The Perils of Preaching Despair

I tem: Donald Trump, speaking at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix on Saturday:

In Georgia, they had an election. We did so well. And everyone knew we won by hundreds of thousands and they stole it from us. And what happened is we had two senators running a couple of months later and you know what happened to them? The Republicans said, “We’re not going out to vote because this is rigged. This election was rigged,” and they know it.

Item:

As President Joe Biden completed 100 days in office, the country was optimistic about the coming year, but now, just after hitting the six-month mark, Americans’ optimism about the direction of the country has plummeted nearly 20 points, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll finds. A majority — 55% — of the public say they are pessimistic about the direction of the country, a marked change from the roughly one-third (36%) that said the same in an ABC News/Ipsos poll published May 2. In the early May survey, Americans were more optimistic than pessimistic by a 28-percentage point margin. Optimism is now under water by 10 points. Looking ahead to the next 12 months, fewer than half — 45% — now report feeling optimistic about the way things are going, a significant drop from about two-thirds (64%) in the May poll.

The trend is a little less obvious in the overall poll average, but the “on the wrong track” number, which was falling from January to April, has been creeping up steadily since early June.

What do these two stories have in common? The dangers of preaching doom and despair. Politicians talk about our troubles all the time, of course. As a candidate or an elected official, you don’t want to be telling people that problems don’t exist when they can see them with their own eyes. You may even have to grapple with the reality that people think something is a much bigger problem than it really is, and work with that sentiment. Facts may not care about the voters’ feelings, but the voters’ feelings are facts on the ground that matter, too.

Still, political leaders have a choice. On the one hand, they can present problems with some measure of perspective and focus on concrete, manageable things that lend themselves to a solution. On the other hand, they can stoke paranoia and despair. Doing the latter might seem, at times, like a way to tap into something powerful in the human psyche, but it can end very badly at the polls.

Look at Trump. For months now, his diehard supporters have resisted the obvious conclusion that the rigged-election theory that Trump himself did more than anyone to promote was a major cause of the depressed Republican voter turnout that cost Republicans two Senate seats in Georgia on January 5. Many Republican campaign professionals said so at the time. As Erick Erickson wrote from Georgia the next day:

As polls closed and votes started pouring in, I started getting messages from Republicans across Georgia. “The numbers are not where the models are,” was a common refrain. The GOP estimated a Republican turnout that did not show up. Again, and this is crucially important, the Republican voters did not show up while Democrats did. The area of North Georgia where Donald Trump went on Monday night turned out at a lower rate than the rest of the state. That area also has a QAnon Congresswoman now who very vocally has been claiming the Democrats were stealing the election. Had the Republicans showed up at their expected levels, they could have at least held David Perdue’s seat.

Now, Trump has finally come right out and admitted that he believes that is what happened: His voters bought the theory that the November election was stolen, so they stayed home the next time around. Preaching doom and despair and paranoia to them — and convincing them of shadowy conspiracies that even the president could neither surmount nor document in court — did not fire them up. It depressed them and made them give up.

Now, look at Joe Biden. He’s not in that kind of trouble — yet. His approval ratings are softening, but still in respectable shape. But the accelerating concern that the country is on the wrong track cannot be good news for him or for his party. Some of that, of course, is due to problems that Democrats keep trying to happy-talk out of existence, such as rising crime. But the messages coming from Democrats on other fronts are not helping.

What messages are Biden and his allies putting out? One is despair about our elections. They tell us that democracy is the most imperiled it has been since the Civil War, the only solution to which is enacting a massive piece of legislation that has no chance of passing the Senate. They warn that the pall of Jim Crow is descending across the country, making it impossible to have free and fair elections in 2022.

The other major push of late has been stoking a renewed panic about COVID. We are told that the Delta variant is some sort of super-virus that causes “breakthrough” infections in people who have already been vaccinated, and that this may require a reintroduction of mask mandates, remote schooling in the fall, and other lockdown initiatives. A lot of this message involves deliberately conflating positive tests for COVID with serious cases that require hospitalization or cause death or grave illness. The message it sends is that hope of an end to COVID-restricted life is illusory and that vaccination is futile. Neither of those things is true, nor is it helpful for the public to believe them.

At the same time, there has been a major freak-out about unvaccinated people, leading to calls for heavy-handed restrictions on the liberty of anyone who is not vaccinated yet. Vaccination rates have indeed lagged frustratingly; the problem is a real one. But some perspective is required. The people who are most vulnerable to the virus — especially senior citizens — have been vaccinated at much greater rates. And it was always going to take a long time to get up to full global herd immunity.

According to the Our World in Data vaccination tracker based on local-government reports, 163 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, more than the total in any other two countries put together. Forty-nine percent of Americans are now fully vaccinated. No major Western country is above Britain’s 56 percent. Only three countries on the entire planet — the islands of Malta and Iceland and the United Arab Emirates — have broken the two-thirds barrier. Plenty of large and/or advanced countries are way behind us — Sweden (38 percent), Finland (32 percent), Hong Kong (30 percent), Japan (25 percent), Mexico (19 percent), Australia (13 percent), Argentina (13 percent), South Korea (13 percent), New Zealand (13 percent), and India (6.8 percent). Large sections of the globe are in single digits. This is reason for concern, but it also suggests that we should have assumed all along that getting the unvaccinated population down to a negligible number was never a realistic prerequisite for reopening the country and its borders.

It is hard to watch the one–two punch on COVID coverage — the constant drumbeat of sensational reports from the media, the ominous statements from teachers’ unions and public-health bureaucrats — without suspecting that some of these people simply cannot let go of the pandemic and how it empowered social control, any more than Trump can let go of the theory that he might still be proven to have won the 2020 election.

Telling people that they have no chance of fair elections and no prospect of returning to their pre-COVID way of life is a recipe for despair. Selling despair in politics is not as profitable as its vendors may think.