New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has taken issue with me and a few other liberals who argue that certain conservative and Republican elites have intentionally subverted recovery from the pandemic to undermine President Biden.
He argues instead that the right’s general bent on the virus “has not fundamentally changed since [Joe] Biden’s election” and asserts that assigning them malicious intent “flies in the face of nearly all the evidence we have.”
The former assertion rests on a huge historical coincidence that makes it difficult to falsify: namely that the government only authorized coronavirus vaccines in the immediate aftermath of the election, after it became clear that Donald Trump would no longer be president. The latter assertion is only true if you ignore copious evidence of sabotage.
Normally I’d let my short-form responses to his article stand on their own, but there’s more at stake in this disagreement than scorekeeping between columnists. If liberals don’t understand the contours of the right-wing elite’s value system they will be unable to anticipate conservative efforts to engineer Democratic governing failures, and their efforts to govern successfully despite that opposition will fail.
Chait’s argument rests on the very real continuity between Republican hostility to pandemic mitigation efforts under both Trump and Biden. “If Republicans had a partisan motive then, it was the belief that opening up the economy and taking the hit to public health would help President Trump,” he writes. “It seems hard to understand how they would suddenly decide the same course of action would hurt President Biden.”
This argument elides three key points, which, taken together, make it perfectly easy to understand why Republicans might take a single course of action initially with the goal of helping Trump, then with the goal hurting Biden. First, and most obviously, GOP hostility to COVID-19 mitigation likely cost them the election—that is, their calculation that encouraging COVID-19 spread to avoid economically harmful mitigation measures would redound to their political benefit was wrong. Second, Republicans didn’t have a position on vaccine promotion before this winter, because those vaccines were still undergoing clinical trials. Finally, the main difference between Trump and Biden on this score upends the Republican calculus under Trump: Biden takes the pandemic seriously and promised to crush the virus.
When you consider all of these confounding dynamics together, the appearance of GOP consistency around opposition to non-pharmaceutical interventions loses almost all of its significance.
To ascertain whether conservative leaders have encouraged COVID-19 spread to damage Biden’s presidency, you need to begin by asking whether their rhetorical and substantive bent on the vaccines would be different than it is if Trump had won. It’s in the nature of counterfactual analysis that nobody can…
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