House Speaker John Boehner is among those raising the fear of an Ebola outbreak in the US. (photo: Getty Images)
Party of Bad Guys outdoes itself with deplorable election strategy
16 October 14
he first transmission of Ebola within the United States, from Liberian visitor Thomas Eric Duncan to a Dallas nurse,
marked a turning point in the political dialogue surrounding the virus
toward an unbridled opportunism. The subsequent diagnosis of a second
nurse and other revelations—that she took a flight shortly before she
began showing symptoms, apparently
with Centers for Disease Control's approval—have only accelerated it.
Obviously a degree of paranoia and sensationalism has colored the Ebola
story since long before this week. But this week’s developments provided
conservatives the psychological ammunition they needed to justify using
the specter of a major Ebola outbreak as an election-year
base-mobilization strategy.
Republican candidates like Scott Brown are now in on the game, and so is House Speaker John Boehner. Fox News, with the exception of Shepard Smith,
is ginning up more Ebola terror than CNN, which had been the vanguard
of Ebola hysteria until this week. Matt Drudge’s call to panic was not
only deranged but unintentionally self-defeating, as one cannot vote if one is self-quarantined.
Engaging in the politics of fear requires a pretense.
You can find people who hype mortal danger, without a sheen of
plausibility, shouting into bullhorns on street corners. Politicians and
their enablers need persuasive stories that make the threats sound
real. And the story that many conservatives are telling about Ebola goes
something like this: We'd love to eschew hysteria, and we’d love to
believe our public health officials can break the chain of transmission
within the U.S., but the Obama administration has proven itself
untrustworthy.
“This is an episode when people want to trust the
government, people need to trust the government and they can’t,”
columnist George Will intoned on Fox News
earlier this month. “What was happening exactly 12 months ago? A
government shutdown and the disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov. Since
then we’ve had intelligence failures regarding ISIS; we’ve had the
debacle of the veterans handling of healthcare; and the Secret Service
that couldn’t lock the front door of the White House. So people think
this is a gang that can’t shoot straight.”
University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds repackaged Will’s basic argument in USA Today on Monday. Among those he cited was "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd, who added lost IRS emails, Edward Snowden's NSA disclosures, and the child-migrant crisis to the litany. Members of the media are enabling this opportunism. They should be anathematizing it.
The competence argument is appealing because it
doesn’t require dabbling in pseudoscience or xenophobia—just healthy
skepticism of our governing institutions. Moreover, I’m certain this
sort of skepticism does help explain why a large minority
of people in the U.S. feels at risk of contracting Ebola. But they are
at no great risk. That the risk is provably infinitesimal underscores
the fact that the issue with Ebola isn’t the virus itself so much as
paranoia about it.
Even if each of the failures and crises enumerated
above were as unambiguous and damning as the administration's critics
claim, it doesn’t follow that federal health officials aren’t up to the
task of controlling Ebola, or that the public at large faces any
meaningful risk. It might follow that we shouldn’t believe this season’s
Affordable Care Act enrollment period will be glitch-free, and that the
Vetrerans Affairs’s problems won’t be solved with new management alone.
The point is not that we should never draw inferences from this
administration's previous failings. But it’s a fallacy to arbitrarily
extend that second-guessing to the Ebola containment effort, while at
the same time happily taking it for granted that the vast majority of
things we entrust the government to do will continue apace.
Ebola carries a crucial mix of novelty, visibility,
and lethality that ripens it for demagogy. But conservatives have
selected a familiar line of demagogy—that you can't trust the government
to administer things and solve problems—and imposed it on to a
situation where stoking reflexive distrust of the government tugs at the
lid of a big Pandora's box.
The sad irony is that state and local institutions, so
beloved on the right, were apparently out to sea when Ebola arrived in
Dallas, and health officials there would have let things drift further
into chaos had the federal government not intruded further. Not that they've performed flawlessly,
but we need more of their expertise and involvement, not less. Texas
Governor Rick Perry—who in gentler times plays footsie with secession—is grateful for this intrusion,
and has “great faith” that their efforts will succeed. Perhaps he’ll
surprise us further by dismissing the idea that the federal officials
who’ve stepped up against Ebola shouldn't be trusted because about a
year ago, some federal healthcare website was beset by glitches.
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