Fighting Ghosts: Hydroxychloroquine, The Power of Diversion, and Forty Years of Republican Illusion
Every. Single. Day.
President Donald Trump sells Hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure. “What’s there to lose?” he asks as his own experts shake their heads and contradict his claims. “What’s there to lose?” he asks as scientists everywhere say there’s no proof whatsoever that the drug will help with coronavirus and no telling if it might actually kill people.
The Hydroxychloroquine phenomenon has, of course, been picked up by Fox News and right wing outlets. Experts don’t push the substance, but their talking heads are more than happy to sell it as the answer to the crisis. Like actors in syrupy prescription drug commercials, beautiful Americans going about their lives while fighting off depression, incontinence, impotence, and psoriasis, they tell you to ask your doctor if Hydroxychloroquine is right for you.
There are so many reasons for this. For Trump, more than likely, he stands to gain financially from the sell of the drug. For Fox News, it’s something to talk about, a news story that doesn’t contribute to the undeniable fact that Trump has sentenced hundreds of thousands of Americans to agonizing deaths. For the right wing faithful, the drug is a godsend, a cure that doubles as an article of faith. Of course there aren’t studies. You cannot study faith.
And for the Republican Party, a terminally ill political that functions as a death cult and clearinghouse for the destruction of our democratic institutions, it is exactly what they need: the illusion of solving a problem while refusing to address the problem at all.
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The events of recent years are incredibly hard to understand through conventional wisdom and understanding. The election of Donald Trump, a fraud and broken man, was a shock to a populace unready to recognize its own dysfunction. The story we have been told, the myth of America, no longer explains how we got to this point.
To even begin wrapping our heads around the problem, it’s first necessary to trace the history of the Republican Party since 1980 as the election of Ronald Reagan began a forty year span of political ruin and created a fabricated reality from which we are still trying to escape. Before Reagan there was Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, the former a criminal and the latter unprepared for the rigors of the presidency. Though Nixon nearly destroyed the American experiment singlehandedly and Ford struggled to address growing social, political, and economic crises, both at least tried to address the issues of America.
With Reagan, the emphasis moved from solutions to showmanship. His defeat of Jimmy Carter was due, in no small part, to Carter’s insistence on addressing America’s ills head-on while Reagan’s politics was pure spectacle. Reagan told America there were no major problems with the country or its people and took on the role as national mascot of the United States. He was a disastrous president who cared little about the responsibilities of office and allowed think-tanks and faceless conservative operatives to handle the business of the country. He served as the smiling face of trickle-down economics, a murderous perversion of our economy that doomed generations of Americans to stagnant wages, economic fear, and a litany of other horrors that would decrease their lifespans and keep them from achieving the mythical American Dream.
Reagan’s campaign operatives worked with one thing in mind: pairing Reagan with the living myths of America, meaning that anyone who attacked him or his policies would be seen as attacking America itself. This began a period of pseudo-governance wherein Reagan would present a public relations-tested version of America to the American people while systematically stripping the federal government of resources and transitioning the control of the country the wealthy and corporations.
This is, in essence, the goal of the modern Republican Party. As has been said, they want to shrink government until they can drown it in a bathtub. We’ve seen that very metaphor play out with the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and the endless floods that now strike our country every year.
Hypercaptialism, as grown by the people who controlled Reagan, allowed corporations to grow into their own nation-states wholly independent from and removed from duty toward the United States of America. They are nationless and their abdication of taxes and loyalty has left America wanting for infrastructure, education, and, perhaps most tragically, healthcare.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party has shifted from vying to manage politics and governance to presenting the illusion of politics and governance while continually undermining politics and governance writ large. There have been several Reaganesque pseudo-events that have no relationship with reality and only exist in the realm of American myth. George H.W. Bush vied for a foothold in the Middle East, and so he grew Saddam Hussein, a collaborator with Reagan and the Republican Party, into a modern Adolf Hitler. His son George W. Bush turned his failure to prevent the September 11th terrorist attacks into a revised and renewed attack on Hussein, weaponizing American anger and ignorance of Middle East affairs and weaving myth from whole cloth.
In the meantime, Right Wing media has peddled one non-emergency after another. Barack Obama as a foreign-born tyrant. Healthcare reform as the beginning of a New World Order takeover. Gay marriage as a satanic plot. Trans people and bathrooms as the beginning of the end of America.
The truth is that the Republican Party has abdicated any responsibility for playing an actual role in actual human affairs and has embraced its role as a political lever for monied interests. A pandemic like the coronavirus only makes this abundantly and agonizingly clear. There is no government response because there is no government. There is only a pseudo-Trump Administration that was never intended to govern or fix problems. Donald Trump was elected to be the death blow to American governance.
Hydroxychloroquine might work. It might save lives. We’ll need scientists and science to determine its worth. But right now, it’s a corporate-produced answer to a problem the government can’t be bothered to address. There’s no room for a pseudo-event with a pandemic. It’s real. The bodies are real. The suffering is real. The only means of solving the pandemic has to be real. But until then, even as the tragedy grows by the hour, the Republican Party remains incapable and unconcerned with actually doing anything in this reality.
Jared Yates Sexton is a political analyst whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People and currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.