Tribal Authority

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

 

In an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Bill Gates said he expects that there will be an ugly wave of increased coronavirus infections through the winter before the new vaccines are able to be widely distributed, and that this is likely to require more mandatory shutdowns, particularly of such hospitality businesses as restaurants and bars.

 

“Sadly appropriate,” he called such measures.

 

Bill Gates’s “sadly appropriate” isn’t exactly Joseph Stalin’s “one million deaths is a statistic,” but it struck some people, including a lot of people with talk-radio shows, as callous. Gates, cocooned by his billions as though sewn up in silk, is pretty far from a struggling bar owner in Milwaukee or a café proprietor in Conway, Ark., who has seen his business and personal finances ravaged by the effects of the coronavirus epidemic and the measures taken against it. It is peculiar that many of the same right-wing critics who say we shouldn’t trust Bill Gates because he is a billionaire also told us that we should trust Donald Trump because he is a billionaire.

 

(He says he is a billionaire, anyway.)

 

It isn’t the money, of course. It never really is. In 2016, when Senator Bernie Sanders was out on the campaign trail denouncing billionaires as a category, lamenting the influence of such figures as Charles Koch on American political life, a friendly critic asked him: What about George Soros? What about Tom Steyer? What about all those Silicon Valley billionaires who support progressive candidates and causes? The socialist from Vermont from Brooklyn looked like he might blow a head gasket. (To be sure, he always looks like he might blow a head gasket.) “False equivalence!” he thundered. Why? He wouldn’t say.

 

He didn’t have to. Their billionaires are bad. Our billionaires are good. When their billionaires give away tons of money to engage in issue advocacy, they are trying to buy elections; when our billionaires give away tons of money to engage in issue advocacy, they are philanthropists protecting democracy itself.

 

Money is power, and the kind of money Bill Gates and Charles Koch have is real power. And in spite of all of our ideologies and philosophies and high rhetoric, much of our politics is primitive stuff, the politics of the playground, the prison yard, and the chimpanzee troop. We worship power when we hold it, or when it is held by a member of our tribe, and we fear power when it is wielded by someone who seems to us alien and hostile.

 

It has been widely observed that each of our two major political parties tends toward libertarianism when out of power and toward authoritarianism when in power. When there is a Democratic president, Republicans are practically lining up to join the ACLU, while Democrats talk jadedly about having to break a few eggs to make an omelet. When George W. Bush signed the PATRIOT Act, Democrats shrieked that the United States was on the verge of becoming a police state; when Bush’s immediate successor, Barack Obama, began a program of assassinating U.S. citizens, and his minions bragged to the New York Times about compiling a hit list, Democrats took it with remarkable equanimity, with most of the criticism coming from Republicans such as Senator Rand Paul. Democrats bemoaned Bush’s executive unilateralism and lionized Obama’s “pen and a telephone” unilateralism. Republicans lamented Obama’s executive overreach and then bent over backwards to accommodate every abuse and tantrum of the Trump administration.

 

There is something more at work in this than simply partisan hypocrisy.

 

I could not document it to your satisfaction or to mine, but I cannot help but detect in the response to the coronavirus epidemic a certain progressive delight in the exercise of power — by progressives and their cultural allies — for its own sake. I write this not as a critic of those interventions but as someone who believes that they were in the main necessary and that they in some cases did not go far enough. The correctness of the policy is not my interest here. Progressives luxuriate in the belief, not entirely justified, that they are of the tribe of science, cultural cousins to scientists and hence partial sharers in the great prestige scientists enjoy, and in the earliest days of the coronavirus epidemic this manifested itself in a kind of reactionary maximalism. To overreact — in substance, emotionally, or rhetorically — was a demonstration of one’s fealty to science, politically understood. It was a kind of speaking in tongues, the N95 mask a kind of tonsure.

 

For these cultural reasons, and for obvious reasons having to do with the daily progression of the epidemic, responses in such psychically ticklish locations as New York City and the Bay Area were at first dramatically more aggressive than they were in, say, Presidio County, Texas, which did not even see its first confirmed coronavirus case until the end of May. Progressives in some cases were especially high-handed in their treatment of religious institutions, while they took a remarkably indulgent attitude toward the mass gatherings and protests of the summer. The difference between the treatment of New York’s Orthodox Jews and the treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters cannot be entire accounted for by public-health priorities.

 

Conservatives were of course discomfited by this, and irritated. When Trump asserted, without bothering to check, that Anthony Fauci is a Democrat (Fauci, who has served under five presidents, Republicans and Democrats, says he is unaffiliated), he was observing in the particular what Republicans have observed in the general: that the people and institutions most empowered by the coronavirus response are mostly on the other side of the aisle, from career civil servants to journalists. (It should be concerning to conservatives that when they consider a figure such as Fauci, their gut reaction is: Whatever he is, he isn’t one of us. They are not wrong about that, and that is a political problem, even if they do not understand why.) And so social distancing and the rest became a culture-war battle, with right-wing talk-radio dismissing Gates as someone with no special expertise or insight at the same time demanding that we defer to President Trump on hydroxychloroquine.

 

As a matter of cultural politics, the war on coronavirus is the inverse of the war on terrorism, which mainly empowered individuals and institutions perceived as being Republican-aligned and allied, culturally or economically, with conservatives: the military, the police departments, defense contractors, intelligence agencies, etc. The question of what power is used to achieve is in a cultural sense subordinate to the question of who is holding the power. I do not think Republicans have spent a lot of time reading Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in the past few years, but I would not be surprised to hear a Fox News talking head say: “Through the rejection of the law or other regulations, it is easy enough to recognize the struggles against those who set them up in their own interests.”

 

Bill Gates must be plotting something, they say. Why? Because Bill Gates must be plotting something. Why? Because he is Bill Gates.

 

And it’s turtles all the way down.

 

Think of it in this context: Led in no small part by Republicans, the United States turned itself upside-down and inside-out over 3,000 deaths in a terrorist attack in 2001. We have been seeing more than 3,000 COVID deaths daily for a while now.

 

But one bankrupted cosmetologist is a tragedy — 300,000 dead Americans is a statistic.