Before Trump put Pence in charge of messaging about the virus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was booked on the Sunday political shows, but cancelled after the change in messaging. Instead, Trump’s people are reciting talking points. When CBS reporter Margaret Brennan today asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Alexander Azar to project how many Americans he expects will come down with COVID-19, he refused to answer, saying only “the risk to average Americans remains low.” And on CNN today, Vice President Pence refused to disagree with Donald Trump Jr.’s statement that Democrats want the coronavirus to kill millions of people to hurt Trump.
This. Is. Bonkers. No one wants millions of dead. We want intelligent strategies, designed by experts, to slow the spread of the disease and help us survive it.
But we are not getting them, because what is important to the Trump White House is getting Trump reelected, and Republican leaders are on board because he is advancing their ideology. This is quite literally the opposite of the “conservatism” they claim to embrace. In 1790, the father of modern conservatism, Irish statesman Edmund Burke, looked at the excesses of the French Revolution and warned about government run by ideology. Ideologues made the terrible mistake of thinking that their abstract theories were more powerful than reality. In their drive to make their theories real, they ran the risk of becoming tyrants. Governments must, he said, support longstanding human traditions like religion and family, because they provided stability. Governments must also, he insisted, be based in reality rather than ideology, using intelligence and experience to govern wisely.
It is high time we stopped calling members of the Trump Party “conservatives.” They are the dangerous ideologues Burke warned against, determined to force us to accept their imagined version of the world even as this coronavirus demands-- in no uncertain terms-- that we focus on reality.
Heather Cox Richardson, historian at Boston College
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