Toward a Politics of Charity

T he Covid-19 era is a cascade of related tragedies, and we would be adding one more item to the tragic catalogue if we were to fail to take the opportunity presented by the heightened contrasts created by the epidemic to understand our national differences a little better. An epidemic is a bit like a war in that it injects an unusual measure of intensity into public affairs, which helps both to reveal and to clarify preexisting differences. Think, for example, of how World War I drew out the militaristic, nationalistic, and centralizing tendencies in American progressivism, producing a reaction whose character was what we would now describe as libertarian. Or think of the way that the combination of the Vietnam War and the social convulsions of the 1960s brought out the anti-Americanism in the white, college-educated Left.

Americans in our time who would like our politics reoriented toward liberty should, if only for practical reasons, try at least a little to understand the point of view of those Americans who are not oriented mainly toward liberty, who are instead oriented toward something else, such as safety, equality, nationalism, or some other competing priority. The reaction to Covid-19 offers a convenient opportunity to do so.

And it is no good engineering an explanation in order to flatter ourselves, telling ourselves the comforting little story that those who disagree with us do so because they have been misled (by left-leaning educators or “the media”) or because of some personal moral failing (cowardice, laziness, bigotry). There are many intelligent and excellent people who see the world very differently from how we do, and they didn’t all come to their views by reading Paul Krugman columns or going to grad school.

One of the issues that is prior to politics is that there are different ways of thinking about probability and risk. Do you know the great Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? Stoppard has fun with a familiar conundrum: If you were to propose to flip a coin 100 times, you would judge that the probability of its coming up heads 100 times in a row was very low, but the probability of its coming up heads on any given toss is 50/50. So, if the coin has come up heads 99 times in a row, do you wonder at the improbability of its coming up heads again on the 100th toss, or do you shrug the 100th toss off as another 50/50 proposition? The mathematical foundation is the same in either case — 100 heads in a row is very unlikely, heads on any given toss is not unlikely — but how it makes us feel can differ considerably by person. And while we have an unfortunate tendency to give in to confirmation bias and to actively seek out information that supports our preexisting biases, even two people who agree about the basic facts of the case vis-à-vis Covid-19 or some other hazard might come to radically different conclusions, and their sentiments are likely to be not only different but mutually antagonistic. This is exacerbated in the American situation because each half of the population defines itself to some extent in opposition to the other half — e.g., the only thing that all of the people who call themselves “conservatives” in our time really agree about is opposition and hostility to the people who call themselves “progressives”; the sole defining feature of the Democratic Party is that it is not the Republican Party; many Texans would be happy to define their state as the anti-California; etc.

As I have argued in the past, differences in attitude toward risk are a big part of Americans’ disagreement about health-care policy, to take one important example. Conservatives point to the monopoly systems in the United Kingdom and Canada, or to European systems that have a higher level of state intervention, and tell our progressive friends: “See, if you go down that road, you will get less choice, less innovation, and a less dynamic system,” without understanding the progressive calculation, which is that giving up some choice and dynamism would be worth it in exchange for guaranteed access and for relieving us of the stress and anxiety of worrying so much about out-of-pocket health-care costs and the possibility of losing health insurance. Those who prefer guaranteed access to a narrower set of health-care services with little or no out-of-pocket expense to participating in a more market-oriented system with more choices and more financial uncertainty are not making a mistake — they are acting from a different set of priorities. My libertarian friends often talk about politics in terms of a conversion experience — “So-and-So was converted to free-market economics in 1978,” etc. Marxists often speak in the same terms. But if we liberty-oriented Americans want to advance our view of health care as a practical political matter, the thing to do is not to try to convert the unbelievers but to understand their attitude toward risk and to rethink our arguments — and, where necessary, our policies — in a way that helps to assuage their anxieties.

This isn’t strictly speaking a Left–Right thing. Almost all of the so-called economic nationalism of both the Right and the Left — that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders often sound alike on economic issues has been noted by, among others, Donald Trump — is a matter of risk aversion, in this case showing itself as aversion to change. (It is also in many cases an aversion to the painful necessity of admitting that the sunk-cost fallacy is a fallacy and acting accordingly, for instance by moving out of one’s familiar community and relocating to a place with more economic opportunity and a healthier social environment.) People on the left are a little more risk-averse when it comes to dealing with markets, and people on the right are a little more risk-averse when it comes to dealing with foreigners, but, very often, they will respond to the same anxiety (market interactions with foreigners) with roughly the same policy proposals, changing only the specific terms of denunciation: “greed” for the left-wing anti-capitalist and “globalism” for the right-wing anti-capitalist. Spend 20 minutes on right-wing Twitter and it will be perfectly plain that much of right-wing politics is driven not by the love of liberty but by the fear of humiliation, particularly by the fear of certain metropolitan men of emasculating humiliation.

Many of the new rules and conventions related to Covid-19 are, at heart, exactly what their critics call them: theater. There is very little reason to believe that the masking protocols followed by airlines, for example — Mask down, sip your coffee, mask up! Mask down, sip your coffee, mask up! — accomplish anything important. But if some of these protocols are meant to be expressive, as I believe they are, then it is worth understanding what it is they are trying to express. Some of what they have to say is ugly and domineering: “I have the power to force you to comply with these trivial and symbolic gestures, and I enjoy exercising that power.” Some of it isn’t: “This situation terrifies me, and I feel like you and yours are not taking the well-being of me and mine as seriously as you should.” This complicates the customary individualism of libertarian analysis, because the response to an epidemic is, like a war, in large part social in character. Almost all of the “Don’t Tread on Me!” types bellyaching about “vaccine passports” are new to the game, in that the United States has made certain vaccines a requirement for those seeking immigrant visas — something very close to a literal vaccine passport — for generations. Covid-19 is new to the list, but mumps, measles, rubella, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, and haemophilus influenzae type B are not, and we have long subjected American citizens, from soldiers to kindergartners, to various vaccine requirements. “Oh, but this one is different!” is pure special-pleading. Which is to say, much of the anti-vaccine-theater stuff is theater, too, and theater driven at least in part by fear — the fear of being dominated by agencies and institutions controlled by cultural rivals and political enemies.

A lot of very old-fashioned and fusty Victorian stuff — manners, etiquette, courtesy, propriety, social convention, social hierarchy — used to help us to work around many of these differences, sparing us at least the stress and discomfort that come with trying to reinvent the rules of social behavior on the fly and anew each day. It is not very difficult (for most people) to treat the people we love in such a way as to make them feel at ease, cared for, and decently esteemed — the purpose of manners and social convention is to give us a guide for treating the rest of our neighbors that way, too, both because it is in itself a good and because pursuing that good brings about mutual benefits.

One of those benefits is avoiding brawls in airports and angry scenes in restaurants, as well as the entrenchment of petty bureaucratic bullying that these bring about. We need public habits and behavioral norms that presuppose these differences and accommodate them; this does not mean always giving veto power to the more risk-averse party in every situation, but it does mean taking their fears and anxieties into account, even when these seem to us excessive. All of us have things that worry us or make us uncomfortable in ways that cannot be strictly accounted for by peer-reviewed scientific papers — human beings, and human societies, do not work like that. The simple act of approaching these differences with kindness and consideration rather than with boorishness and the desire to dominate would go a long way toward lowering the tension; unhappily, we have powerful political interests (and powerful commercial interests attached to those political interests) that benefit from increasing the tension, from choosing boorishness not because they lack the capacity for better behavior but because boorishness pays. Mentally normal adults would in normal circumstances be embarrassed by that kind of thing, which is why so much work has been done to convince Americans on both sides of the social divide that they are “at war.” Some of them won’t be happy until they have their war.

Conservatives who argue that this is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles planted in a Christian civilization have as their first duty neither the defense of the Constitution nor fealty to the flag but loving our neighbors as ourselves, and this is as much a public and political duty as it is a private and spiritual one. Which means, at the very least, that we should not want our neighbors and fellow citizens to be afraid, and that we must not enjoy their fear nor profit by it. We must love them even as we disagree with them, even as we understand that at least some of their fears are irrational or unfounded. (It is very likely that as I write these words Charles C. W. Cooke is down in Florida building another AR-15 in his garage, and the public peace will be in no way endangered by this, however much anxiety such rifles may cause in some people.) It is only in a politics of charity — meaning a politics of love — that we can liberate ourselves from the politics of domination and humiliation and the fear of domination and humiliation. Two-thirds of Americans call themselves Christians, and it would cause radical social change if they started acting — not only in their private lives but as citizens — as though they meant it.

Sneer at that proposal if you like — Americans have become great sneerers — but it is much more practical than setting up independent republics in Texas and Northern California, or, even sillier, trying to govern a nation of 330 million people as though 165 million of them did not exist.