Nearing the end of The Backlog here…
I couldn’t help but think that that stupid CDC advisory committee decision last week to not recommend boosters for the general population, is one of those dumb historical mistakes that Mike Duncan loves to narrate with a dad joke and a resigned sigh.
In this episode, we have scientists and doctors acting like pundits — attempting to participate in a political process they don’t really understand, because they have a blinkered institutional worldview (with its own partisan bubble on top of that) which has made them irrationally afraid of the public and politicians making decisions they consider to be dumb. This isn’t even the first time that these non-politicians have tried to game their announcements in order to provoke their desired response, and as we’ve seen in reality, they’re really bad at gaming them out!
I have the sense that this is all exacerbated by partisan polarization: the public does dumb things because it’s polarized, and the scientists are doing dumb things because they’re reacting to the public’s stupidity, and are themselves just as polarized as the rest of us.
For what it’s worth, this is a poster child for why I’m always trying to point at the root problems, instead of just leaving this at “well, the scientists/public are being stupid and should just stop being stupid”. Most pundits don’t care about going any further than that. It’s easy to just stop at the end of your story, and come up with a moral based on what you’ve learned so far. It’s hard to develop a comprehensive picture of historical root problems like CIZST, American Nations, and the morals that such a comprehensive picture point to are far less conclusive, and far less directly related to the original story.
But they’re still there. And they’re valuable. Don’t stop at the end of the story. Don’t stop reading and educating yourself. And, of course, don’t stop tuning in to the Discourse!
Southern Fried Hot Take: Don’t mistake this for victim-blaming the Civil Rights Movement, but I think Civil Rights is why the South (and regions influenced by its political culture, which are basically the entirety of Rural America at this point) couldn’t tolerate masking for COVID, despite the cornucopia of literal photo evidence showing them tolerating masking and other far more authoritarian measures in several pandemics over the past century.
Look, since the 60’s, the South has just plain been mad. After all, they didn’t get their way!
You know that adage about how “the seeds of every nation’s fall are sown in its founding contradiction(s)”? Well, Civil Rights broke the South’s founding deal with the rest of America. To be more accurate, the Civil War had already broken their original deal — duh, “slavery” — but I think at this point it’s also pretty obvious that Jim Crow was the contradiction to ironically come out of what is often called “America’s second founding” — that is, Reconstruction.
So, if you take Civil Rights to be America’s “third founding”, well, the South was basically left high and dry. There is no deal left to be had with the rest of America: America doesn’t really need the South for security the same way the Northern colonies needed them after the revolution, and the South is really only hanging on because it needs the financial stability the Republic offers it.
The South doesn’t really feel like it owes the rest of America shit right now. They behave like an insurgency because they’re practically an occupied territory under the Civil Rights Act — again, this is not a statement on the underlying morality of Civil Rights (duh), it’s just a statement of how the South views the existing legal regime. They’re living in an arrangement that we — roughly, “the North” — put them up to; and from COVID, to immigration, to building a reasonable welfare state, they just don’t care.
Through this lens, the South’s recruitment of the rest of Rural America to its cause makes a lot more sense. When you’re outnumbered 2-to-1 (literally, the South is roughly 30% of our population), you find allies! But also, it’s an act of self-preservation. If you don’t want to be an occupied territory, you have to win influence among the occupiers. My own family story makes this quite stark: a bare handful of generations removed from a German-Missourian ancestor who fought for the Union, a majority of my relatives now support a Trumpist movement that gained critical momentum from Southern leaders (like Jeff Sessions!).
Anyways, to bring this thing home, the point was that when COVID came along, the South weren’t willing to pitch in like they have in the past, because they don’t feel like they are getting anything out of the American deal anymore. Their deeper intransigence — like abusing the filibuster to prevent America’s natural evolution into a social democracy — is likewise emblematic of this: they only engage in national projects anymore if they feel they benefit, like they do with our military-industrial complex.
Looks like I’ll be done with the backlog by week’s end!
Also, it looks like this is all paying off in terms of a slight bump in engagement; so keep it coming! Cheers.