This week, after President Biden slammed GOP governors for “Neanderthal thinking” over their suspensions of mask mandates, a whole lot of Republicans pretended to be outraged. And a whole lot of folks in the media pretended to believe them.
Yet Biden appears to be taking the pushback seriously. The New York Times is now reporting that Biden has decided not to wage open warfare on Republican governors who relax restrictions designed to contain the coronavirus.
“His top advisers say they see no benefits in waging a culture war against Republican governors while they are fighting to contain the pandemic,” the Times notes.
As silly as this fake controversy is, it opens a window on some of the worst pathologies in our politics — and, importantly, on the Biden team’s understanding of how to navigate them.
Biden’s “Neanderthal” remark came after decisions by GOP governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Tate Reeves of Mississippi to end statewide mask mandates and to allow businesses to operate at full capacity.
Biden declared this a “big mistake,” arguing that accelerated vaccinations are putting us “on the cusp” of controlling the pandemic, and added: “The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine, take off your masks.”
As it happens, health officials in those two states were also dismayed by the decisions. But that didn’t stop Republicans from fake-erupting. So Biden won’t go to war over such decisions, though he’ll continue to “engage with” GOP officials he disagrees with about this.
I can identify several reasons why Biden’s team is proceeding with caution around these culture-war landmines.
Biden turns down the volume
The first was pinpointed by Ezra Klein: Biden has muted his public presence to minimize the social and cultural conflict his predecessor relished. Refraining from needlessly activating the sort of negative polarization — which presidents are uniquely positioned to trigger — that poisons our substantive debates also creates space to go bigger on policy.
Former president Donald Trump, of course, seized on every public argument we had over the coronavirus — over whether to wear masks, over whether it was a crisis at all — to stoke civil conflict.
Trump’s attacks on public health restrictions in Democratic states surely helped turn millions against such restrictions, encouraging GOP governors to reopen states too early, leading to last spring’s catastrophic spike in cases.
And so, the Biden team surely sees that the lesson of the “Neanderthal” controversy is that even a stray presidential remark can trigger a cynically hyped controversy on the right, potentially reactivating polarization around precautions and dissuading people from taking them.
This points to the second reason for the administration’s caution, one rooted in a view of the potential civic possibilities endemic in the taming of the pandemic.
Depoliticizing mask-wearing
Even before Biden took office, his team was playing around with the idea that the imperative of encouraging precautions could, if communicated skillfully, also reinvigorate a sense of common purpose and mutual obligation.
As David Kessler, the physician who is leading the vaccine rollout, told me at the time, if Biden officials could succeed in “depoliticizing masks,” that might help “bring the country together” around a sense of reciprocal “duty.”
This has given rise to a paradox. Biden would like his encouragement of precautions to revive that sense of duty. But when GOP governors move sharply in the other direction — lifting restrictions and potentially creating more risk with undisguised own-the-libs relish — criticizing those actions too bluntly can undermine that broader civic project.
What makes this more challenging is the way all this has become fraught with culture-war hostilities.
No end to the culture-warmongering
When the rage against public health restrictions was in full swing, the argument wasn’t merely that they represented a threat to people’s liberties. It was also freighted with phony right-wing populist anti-elitism.
The suggestion, sometimes made explicit, was that governors and public health officials were not to be seen as making profoundly difficult and consequential choices, ones balancing the dictates of science against other human goods amid fast-moving and unpredictable conditions.
Instead, these elites seized the chance to crush the economic and social aspirations of virtuous working-class heartlanders. Meanwhile, the cosmopolitan “laptop class,” those enemies of conservative community cosseted away in precious home offices, remained superciliously unconcerned with regular folks chafing to return to real-world jobs, social gatherings and churches.
As John Ganz has noted, this sort of mythologizing depends heavily on a very crude dichotomy that is a constant in our politics. It pits an alienated but virtuous and mystically authentic nation of workers and small business owners against a corrupt and hypocritical “professional managerial class.”
This fable is alive again in the Neanderthal flap. Notably, Republicans who feigned outrage trotted out these sorts of tropes, calling on Biden to “travel to middle America” and even likening his criticism to calling residents of those states “deplorables.”
The depth and reach of such cultural sensitivities is likely highly exaggerated, an artifact of the bad faith of the people cynically trying to (dare we say it?) trigger them.
But nonetheless, the Biden team appears to believe there’s no reason to risk firing them up at all, if it might dissuade some people from taking precautions against the virus, again making the spread worse before it gets better.
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