Republicans
and Democrats, leftists and the Big Con, are indeed of one mind, and share the
same interest, in promoting the Great Panic of 2020—i.e., the idea of “The Coronavirus Pandemic” that threatens to wipe
out humanity.
I’m referring here specifically to
politicians, journalists (so-called), and commentators.
To put it quite simply, those in Big Media
are having a field day. The manufacturers and distributors of “news” are invested
in seeing to it that their livelihoods thrive. To this end, they seek to
sensationalize, as much as possible, their coverage of whatever it is they
determine to be “newsworthy.” The more extra-ordinary the
story can be made to sound to consumers of the product that Big Media sells,
the better.
From
all that is transpiring in the world, the journalists and commentators that
constitute Big Media select snippets of happenings. By marginalizing, if
not altogether ignoring, other facets of the ever constant flow of daily
goings-on, they construct or “spin” their snippets of choice into narratives
that at once satisfy the ideological and social constraints that define the
contemporary world of journalism and serve the
material and, not infrequently, political interests of their authors.
Perhaps
not so interestingly, politicians too are motivated by the same kinds of
considerations. But while journalists and commentators in Big Media are driven
by a desire for ratings, circulation, and, thus, profits, politicians,
obviously, want votes.
In America 2020, this, unfortunately, means
that politicians must be seen as men and women of action. And the more action, the better.
Both
those in Big Government and those in Big Media have collaborated in
perpetuating a certain style of politics that has been the American political orientation for quite some
time. Yet It isn’t unique to America; quite the contrary, for, in varying
degrees, depending upon place and time, it has informed the politics of
European countries since the emergence of the modern Nation-State.
Beginning in the 20th century, though, such was the success of this form in
achieving a monopoly over the politics of European peoples that it largely
banished from their collective memory political styles of other sorts.
This
style of politics whose ubiquity and dominance have rendered us oblivious to
any and all others is what the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott described
as “the Politics of Crisis.”
It is the Politics of Crisis that butters
the bread of those in both Big Media and Big Government.
“CORONAVIRUS
PANDEMIC”: Against the backdrop of blood red, these are the words on the banner
that one 24 hour cable news network features at the bottom of the television
screen—even during the commercials.
A
pandemic, mind you, refers to an infectious disease that has spread to a larger
landmass. This is clearly not an appealing thing, but the word itself,
particularly as it is being used incessantly by those in Big Media and Big
Government, is emotionally-charged. Its repeated use is not meant to be
descriptive. Rather, it is designed to conjure up in the popular
imagination thoughts of the Black Plague, say, or the Influenza Pandemic of
1918. The former, in the 14th century,
having possibly killed as many as 200 million people,
may have reduced the world’s population by over one-third.
The latter infected 500 million, or
one-third, of the population of the whole planet. Of those infected, some 50 million died. Approximately 675,000 of
these deaths occurred in the United States.
Those
in Big Media and Big Government are well aware of the fact—and it is a fact—that when most people hear the term
“pandemic,” to say nothing of when they see it in red
in large letters at the bottom of their screens, they are thinking of something
that kills massive numbers of human beings.
Your
average person is thinking of a cataclysmic scenario of the kind depicted in
pop-culture entertainment like The Walking Dead.
The
COVID-19 scare is pregnant with boundless possibilities for politicians and
media commentators to convince an all too gullible public to think that not
only are we in a crisis; we are enduring among the greatest of all existential crises, a deadly plague the likes of
which we have never encountered.
The
24 hour media coverage; declarations of States of Emergency; the government-ordered
shutdowns of private businesses; the cancellations and closings of events,
institutions, organizations; the quarantining, “social distancing,” and
“self-isolation”—the stage has been seamlessly set for what I’m convinced will
go down as perhaps the Greatest Story Ever Sold within the
recent memory of the contemporary Western political world.
Even
9/11, for all of the abuses of power to which it led, didn’t result in anything
like this abrupt and pervasive an exertion of political power or the mental conformity
among the masses to which the sensationalism over COVID-19 has given
rise.
War is the quintessential crisis. In times of war, the government
wields, and is expected by the populace to wield, power over the populace that
it couldn’t get away with exercising in peacetime.
In
wartime, the state considered as “civil association,” an association whose members conceive
themselves as individualsengaged in self-chosen pursuits, has imposed upon it a reading of
a state of a radically different sort.
Civil
association gives way to an “enterprise association.”
“Civil
association” and “enterprise association”: These are the terms that Oakeshott
used to refer to two diametrically opposed interpretations of a state.
The
associates of an enterprise association are joint-enterprisers united
in pursuit of “a common good.” Yet the
latter, it is crucial to realize, is most assuredly not a common interest in,
say, peaceful co-existence or social order, as it is with respect to civil
association.
Rather,
in an enterprise association, “the common good” is a substantive end for the sake of the realization of
which all members are expected to “sacrifice” their resources in time, energy,
and money.
Of
course, despite its incessant use by those in Big Government and their
apologists in Big Media, the term “sacrifice,” implying at it does a voluntary foregoing on the part of citizens of
their goods, is nothing of the kind: The occupiers of offices of rule—who, when
a state is conceived as an enterprise-association, style themselves “leaders”—confiscate from citizens those of their
resources that they determine are necessary
for “the common good.”
And
then, so as to obscure the coercive nature of this systematic deployment of
power, politicians instead refer to the need for “sacrifices” by those who are
being forced to be servants to the fulfillment of ends selected by “leaders.”
The
Politics of Crisis is the lifeblood of a state imagined as an enterprise
association. When the crisis is a war, it buttresses that much more the
association, for war requires wartime “leaders” who can then conscript, to a
significantly greater extent than they already conscript, the resources of the
citizenry under the pretext of “patriotism,” a sensibility still keenly felt by
most people.
Those
who resist or otherwise refuse to immediately acquiesce can be branded
“unpatriotic” or “treasonous.” As such, dissenters invite both formal
penalties as well associal ostracism, for the
treasonous are disreputable. This explains why the language of war invariably
accompanies the efforts of politicians (and their enablers) to mobilize the
citizenry for the sake of defeating some “enemy” that they’ve identified (think:
War on Poverty, War on Drugs, etc.)
President
Trump has set the tone when he declared that America is now in a war against…“The Coronavirus!” Politicians across party lines
and their Big Media accomplices have been all too ready to capitalize upon the
rhetoric of war and crisis themselves.
The
President is now a wartime president. He and the governors of several
states (like the governors of New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and
California) have assumed the personae of messiahs who have appointed themselves
to lead the masses, their sheep, to safety.
As a
consequence of this, it’s vital to understand, Americans are not in danger of
losing their liberties. They have lost them.
This
is correct, and it is undeniable to anyone who is reading this at the
moment. To reiterate:
Americans
have lost their liberties.
Businesses
of most sorts have been ordered by government to close their doors. This
means that, indirectly, the self-employed and all other employees have been
ordered by their government to abandon their livelihoods—at least until such
time that our Leaders assure us that the war over COVID-19 has ended.
And
people have been ordered by their Leaders not to leave their homes, to travel
nowhere and for no purposes except for those that the Leaders identify as
“essential.”
Liberties
have been denied.
Whether
these liberties are retrieved is left to be seen. My suspicion is that, in the
short-term, once this strain of coronavirus is gone, life will return for a
while to basically what it was before the Great Panic of 2020. Yet the
latter will remain ensconced in the popular imagination for long after some
semblance of normalcy returns.
This in
turn means that it will be all too easy for Big Government and Big Media to use
this as a precedent for appropriating similar (or more severe) measures in the
future when they decide to use some other event or phenomenon to do so.
In the
next installment of this series on Coronavirus hysteria, I will turn attention
away from the political and media elites and toward the role that everyday
citizens play in fueling the flames of fear.
Jack Kerwick [send him mail] received his doctoral degree in
philosophy from Temple University. His area of specialization is ethics and
political philosophy. He is a professor of philosophy at several colleges and
universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jack blogs at Beliefnet.com:
At the Intersection of Faith & Culture.