Anthony Fauci is not a rebel
Hello friends,
In this week's newsletter:
(1) A blog post about the perils of making Anthony Fauci a #Resistance hero
(2) Excerpt from a piece I was invited to do for In These Times as part of a forum about "Lessons for the Left" from the 2020 primaries: To Win Elections, Should the Left Be Nicer on the Internet? (Some other contributors to the forum include David Sirota, Astra Taylor, and Philip Agnew — and there's a counterargument from Maximillian Alvarez.)
(3) Notebook: Short-form thoughts on everything from Tiger King to conspiracy theories to the impotence of white privilege talk as police killings take center stage again in America.
(4) What I'm reading
Also, if you're interested, I was briefly interviewed in the documentary "Bernie Blackout" that aired on VICE TV a couple weeks ago. You should be able to see it here. Please try not to look at my hair, which has not been cut in about 13 years.
Anthony Fauci is not a rebel
Anthony Fauci, the director of the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has emerged as an odd kind of icon of our times.
Fauci is an esteemed immunologist who has advised presidents from both parties for decades on how to handle public health issues, and he’s played a prominent role in communicating with the president and the public about the coronavirus pandemic. But he’s become much more than a scientist in recent months — he’s also become a celebrity.
Fauci has inspired online fan clubs, memes, weird fan art, and merchandise, including t-shirts, mugs, socks, bobbleheads, and prayer candles. Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom have been proudly sporting “Fauci gang” t-shirts. After Fauci quipped to a reporter that Brad Pitt should play him on Saturday Night Live, the show made it happen — and Pitt ended his impersonation with a very sincere expression of gratitude to the scientist. While some hardcore Trump supporters see the man as an agent of the “deep state” set on sabotaging the president, liberal media considers him “the nation’s voice.” Fauci now has a security detail.
So why is Fauci so beloved — and why has he been so swiftly incorporated into the pantheon of heroes for #TheResistance? Mainly because he is the president’s greatest foil in the federal government’s coronavirus response. While Trump muses about injecting bleach into his veins, opening up churches, and the need to force vulnerable workers to get back on the job to make the stock market happy again, Fauci carefully and calmly explains the latest evidence on the virus and how social distancing will save lives. Moreover, Fauci dares to depart from Trump with his pronouncements and his subtle admissions that the administration has not handled the crisis adequately.
I too have admired Fauci’s careful tightrope walk, his balancing of his responsibility to dispense honest advice to the public with the need to affect deference to Trump to both comfort and game him. But I would not recommend rallying around Fauci as a hero. Or, to put it more carefully, I think that any political movement that sees him as the “nation’s voice” in response to Trump’s increasingly authoritarian project of human sacrifice is not equipped to meet this moment.
That’s because there is an asymmetry between what Trump represents and what Fauci represents.
Outwardly, Trump and Fauci are opposites because of the divide between them on epistemology, or how we know things: Fauci represents scientific expertise and know-how; Trump, and the GOP more broadly, reject scientific thinking in favor of superstition and instinct. Fauci represents the camp of people who took early warning signs seriously and argued for measures to get ahead of the problem, while Trump and his ilk downplayed the issue as a minor flu that would “go away” on its own accord — “like a miracle." While Fauci’s crowd calls for clinical trials for treatments, Trump encourages the public to self-medicate based on anecdotes, hearsay, and his own depraved fantasies.
But Trump’s derangement on coronavirus isn’t simply a function of his hostility to science and expert knowledge. It’s also animated by political, economic and moral calculations. And Fauci has no role as a counterweight on these fronts.
We’re operating in uncharted territory here — there is no precedent in the modern world for the kind of crisis we’re in. One plane of our ignorance is the virus: how to contain it, how to treat it, and how to make it go away — or at least manageable. Scientific thinking in fields like epidemiology and virology and pulmonology are important on this plane.
But this crisis is also about how the virus affects society, and for that there are other planes of ignorance — and other sets of intellectual tools. Governments around the world are forming responses to the virus’s effects based on modeling social rights (what does the state owe the people in a time of material deprivation), utilitarian ethics (what kinds of policies will minimize aggregate suffering and loss of life), economic prognostication (what kind of fiscal stimulus and monetary policy is needed to keep the economy afloat), administrative tinkering (how should fiscal stimulus be delivered), psychology (what kind of social distancing is most likely to produce widespread compliance) and so on. In other words, fields of thought outside of virus-related science.
Scientific knowledge of the novel coronavirus can inform and aid thinking in those fields, but it can offer no position on the most virtuous or most effective way to handle the dilemmas we face in them. Viewing science as a weapon and scientists as saviors may distract us from this reality.
An overwhelming majority of humanity will survive this virus. But very few will be unscathed by the consequences of its spread. And beyond learning about this virus, we as a society must also set about learning how to define freedom and rights in these new contexts. As the fight for resources intensifies, we should not trust that political and economic elites — held hostage by the interests of capital — are up to the task. The leaders worth championing are those who can call out Trump's "get back to work" agenda as not only ignorant about the virus but also identify it as a project of sacrificing certain segments of the population — and a kind of machismo posturing that allows Trump to dodge more complex questions of reviving economic activity when many people — across the political spectrum — are genuinely uneasy about getting ill.
From a left perspective, some of this is straightforward: push for policies that protect workers from mass layoffs, crippling debt, and home evictions. But coalescing behind and executing these policies is much more complicated, and there are plenty of thorny questions surrounding issues like the appropriate level of surveillance for contact-tracing. There are also huge strategic collective action questions — Fauci would likely advise against protesting in the streets during a plague, after all.
To win elections, should the left be nicer on the Internet?
Some excerpts from my article for In These Times:
"A modest proposal for the Left as it sorts through the ashes of the Democratic primary and considers how to improve its next major electoral run: Be nicer on the Internet.
In some quarters of the Left, this sentiment is considereda distraction from more substantive issues of campaigning. But the lessons of 2020 suggest that the toxic aspects of the online culture of the Left were a salient part of the political climate, and may have dampened Sanders’s ability to coalition-build with progressives outside his core base—most notably, Warren supporters—who could’ve helped defeat Joe Biden at the polls. A renewed focus on civility in the electoral sphere could expand the mass appeal of leftist thinking, and it could also have salutary effects within the Left by reminding itself what it means to foster a truly democratic culture.
...
This is not a call for the Left to be docile. Rather, it’s a case for leftists online to see themselves as surrogates for their cause, and to develop a discerning and strategic eye when it comes to being antagonistic. Rage is a real political tool, but outright vitriol should be reserved for people and organizations who deserve it most; organizing a street fight against neo-Nazis or mobilizing a strike against a brutal boss requires a different set of energies and affects than putting together the numbers for winning a national election. The US’s two-party system necessarily entails assembling coalitions, and both 2016 and 2020 show that the math is punishing to those who ignore that reality.
Do we know if online behavior played a decisive role for a substantial chunk of Warren supporters? It’s unclear. Is it possible that even without the factor of obnoxious Bernie supporters, that many of Warren’s progressive supporters would have declined to pivot to Sanders? Certainly. It is, after all, possible that her identities as a wonk or a firebrand feminist were essential to sealing the deal with some of her followers. But we know for a fact that many were intrigued by or fully behind Sanders’s policy agenda, and that those people were not systematically courted as potential allies.
On the surface, it might seem petty for a progressive to decline to back Sanders and fall in line with Biden because someone was a dick to them online, or perhaps even in person. I personally don’t think it’s nearly good enough of a reason to side with Biden’s status quo restoration agenda. But any movement that blames voters for not voting for them is never going to be a serious one. And so it's worth thinking more deeply about why some people are so bothered by rudeness and bullying online, and trying to understand what it signals to people on the outside. It seems likely that people view it as a signal that a movement is not inclusive, and inhospitable to internal debate."
Read the rest here.
Max Alvarez wrote a counterargument on this theme here.
Notebook
Miscellaneous short-form thoughts, typically posted to social media recently.
Watching Tiger Kingis like eating your pillowcase’s worth of Halloween candy in one night: excitement, a startling high, a crash, regret. What started off as a potentially riveting documentary about how the ruthless big cat trade works ends up as an obscene character study, fueled by rumors and baiting a mostly broken set of humans with excessive camera time; the animals were almost entirely off screen. I find it amazing that I learned nothing substantive about the effects of captivity on the animals, or how ethical or justifiable Carole Baskin’s set up was, or what the options are for using offspring from those cats to repopulate wild populations, and so on. I also think there was a huge missed opportunity to talk about the difference between zoos and these private parks, and the trade-offs of animal captivity. It was more or less the opposite of the documentary Blackfish. It was of course entertaining as hell, but ultimately the directors ended up carrying the torch of exploitative voyeurism that they documented in their subjects.
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Seeing so many liberal identitarians dutifully roll out rote messages about white privilege and awareness and introspection this week without a broader reckoning with the *systems* that produce these situations & what's needed to upend those systems. Guilt is not a political program.
An evolution I've seen in this scene is an increasing emphasis on how white people are complicit in what's happening. Sure. But what is the connective tissue then? It's not individual beliefs. It's systems of segregation and discrimination and material exploitation.
Cognizance of how you're a beneficiary of these systems and asking for justice for wronged individuals is a very narrow lens. There needs to be constant emphasis on changing the distribution of wealth and power embedded in our society that gives rise to these situations.
I think it's kind of telling that liberal identitarians aren't always talking about reparations, which seems like such a straightforward program to hammer home from that lens. But many who wax poetic about privilege have astonishing disinterest in the material dimension of things.
If every time a black person gets gunned down a white liberal says, "White ppl, it's time to think about ourselves!" that doesn't seem like great politics! In fact it's sort of a self-involved non-politics. How about, "White people, it's time to organize and mobilize w/ POC around goals that can create material and social equity and end nationwide segregation; form the unions and protest groups and parties needed to dismantle mass incarceration, unequal access to quality health care and housing and education and clean water and so on."
Anyway, TLDR: lean intro the struggle, not your guilt. Fighting ignorance matters, but it means nothing without a fight for power.
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I think sometimes the way "conspiracy theory" is tossed around these days ends up sounding like it's absurd to believe a small group of people could conspire to covertly do something terrible. But of course that *does* happen, and implying it doesn't misses the point.
Conspiracy theories should be shot down because they offer explanations without evidence, because they're hostile to agnosticism, because they conflate plausibility with probability, because they sew together gaps in information with a thread conjured up in the mind.
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Links to some threads on Twitter:
This one went kind of viral: Trump’s HHS Alex Azar singles out one reason to explain why the US has the most coronavirus deaths in the world — “Unfortunately the American population is ... very diverse...” (here)
Liberals have conceded the notion of "freedom" to the right over and over again, and they are doing it again on coronavirus.
What I'm reading
Art critic Jerry Saltz's memoirish essayon eating and coping mechanisms, childhood and self-control, criticism, love, cancer, and pandemics.
What’s therisk of catching coronavirusfrom a surface?
Biden and Trump campaign officials estimate undecided swing voters only make upsomewhere around 5 percentof the total electorate in 2020, a considerably smaller available slice than in the last election.
Jia Tolentino: Whatmutual aidcan do during a pandemic.
The class politics ofthe dollar system.
Why Jamelle Bouie isnot worriedabout Trump refusing to leave office.
Economic historian Adam Tooze's take onthe pandemic's consequences for the global economy.
Can journalism be saved?