The GOP was built to fail on coronavirus.
One of the most striking elements of the coronavirus crisis is how easily the response has been folded into America’s partisan culture war. From the earliest days of the outbreak, Republicans in Congress, party-aligned media, and voters have tended to play down the pandemic and treat the push for social distancing skeptically — while also positing nefarious motives for liberals and public officials who take opposite positions. There are exceptions, like Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio and Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, but corona-skepticism and hyper-partisanship has been more much the rule.
The Trump administration was infamously slow to embrace distancing and conduct widespread testing; even now, President Donald Trump is privately pushing to rapidly reopen the country starting May 1…
Conservative media has cast Democratic governors who have imposed distancing as authoritarians, pitting allegedly authentic Americans who want to reopen the country against out-of-touch liberal elites who don’t care about the lockdown’s economic consequences.
It is, of course, desperately important to establish a sense of shared reality and responsibility here. You need a cross-elite consensus on coronavirus, not only to swiftly pass essential legislation like more expansive forms of stimulus, but also to make sure the entire citizenry actually follows public health best practices in their daily lives. The more Republicans and allied media treat the coronavirus as a partisan issue, the harder those things will become.
How did the coronavirus become folded into the culture war in such a harmful way? One of the best explanations I’ve seen comes from David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College. The GOP, Hopkins writes on his personal blog, is failing on coronavirus not by accident — but because the party was built in a way that produced failure.
“The contemporary Republican Party has been built to wage ideological and partisan conflict more than to manage the government or solve specific social problems,” Hopkins writes….
Read the full analysis on Vox.com here: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/16/21223600/hyper-partisanship-republicans-coronavirus-trump-hopkins
