Yes, we should ‘politicize’ the pandemic
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 30, 2020 at 1:07 p.m. CST
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 Trump and the entire party. Like
Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.):
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 over 338,000 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. For instance, labor unions politicize workers in the best way, by
helping them understand their individual experiences in a broader context. That
helps them see the connections between themselves and others in ways that
empower them to create positive change. That, in turn, is why conservatives are
so threatened by unions and so determined to destroy them; the last thing they
want is workers who see the political implications of their own situation.
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.