With armed protesters storming the gallery in the Michigan state legislature, the insurgency against state-mandated stay-at-home orders to contain the spread of Covid-19 became an active threat to public safety. Nevertheless, media portrayals of this spate of protests have consistently downplayed their ideological character—making them appear as more or less spontaneous outpourings of popular frustration over home-confinement directives and their economic fallout.
But as New Republic contributor Joe Lowndes argues, the scattered agitations to reopen America have followed a familiar script of white grievance politics going back to the initial Tea Party uprisings of 2010. Like those protests, the state actions against stay-at-home orders have been funded by large donors on the right like the Koch and DeVos families. And just as the Tea Party galvanized a body of racialized protest over the expansion of federal power into the health care sector under the aegis of a black president, so does the present set of demonstrations seek to dramatize the declining life prospects for many white Americans in the face of an impersonal global pandemic now made to resemble a power grab engineered by a sinister liberal state. The result is a grim formula that effectively transforms the larger forces that have sidelined many working Americans into the talismanic assertion of white freedom and self-determination—even at the cost of death.
“A sense of the declining status of whiteness appears tightly connected to collective self-harm,” Lowndes observes:
It is difficult not to think about this while watching mostly middle-aged white protesters demand the right to sacrifice their lives instead of joining others to demand greater protections for frontline workers, increased payments to keep workers at home, rent and mortgage moratoria, debt cancellation, federal money for states and municipalities, and more.
Demands to reopen states provide great cover for the Trump administration, the Republican Party in Congress, red state governors, and the Federal Reserve, who are working to keep current wealth stratifications in place and protect the rich from economic harm—and doing so without much pushback from Democrats. As conditions become more dire, the right will do all it can to enlist the loyalty of middle- and working-class victims of the crisis. Here, the logics of race and nation will become increasingly important.
And sure enough, leading figures in the Trump administration and the Trump-enabling mediasphere are falling in line with these prime directives. Protesters and pundits alike have sought to paint the stay-at-home orders now in force in many states as a deeply suspect misapplication of urban (i.e., nonwhite and immigrant) containment measures to a frontier-style white homeland. “This kind of rhetoric maps easily onto the growing political divides between rural and urban America,” Lowndes writes, “and beneath it, the racial demonization of black and brown denizens of cities. It is this sentiment that gives cover to Republican resistance to federal spending when couched in language like Mitch McConnell’s opposition to ‘blue state bailouts.’”
The rhetoric of the imperiled nation fuses naturally with such bigoted talk—a point that Attorney General William Barr made abundantly plain during a guest spot on Laura Ingraham’s reliably xenophobic Fox News show. Barr explained that he “felt for a long time—as much as people talk about global warming—that the real threat to human beings is microbes and being able to control disease, and that starts with controlling your border. So, I think people will be attuned to more protective measures.”
The big problem with this rhetorical deflection—apart from its vicious racist equation of foreigners with a microbial infection—is that in real life, borders and culture-war grievances make zero difference to a lethal virus. So by violating social distancing guidelines and appearing in public spaces unmasked, these legatees of the Tea Party are in effect demanding to be granted both liberty and death. The flouting of these basic public health safeguards is “meant as a tough-guy taunt,” Lowndes writes, “to show their own robustness and the weakness of their opponents. But it also reveals something more pathological. The risky behavior demonstrates vitality precisely because it tempts fate, suggestive of Freud’s death drive, which he described as a force ‘whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death.’” Such are the morbid dynamics that animate today’s conservative movement—and they are the principal reason that Michigan’s armed protesters may yet be posing the greatest threat to their own well-being.
—Chris Lehmann, Editor |
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