The phrase “personal responsibility” has long been a dog whistle. Those invoking it assume the mantle of righteousness to imply that those to whom they direct the phrase are — let’s be blunt — lower caste, untouchables. Irresponsibles. Not real Americans. Other. To be really blunt: black.
It is a hypocritical lie, of course. As in personal responsibility for thee but not for me. Along the lines of socialism for the rich and bootstraps, rugged individualism for the rest. Permissiveness for the ruling class and its friends and harsh rules for lessers.
In examining our failure to control the coronavirus Paul Krugman examines the vehemence with which Republicans defend the right to ignore science and restrictions on personal behavior in service to the greater good. Particularly, the fury with which the right resists wearing masks:
You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.
Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual. I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for light bulbs. It’s the principle of the thing: Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.
This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.
Republicans angrily insist they will not extend temporary unemployment assistance again even to keep consumer spending (and the economy) from collapsing further. “Aiding the unemployed, even if their joblessness isn’t their own fault, is a tacit admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens,” Krugman writes. “And that’s an admission the right doesn’t want to make.”
You can spot people who are serious about wanting the economy to recover faster. They are wearing masks. The others are the ones behaving irresponsibly, throwing tantrums, and claiming bogus exemptions, even selling them online.
Stuart Stevens, author of “It Was All a Lie,” saw the warnings of where his Republican party was heading and ignored them, choosing to believe what he preferred to believe. It is now the party of Trump, the man of 20,000 lies and 150,000 dead Americans:
How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. What others and I thought were bedrock values turned out to be mere marketing slogans easily replaced.
Stevens writes, “A party rooted in decency and values does not embrace the anger that Mr. Trump peddles as patriotism.” Yet, Republicans long ago became the party of a Southern Strategy built upon white grievance. And the South embraced and nurtured the big lie half a century before “Mein Kampf.” That American big lie is The Lost Cause.
Bennett Minton reviews in the Washington Post how Virginians used textbooks to inculcate in its schoolchildren the view that the War of Northern Aggression had been unjust. That slaves loved their masters and were well-treated. Historian Francis Simkins explained that slavery was “an educational process which transformed the black man from a primitive to a civilized person endowed with conceits, customs, industrial skills, Christian beliefs, and ideals, of the Anglo-Saxon of North America.”
Even now, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) argues against teaching a less propagandistic version of history. He has introduced a bill to prevent federal funds for teaching a history that views slavery as anything other than “the necessary evil upon which the union was built.”
Norman Eisen, impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, writes of the moment he realized just how corrupt the Republican defense of Donald Trump would be. His attorneys told the U.S. Senate, “In the Judiciary Committee . . . there were no rights for the president.” They claimed the president had been denied due process. It was a lie. In fact, Trump had stonewalled.
Eisen continues:
That was the moment I realized how dangerously deep the Trump rot went: The president’s lawyers could have defended him capably without stooping to this. Lawyers are not in place to repeat the excesses of their clients. And yet Trump had managed to finagle his team into an alarming display of mimicry. Falsehood was his stock in trade, and they were enthusiastic franchisees. Worse, the GOP-controlled Senate was all too ready to accept it.
People who live a lie, teach lies, and defend lies, find it very easy to lie.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.