Science, Politics and Freedom

The coronavirus has already caused more than 45,000 deaths in the United States. This is just the beginning, Donald Trump announced in one of his many public appearances. According to a university’s mathematical modeling, the United States could end up suffering 200,000 deaths from the pandemic. If I have succeeded in properly understanding the logic of the brutal gringo president, that reference point would permit him to say that he has done a magnificent job, as long as he does not exceed that figure.

This shows that Trump is perfectly capable of using science and experts effectively, and of boasting about his country’s equipment production. (“We tested far more than anybody else.”) At the same time, he is intimately linked with political movements that repudiate science, in essence, for the same reasons they reject every hint of state regulation. Such a convergence could be seen in the colorful demonstrations against the lockdown, supported more or less openly by Trump and carried out mostly by angry white people, some of them carrying rifles. The protests focused on rejecting restrictions of their “freedoms” and a heated demand to restore their civil rights. It is impossible to forget the image of a woman shouting at a health care provider trying to defend social distancing that if she liked communism so much, she should go to China.

Some of them also carried signs that inevitably evoked a sordid and terrifying past: “Sacrifice the weak.” No, this is not some fringe eccentric behavior. Do you remember the governor of Texas saying not long ago that old people have to sacrifice themselves so the economy could function?* And although his remarks were, typically, made in a festival atmosphere – hundreds of people immediately went on social media to remind him that he himself is not a youngster – they still constitute a sort of normalization of the logic of eliminating inconvenient people. We know, regrettably, that there are generally consequences resulting from actions like this.

Here, however, with respect to sad 20th century experiences, there is as much continuity as change. The right has whipped up anti-confinement demonstrations in the United States with support from religious groups and television and radio networks. With this, the right is sticking to an agenda that is individualist, traditionalist and protective of the Constitution; this is something quite different from the flag-waving by fascists and Nazis in their time. Their points of reference are the right to have their religion, to cultivate their own beliefs and express them publicly, and to bear arms (the noted Second Amendment), all without government interference. Their public rhetoric is one of defense of rights and of the plurality of wisdom in the public space. It has been and is still being asked, who are you to impose your conviction that Darwinism is the only appropriate theory to explain the evolution of species? Do I not have the right to educate my children about other equally acceptable beliefs? Why the hell do I have to believe the experts, if I also have a respectable opinion?

Some years before Trump arrived on the political scene, there was a force already at work that had acquired enormous power in the Republican Party, the tea party, whose name is purportedly a reference to the founding principles of the United States. Trump had no chance of being nominated without its support. But in addition, it is in large part by drawing on that tea party rhetoric that he has been able to construct a new politics of truth, whose greatest and, it must be said, most brilliant exponent is his presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway. (Remember? Trump does not lie; he just refers to alternative facts.)

Such craziness kills. We are already seeing it in the catastrophe unfolding in the United States. The drift toward authoritarianism and a libertarianism that is extremist and exclusivist (and sometimes both together) threatens us.

*Translator’s note: This remark has been attributed to Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, 69.