Political polarization, the pandemic, and mask-wearing (1A)

This is the first post dealing with political polarization within the COVID-19 pandemic. This post focuses on the influence of right-wing populism and the fight against mask-wearing. The next post in this series fleshes out many of the themes and contexts developed in this post.

Why do many if not most Trumpists/Republicans refuse to wear masks remains for me one of the imponderable facets of the coronavirus pandemic. Wearing masks not only protects others from being infected but also, according to recent research, probably helps the wearer as well. Wearing masks in nearly costless and a minor convenience but remains a significant action that reduces the rate of infection.

This is the first of several posts focusing on the controversy over mask-wearing in the United States. .

Regarding U.S. populism, Rogers Brubaker refers to populism “as a discursive and stylistic repertoire, a set of tropes, gestures, and stances.” He focuses on “a certain way of talking, a loose complex of tropes and gestures.” Finally, his argument “reflects the distinctiveness of the American experience of the pandemic and the distinctive salience of anti-intellectualism, libertarian anti-statism, and myths of self-reliance in American culture.”

Brubaker’s paper suggests that the role of populism in mask-wearing seems paradoxical in three respects. First, populism is thriving in an environment where science and expertise seem indispensable for dealing with COVID-19. Yet populism generally mistrusts science and expertise. Second, to thrive populism usually requires or creates a sense of crisis, but populists today accuse mainstream elites and media for exaggerating, perhaps even inventing, the coronavirus. Finally, populism usually embraces protectionism but now challenges the protective enactments and rhetoric of government. Nonetheless, Brubaker believes he can explain these paradoxes and show they are more imaginary than real; they are only apparent paradoxes.

Expertise

With the advent of the pandemic expertise became very visible. Lay people and often government officials often relied on this expertise. Viewers could rarely turn on their television without seeing various kinds of health officials discussing the pandemic. But the visibility and the influence of these experts made them the targets of populist attack. Expertise is vulnerable to populist attack because it is indispensable.

To populists, most types of expertise benefits groups that are in power. Expert decisions always benefit some groups and people and inconvenience if not devastate or threaten others. In this pandemic, the influence of epidemiologists has been decisive and unprecedented. From the very beginning, the public witnessed the agreement-disagreement tussle between Trump and some members of his administration and most if not all epidemiologists and other public health experts. Over time, the antagonism shown by the administration blossomed when lockdown orders started to cause severe economic problems.

These conditions created two challenges to expertise: (1) the experiential challenge and (2) the participatory challenge.

The experiential challenge

American populists give much more credence to common sense and personal experience than to abstract theory and other distant forms of knowledge. The widespread geographical and demographic differences in the impact of the pandemic played a key role in lessening if not overriding expertise. Rural and suburban whites were much less affected by the coronavirus than urban areas, poor people, and minorities. People outside the northeast and the west coast states generally were much less affected.

Thus, by mid-May when the northeast began to get control of the coronavirus, many parts of the country had no or very little personal experience with the virus.  The pandemic did not apply to them. Brubaker describes the “them” as “the healthy heartland, the real American of locally rooted communities and virtuous, hard-working ordinary citizens.” These people were not “sites of corruption, criminality, disease, and understood as dominated by liberal cosmopolitan elites on the one hand and by racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender minorities on the other.”

Another aspect of the experimental challenge deals with the fact that epidemiological time is exponential time. A small outbreak could quickly become a disaster, which is something the health experts continually stressed. But because these early warnings were often taken seriously, many would find them self-discrediting. In other words, the lockdowns prevented projected catastrophes, which can be labeled the paradox of prevention: successful measures can be seen with hindsight as having been unnecessary. Many people overlooked the conditional aspects of the warning: if nothing is done, the virus would explode exponentially.

The participatory challenge

This challenge focuses on data in the sense that expert research, expert opinions, expert models, and projections are easily accessible. This is especially true with coronavirus expertise, research, and data. People now have a much greater ability to find new data or research that supports various positions. Sometimes it was easy to prove that the experts had gotten it wrong.

Brubaker posits that the participatory challenge rests in the cultural politics of knowledge that has made people suspicious of expert judgment and has made various forms of lay expertise more important. This lay expertise is often based fully on one’s experience. Experience to many people has become the primary way of knowing. Lay people, according to this challenge, must be responsible for choosing between competing claims.

In the early months of 2020, the public faced different definitions, descriptions, and projections regarding the coronavirus. People could easily believe different things about the virus. There was both a chronic crisis of experience and a crisis of public knowledge. The knowledge gained through experience seemed contrary to the abstract knowledge claimed by experts.

Crisis

Generally, crises provide a strong wind for populism; populists often try to create a crisis atmosphere if not an actual crisis. But here populists are accusing the mainstream media and the elites, especially public health experts, for exaggerating the coronavirus. Contrary to usual experience populists downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus. In doing so they accused the state of exploiting the virus to illegitimately expand state power by suspending people’s rights and increasing surveillance on the population.

Populists, however, may be much more interested in the economic crisis than the coronavirus crisis. One can argue that, at least in the early months of the pandemic, the people who were most affected by the economic crisis were the least affected by the pandemic. Consequently, populists moved to create a political crisis. They couched this crisis as one of “governmental overreach that trampled fundamental rights, including the right to work, the right to move in public space, the right to free exercise of religion, the right to bear arms, the right to protest, the right to privacy, and the right to not wear a mask.” This crisis also provided an opportunity for the boogaloo movement to protest coronavirus restrictions and recruit new followers.

Protection

Populism wants to protect people from globalism, open borders, and the cosmopolitan culture among other threats. Yet regarding the pandemic, the populists seem to favor openness as they challenge government overreach. Brubaker notes that early in the pandemic, “when the virus was perceived as an outside threat, conservative and far-right figures had taken the lead in pressuring Trump to ban travel from China, at a time when liberals and public health officials questioned that measure.”

Brubaker puzzles over this paradox: “The demand to restore individual liberties, in the context of emergency restrictions, is a libertarian argument; I don’t think it can plausibly be characterized as protectionist. Economic demands could be framed in protectionist terms, for example as a demand for state action to protect jobs, or to protect people from losing their health insurance or from being evicted from their homes. But this argument has not been made by anti-lockdown protesters.”

He explains the paradox by saying populism is not an ideology; it is substantively empty. Populism is defined by what it opposes: it is always anti-elite, always anti-establishment. Regarding the pandemic, populism is taking an anti-protectionist stance against the domestic protectionist regime. Populists see this protectionist regime as created and sustained by the “political, cognitive, public health, mainstream media, and professional elites. These elites – so runs the critique – have been at best inconvenienced by the regime of protection. They can work from home, and they continue to draw their salaries. They can afford the luxury of hyper-protection; they can afford to minimize the risk of contagion at the expense of everything else.”

Populists can claim that “the people” cannot afford hyper-protection. But they more emphatically claim the people do not want or need this protection. Here, Brubaker also mentions the importance of gendered imagery, which he says is often an aspect of populism: “‘The people’ are seen as tough, resilient, brave, and willing to take risks, the elite as soft, coddled, anxious, oversensitive, and risk-averse. Gender symbolism is also central to the cultural politics of masks…”
Populists also resent the moralizing and condescension of elites, who they see as “all too eager to lecture ordinary people about how they should behave and all too ready to reprimand them for their selfish heedlessness of others when they have violated social distancing guidelines. The support given by the elites’ support of police violence protests fits within this notion of unfair condescension that further undermined the credibility and authority of public health elites to populists.”

Conclusion

In sum, American right-wing populism (1) gave much more credence to experiential and personal knowledge of the coronavirus than to abstract scientific knowledge and expertise; (2) created a political crisis about government overreach that was forcing people to wear masks, a crisis that they believed worsened the economic crisis; and (3) saw government overreach as prototypical of the “nanny state” wherein the elites who were forcing personal restrictions and shaming them could much better deal with these restrictions than the common people.

Brubaker makes two points in his concluding comments. First, he makes the point that the future course of the pandemic (he wrote his paper in mid-June) is complex and unforeseeable because its future trajectory depends on many interrelated processes. These include what people believe or know about the pandemic and how they act on that knowledge. A chaotic and shifting messaging, which is embedded in a polarized media system, shapes what people believe. In sum, “decisions about modalities and timing of reopening, for their part, respond both to contested knowledge about the dynamics of the pandemic and political pressures generated by the economic crisis and filtered through the prism of hyper-polarized partisan politics.”

Second, increased infection curves will generate new claims to knowledge but these new knowledge claims “will remain deeply contested and beset with deep uncertainty. They will yield no unambiguous and uncontested guidelines for action. The crisis of expertise is likely to deepen, and with it, the political crisis over how to respond to the pandemic, especially against the horizon of an approaching election.”

Comment

I find Brubaker’s paper persuasive but believe he paid too little attention to the topic of expertise. Specifically, I think he minimizes, if not ignores, the relationship between the conservative media ecosystem (such as conservative talk radio and cable “news”) and what counts as expertise and knowledge, especially regarding the coronavirus. Related to this a more general discussion about the changing nature and influence of expertise. The next post in this short series will discuss these two topics.

Boogaloos

His concept of populism is broad and raises the question of what its boundaries are. For example, he mentions the boogaloo movement, but it is unclear if he considers this movement as part of the concept of populism he uses.

The group called boogaloo boys (or bois) itself is relatively ambiguous and not definitive. The most common characteristics of boogaloo groups involve being (1) libertarian, (2) strongly in favor of gun rights (and strongly sensitive to any gun confiscation), and (3) strongly opposed to government police forces. Many boogaloos advocate a violent civil war against the federal government and some believe in accelerating civil disorder to foment the start of a civil war. Many members appear to be active or retired members of the military. Some boogaloos are white supremacists, while others appear (or pose as) sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement. The commonality here may be antagonism toward police overreach.

The boogaloo phenomenon (many adherents say that the word “movement” much overdoes its relative lack of organization) perhaps began specifically on 4chan’s/k/forum, although the term was first used in 2012 about Obama’s reelection triggering a second civil war. They have a strong online presence and their mix of memes and humor often makes it difficult to determine their exact nature and the actions they propose.

Nonetheless, the COVID-19 restrictions have been a boon to boogaloo membership and activity; much of their membership growth has occurred in this calendar year. They have been visible, usually armed with long guns, in many protests of state/local lockdowns and other provisions that limit personal actions and preferences. Sometimes they have used these protests to make the protests more violent than they otherwise would be. At times they have offered to protect businesses that remain open despite official pronouncements for closure. To a lesser extent, they have also participated in protests of police violence.

Boogaloos are an extreme right-wing extremist group that can often become violent, especially in the western part of the country, most prominently in California, Nevada, Washington, and Texas. The pandemic has facilitated increased boogaloo membership and activity, increasing the presence and importance of an extremist right-wing group.

For illustrative information on boogaloos see here, here, here, and here.