On our minds: Why Mr. Trump’s maskless White House ceremony seems to have provoked anger beyond that of hundreds of thousands of deaths. |
‘What Do You Think When You See This?’ |
 | | President Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, spoke with Judge Amy Coney Barrett and her family before her Supreme Court nomination ceremony at the White House on Sept. 26.Doug Mills/The New York Times |
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These are some of the hundreds of Twitter responses to a video of maskless administration officials embracing at a White House celebration that is thought to have spread Covid-19 to President Trump and others. Many of the stories are in response to a question posed by Georgetown University political scientist Don Moynihan, “What do you think when you see this?” |
Public outrage has channeled not just a sense of loss but, tellingly, of unfairness. |
Millions of Americans have sacrificed dearly to comply with guidelines meant to curb the virus’s spread. Meanwhile, administration officials overseeing the highest death toll on earth appear, in the video, to be living free of such burdens. Officials apparently assumed that their near-unlimited access to rapid testing kits, which are off-limits to many Americans, gave them some kind of special protection. |
The administration turned out to be mistaken in concluding that these tests would free its officials from having to wear masks or forgo social contact: Mr. Trump still got sick. Still, this does not change that it believed it had found a shortcut around the hardships being borne by the rest of the country, even as Mr. Trump downplayed those same hardships and urged an aggressive reopening that would in many ways worsen them. |
That Mr. Trump had exposed a number of people who did not have access to daily rapid testing seemed to underscore the sense of a separate set of rules and risks for the elite versus everyone else. |
“It makes you feel like a sucker,” Charlie Warzel, a New York Times opinion columnist, wrote on Twitter. |
That outrage deepened when Mr. Trump was whisked to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to receive experimental treatments also unavailable to most Americans. It might have provoked less of a backlash — all presidents receive heightened medical care by virtue of their importance to the country, after all — had Mr. Trump not spent months pushing for medically dubious treatments that he said would enable a speedier reopening and that he is now, conspicuously, not taking himself. |
It might seem incongruous that a sense of abstract unfairness would trigger such anger, especially relative to the much more tangible toll of now over 200,000 confirmed deaths. But this is a consistent finding in the study of another sort of political backlash that is not as different as it might seem: backlash against government corruption. |
Consider Brazil, where long-simmering anger at inequality and economic malaise finally boiled over in mass protests when it was revealed that top officials had been taking bribes for years. To many Brazilians, the incident stung not because they were especially worried about, say, Brazilian construction firms securing ill-gotten government contracts, but because of the impunity. |
A school of thought says that corruption provokes such outrage and popular backlash not primarily because it is a form of rule-breaking or siphons off public money, but because it cuts against a fundamental human instinct for fairness, to the extent that, to many people, “corruption” refers to the unfairness more than the theft or rule-breaking itself. |
The political scientists Gal Ariely and Eric Uslaner, who call this “the unfairness thesis,” have found that backlash against corruption often comes down “perceptions that elites grow rich from dishonesty and that they gain special treatment not available to ordinary people.” Corruption, in this view, triggers a deep sense in peoples’ minds that something fundamental has been taken away, propelling them to take it back. |
And high inequality can deepen this sense that the system is tilted to favor the elite. Finn Heinrich, an analyst for Transparency International, has written that official corruption and economic inequality can form a self-reinforcing feedback loop of public outrage that, Mr. Heinrich argues, fueled much of the populist wave of recent years. (As I wrote in March, the coronavirus both reveals and widens inequality, disproportionately affecting the have-nots in the short-term as it also deepens gaps in income, public health, and education that may not be fully visible for a generation.) |
Once you identify this pattern, you can see it everywhere. Just in the past year or so, some of the largest protest movements in modern memory — in Lebanon, Iraq, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and other places, all of which became major political crises — have been triggered by revelations of public corruption. Talk to protesters, and it is often the unfairness that seems to most animate them. |
The White House’s circumventing social distancing requirements is not, of course, a form of corruption. Revelations about Mr. Trump’s creative tax accounting, which enabled him to pay merely $750 in federal income taxes for each of two years in a row, falls closer. Regardless of whether Mr. Trump is found to have broken any laws, the suggestion of self-dealing and a playing field tilted dramatically in his favor fits within how corruption is broadly perceived: a form of systemic unfairness privileging the elite over everyone else. |
Perceived systemic unfairness is not just an emotional abstraction. It’s also a barometer for the degree to which that system serves or exploits the millions of people within it, which can be enormously consequential. One of the largest protest movements in recent years erupted in South Korea in 2016 over presidential corruption allegations that were, compared with scandals in other countries, relatively mild. But it surfaced deeper anger over the country’s staggering levels of inequality and, in an incident often raised by protesters, a 2014 ferry sinking that had killed more than 300 people. |
The disaster was blamed on lax regulation by industry-friendly officials. That is arguably a form of corruption, though unrelated to later allegations against the president. Still, to protesters, who are thought to have numbered in the millions, it was all linked. |
It might not have been true in a literal sense that South Koreans were made to die in ferry accidents so that the president could enrich her friends. But if you view both of those outcomes as products of the same systemic unfairness, and if you view elites as having engineered that system to favor themselves, then perhaps public anger at the president, who was removed from office and imprisoned, makes more sense. |
This may also help make sense of the last two months of polling for Mr. Trump, which has seen his support drop even among core supporters who had stuck with him even during the deadliest days of the spring and summer. Many of those die-hards are older white Americans who, even in areas with low levels of social distancing compliance, have less room to skirt the safety measures that Mr. Trump and his White House so cheerily defy. |
In a review of a new novel, “Leave the World Behind,” Hillary Kelly writes for The New Yorker about a new kind of not-quite-disaster story that I suspect might dominate 2020s American culture the way that stories of institutional decay and social distrust dominated the years after Richard M. Nixon’s administration. |
I expected, after all of this, the natural tick-tock of a disaster novel. The invasion or superstorm or missiles would arrive; the characters would run for it; inevitably, some innocent would be sacrificed to the gods who demand such things from novelists. But, although the tension heightens, no such moments arrive. Where other practitioners of the genre revel in chaos — the coarse spectacle of society unravelling — Alam keeps close to his characters, who, like insects in acrylic, remain trapped in a state of suspended unease. This, he suggests, is the modern disaster — the precarity of American life, which leaves us unsure, always, if things can get worse.
We want these people to run, to find other humans, to do something, anything, that feels useful in crisis. And we judge them, too, as avatars of our own worst instincts, so enmeshed in the comforts of life that they believe that a pretty little home in the woods will keep them safe from the big bad wolf of civilizational collapse. It becomes clear, over time, that they’re trapped less in the house than in a fantasy of their making, even as doubt creeps in at the edges. |
- For no particular reason, David Remnick’s 1993 book, “Lenin’s Tomb,” chronicling the last years of the Soviet Union, when it was “ruled by a succession of half-dead men in half-lit hospitals.” The slide toward collapse arguably began in 1982, with a series of bungled and contradictory official statements about the ailing health of its leader amid a chaotic and uncertain transition of power.
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