporters that the whole process was fixed is hard to ignore. I don’t believe a word of it.

I have supported Bernie since I lived in Maine and he was running for Vermont’s seat in the House in the 1990s. I supported him against Hillary Clinton and I supported him again this time, even buying his book, which is very similar to one of his stump speeches. I was unexpectedly hopeful when he won Nevada, and looked like the front-runner for the nomination, a Jewish man who called himself a democratic socialist and advocated fundamental changes in our politics and economy. I didn’t think he could accomplish all that, even if he won the nomination and the Presidency, but he was pushing our national politics ever closer to my own vision of a just society.

Then came South Carolina and then Super Tuesday and the next Tuesday, and it was all over. Joe Biden won nearly everything convincingly. All the other candidates dropped out. It was not surprising that most then endorsed Biden. Elizabeth Warren, the other candidate in the “progressive lane”, did not endorse anyone, perhaps a reflection of her spat with Bernie over whether he said last year that a woman couldn’t win, which in fact turned out to be true.

Bernie himself has not yet admitted the obvious. His campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, sent me a message last week about the poor electoral results, which began, “And while our campaign has won the battle of ideas, we are losing the battle over electability to Joe Biden.” Bernie won the battle of ideas in my head, but not in the heads of a majority of voters. I don’t think that the big majorities who voted for Biden picked him because they thought he was more likely to beat Trump, but because they liked the idea of him being President more than they wanted Bernie.

The evidence about the “war of ideas” is not easy to interpret. Some of Bernie’s ideas that were decried as too radical by his more moderate competitors were surprisingly popular with Democratic voters. The exit polls on Super Tuesday by NBC News showed that majorities of Democratic primary voters in Texas (57%) and California (53%), and pluralities in North Carolina (48%) and Tennessee (47%) expressed a favorable opinion about “socialism”. Majorities of Democratic voters in 4 southern states supported Medicare for All: Mississippi (62%), Tennessee (53%), Virginia (52%), and Alabama (51%). Half of Missouri Democrats said that the economic system “needs a complete overhaul”.

That support for progressive positions did not turn into support for Bernie himself, the personification of those policies. We need much more information about what went on in voters’ minds to understand that. But the claims of Bernie supporters that the intervention of high-level Democratic operatives, such as the Democratic National Committee, working hand-in-hand with the big media networks, made sure that the less dangerous Biden won don’t convince me. There is no evidence for such a conspiracy.

Common Dreams argued before Super Tuesday that Michael Bloomberg, representing the whole crooked Democratic “establishment”, was going to buy the nomination, except he couldn’t. Change.org circulated an online petition calling on people to demand “DNC: Stop rigging the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and convention”.

I don’t think that most primary voters were influenced by possible DNC machinations, and the outcries about fixing the convention with moderate superdelegates is irrelevant. Bernie just lost to Joe in our very democratic primary process. He could not have expected his moderate competitors to endorse anyone but Biden. The voters have spoken.

I don’t know if Bernie would have done better against Trump in November. All the head-to-head polls that tried to predict the ultimate outcome are out the window, now that the coronavirus crisis changes everything.

The Sanders campaign says it will continue into the New York primary a month from now. I think Bernie should ease out of the race, now that it’s hard to have a race and the decision is already clear. I do appreciate that his campaign messaging has now shifted to urging his supporters to donate to a variety of organizations which are helping people affected by the pandemic. His campaign manager Shakir said Bernie would “continue his fight to ensure we are protecting working people, low-income people, and the most vulnerable communities, not just giant corporations and Wall Street in any response to the virus.” His campaign website offers a detailed response to the crisis. This message lists many such organizations which could use help. I hope he does that, because we need strong voices pushing our politics toward more economic and biological justice.

Bernie Sanders was always a longshot. He has shoved the national political discussion leftward and will continue to do that, but his presidential possibilities, if they ever existed, are gone. It’s time for progressives, even democratic socialists like me, to go all in for Biden. He’s not our dream, but he’s not a Trump nightmare.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

March 24, 2020

Life in Lockdown

Here in Jacksonville, we do not yet have any confirmed cases of coronavirus, but we are preparing for that certainty in the very near future. Part of that preparation means coming to an understanding of what life will be like until the virus no longer threatens us. Life in lockdown means an unprecedented shrinking of our normal activities.

We will probably not have a national lockdown. China, Italy and Spain have already declared that people should not leave their homes, except for absolutely necessary trips to buy food or medicine or visit sick relatives. But local lockdowns are spreading as quickly as the virus itself. Seven counties around San Francisco imposed “shelter-in-place”, banning all nonessential travel. California Governor Gavin Newsom suggested this might be extended to the whole state. New Jersey imposed a statewide evening curfew, and New York and Connecticut also “strongly discouraged” non-essential travel between 8 PM and 5 AM. Several New Jersey cities were in lockdown as of Monday. Whatever new rules come into play, we are contemplating a voluntary lockdown of our lives, and trying to figure out what that will mean.

No going to the movies, no meals out, no concerts or plays, no parties. Dinners with friends are probably out. Sports events are all cancelled anyway, and going to the gym is a bad idea. Classes are being cancelled across the country, from preschool to university. Work from home is being mandated by every company that can manage it. Shopping should only be for necessities, many of which are gone from the stores anyway.

What can we do? Phone friends and relatives and talk for hours about what we are not doing. Watch TV, but that will also be much more limited than before. Professional sports are gone. Shows that provide needed laughs, like Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show”, have no audiences. I expect that many normal TV shows will not be made. Movie sets will be abandoned, which means that months from now there may be no new movies.

Travel will nearly disappear, meaning hotels, airlines, taxis, train services, restaurants and every business which caters to travelers will take a hit for months. Some won’t survive. I question every impulse I have to drive somewhere local. How close will I need to get to people? Will I have to exchange things, like money? Are their door handles wiped down?

Movie ticket sales fell by nearly half this past weekend over last, meaning the worst weekend since data began to be collected in the 1980s.

Perhaps the greatest inconvenience, in my view, is the unpredictability of the end of lockdown. Shutting down our normal lives and remaining at home for a week or two is very different than for 3 months. Already a number of responsible people and institutions have signaled that we should be thinking in terms of months. Carnival's Princess Cruises are stopping for two months. The Louisiana presidential primary has been delayed for 2 months. On Monday, the NY Times quoted some experts who predicted that the crisis will not begin to abate for another 2 months, and that already seems outdated. Trump said on Monday that the outbreak might not be controlled until July or August. There apparently is a good chance that the virus might abate during the summer and then return in the fall.

By the time that normal life returns, whenever that is, it won’t be normal. Many businesses will close because they couldn’t survive weeks or months without revenue, especially small businesses, like stand-alone restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques. Home repairs will be postponed, depriving plumbers, electricians, appliance repairers of income.

I’m not complaining. We are retired. We have no responsibilities to other people that could put us in a dangerous place. Our pensions and Social Security payments arrive in our bank account.

But we can’t offer much help to our children, who are staying home with their children. We won’t be distributing money through the economy, providing incomes for others. We are enjoined to keep ourselves safe, which means to isolate ourselves from everyone else. The more self-sufficient we are, the better. The interconnected world, the global community, is disintegrating. Every country, every town, every family for themselves.

What kind of world will we come back to, when we unlock our lives?

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

March 19, 2020

Avoid Labels

I don’t like labels. Our politics and our social interactions are dominated by labels that oversimplify and essentialize, and are intentionally or unintentionally misleading. The obvious label for my thinking is “liberal”, a word and a concept that were so vilified that they became taboo. For one hundred years “liberal” was a positive word for both parties. Suddenly in 1984, in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, liberals became anti-family promoters of drug use and immorality, godless fans of big government, lovers of higher taxes and soft on crime.

The Republican Party’s 1992 platform said, “Liberal Democrats think people are the problem.”

Rather than defend themselves, Democrats ran away from the liberal label. In the Democratic primary debate of 2007, Mike Gravel rejected the word “liberal”, and Hillary Clinton noted “in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head” as a reason for her preference for “progressive”.

By then liberalism was already making a comeback. Gallup found that the proportion of Americans identifying as liberal has been increasing since 2002, from 19% to 26% in 2018. The shift happened only among Democrats, who went from 29% to 51% liberal. Republicans moved further away from liberalism, as their conservative proportion moved from 62% to 73%.

But the willingness of more Democrats to embrace the liberal label does not mean that those who learned to hate liberals since 1984 will change their minds. Hatred of liberals can be found in the comments to any liberal columnist, where liberal is often paired with left or socialist or communist, as if they were the same thing.

Even the simplest of labels elicit confused responses. At the end of 2018, 10% of Americans polled called Trump “liberal”, and 11% called him “very liberal”.

But even when a label is well understood, it reduces human diversity to a one-dimensional political spectrum. Before I became a weekly op-ed writer, I wrote a column in 2006 entitled “Why I Am a Conservative”. I began with “I believe in traditional values.” I meant to show that many ideas usually connected with conservatism were the foundation of our family practices: family meals, good manners, limitations on TV, strict behavioral rules. In so many aspects of my daily life, I am what is now called “old school”. I don’t think those ideas are uncommon among liberals, or even more common among conservatives, but label-users try to demonize their enemies by claiming values that they don’t actually practice.

The uselessness of labels has been demonstrated most forcefully by Trump’s presidency and his takeover of the Republican Party. The “traditional” values that self-proclaimed conservatives have claimed to be their special province are no longer important: morality, honesty, modesty, politeness, just as a beginning. Political values, like budget restraint or opposition to Russian aggression, have been jettisoned, too. Who would have thought a few decades ago that freedom of the press would turn out to be a liberal value?

Human personalities are much too complex for simplistic labels to do anything other than mislead, especially when everyone gets thrown into a handful of categories, like “conservative”, “moderate”, and “liberal”. We won’t get rid of labels, because they are too convenient, especially for the talking heads who seek to persuade more than explain. The best we can do is to be skeptical, too avoid assuming more than we know, to recognize that values like generosity or friendliness are disconnected from political leanings.

Words can be so helpful and so misleading.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

March 10, 2020

Walking to Work

I walked to work today, like thousands of days before. Sidewalks guided my path to my office at Illinois College. There was life in the air among the giant trees scattered throughout my neighborhood.

I didn’t see any riot police, or even any police at all. Yet I have never felt physically threatened on these daily walks, or at any time in Jacksonville, day and night. I never see crime here. There is crime, every event of policing reported dutifully by the local paper. But most of the crimes featured in local papers come from other places, sometimes faraway. Jacksonville is as peaceful and safe a human community as anywhere on earth.

There are thousands of communities like Jacksonville across our country. The general sense of danger in public that grips communities around the world, about which we see as much video as the networks can fit in, is rare in America, confined to certain neighborhoods of certain places, often cities. I do not mean to minimize the actual dangers and justified worries about danger that exist in the US, shared by males and females as victims of violent crime. The ubiquity of guns carried by private citizens makes the US a more dangerous place with a higher homicide rate than anywhere in the European Union. But the only guns I see on a daily basis are on TV.

The relative safety of our streets in world terms is a gift to be grateful for. I did nothing to deserve the security I was born into. Some people made a conscious choice to come here, mostly from places where there is much less security and social peace. Most of us can thank the luck of our birth.

In the midst of our national problems, we should see our national tranquillity as a priceless gift. We cannot take much credit for what was invented 250 years ago, fought over 160 years ago, and survived to bring us what we enjoy. The living can take important credit for breaking down the barriers that had been set up to prevent less favored, darker-skinned groups from enjoying that tranquillity, barriers we are still talking about in this election.

Our tranquillity is a privilege to be enjoyed and a treasure to protect. The words “national security” were not seen so much when I was younger. We hid under our desks to avoid the destruction of hypothetical atomic bombs, but the significance of “national security” was not blared into our living rooms every day, as we have gotten used to.

Protection of our tranquillity is an expensive and important national task. That task must be shouldered by government and must be shared by us all. We need an armed government to prevent terrorism, but only we on the ground in our communities can insure social peace. Elections stimulate public and private violence in countries across the world. We should not dismiss that possibility here; we eliminate the possibility by our determination to preserve social peace, despite political differences.

I like to walk to work so much that we sought houses within walking distance of our work. There is nothing more surprising on my walk than flowers that have just bloomed or a flock of birds overhead. I like it that way. I want to keep my neighborhood tranquil. I want all American neighborhoods to be tranquil. We won’t preserve this most precious gift by assuming we simply deserve it, chosen by God for a better fate than most other humans.

We must acknowledge our good fortune, examine its role in our society, recognize the dangers, and work collectively to preserve the tranquillity that surrounds our lives.

Peace be with you.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
March 3, 2020