How do we decide who the enemy is? At Slate, Lili Loofbourow ponders how COVID-19 the virus went from being the Them in Us vs. Them to some Americans transferring their fears onto other Americans. We are wired, I’ve argued, to identify enemies by their faces. A virus has none, so we gave it one. Or two or three: Dr. Anthony Fauci, or Big Pharma, or Democrats, or liberal authoritarians, or Bill Gates. Whatever works.
March 2020 was a truly frightening time, and the psychology of dread is not uniform. “Many Americans have a truly phobic relationship to the kind of fear that cannot be dealt with through combat,” Loofbourow writes. “It’s as if FDR’s famous admonition about fear got taken a mite too literally.” They wanted someone to blame. They needed someone to blame. With a face.
Donald Trump’s party was eager to oblige:
It was inevitable, perhaps, that these two ingredients—a drumbeat of division, and an enemy too small to make a worthy adversary—would combine to redirect those fears onto a more tangible target. Conservatives swapped out an enemy that was both hard and confusing to villainize—the virus—for one that was more readily available: Fauci. Or Biden. Or evil doctors enriching vaccine manufacturers by requiring jabs for a virus that isn’t even dangerous. (It should be noted that many safety-first Americans—mostly on the liberal side—have also transformed their fear and frustration into tribalized disdain, with the difference being that mass death was actually happening.) Trump was seeding some of this before the U.S. even had its first lockdowns. “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” he tweeted on March 9, 2020, from his now-banned account.
Covid restrictions became attacks on freedom, she continues. For many on the right, “any ideology beyond pure individualism risks succumbing to tyranny or socialism or both.”
Let’s face it: There comes a point in the post-9/11 American approach to terrorism where the “live as if the threat isn’t there” mantra fails to satisfy and escalates into a desire for revenge. They want you to be afraid, and defying them becomes an obsession that supersedes everything else—whether it lands you in the longest and most expensive war in American history or causes you to maintain, as you lay dying, that the virus killing you does not exist. Courage may mean shopping, it may mean dining in restaurants, or it may start to mean fighting those who believe in safety measures in the name of freedom.
People want somebody to blame. They need somebody to blame. Whether or not the enemy du jour is guilty of anything is beside the point. Never mind the blindfolded lady holding the scales or the “Equal justice under law” engraved on the Supreme Court building. If a real guilty person is not available for lynching, another will do.
“Does tough on crime include convicting the innocent?” asked Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island. His Republican colleagues on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee think it does, Digby pointed out on Thursday.
Republicans grilling Nina Morrison, a Biden nominee for a judgeship and former attorney with the Innocence Project, made clear their disapproval of correcting travesties of justice. Morrison, often through DNA evidence, helped free citizens wrongly convicted of violent crimes. Meaning, people in prison for crimes committed by violent criminals still loose in the community.
In a series of gotcha questions backed by faux outrage, writes Jennifer Bendery at Huffington Post, Republicans used the nomination to wage a proxy fight to accuse Democrats of being soft on crime and responsible for an increase in violence.
“Why do you keep advising radical district attorneys who let violent criminals go and result in homicide rates skyrocketing?” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas demanded, ignoring the fact that people Morrison helped release were declared innocent.
It is more important to him that 1) someone be blamed, and 2) he scores political points over it. This is an old game with judicial nominations. Justice? Injustice? Whatever scores political points.
The posturing is as naked as the emperor. They don’t just need someone to blame. They need an enemy. Any enemy will do. “As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,” they’ve got a little list.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.