The far right thrives on fear. It’s no
surprise, then, that it would use the latest pandemic, which has generated
widespread panic, to bolster its own agenda. All of the hallmarks of the far
right are in play during the coronavirus crisis. It has pushed to close
borders. It has demonized foreigners and particularly border-crossers. It has
spread a variety of conspiracy theories. And where it is in power — Hungary,
Israel — it has moved to increase that power through emergency measures.
COVID-19: Will We Learn the Lessons?
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On the other hand, the incompetent response
of some right-wing leaders — Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil —
may well set back the far right in certain countries. Moreover, the scale of
the threat has put on the table the kind of large-scale transformative policies
that hitherto circulated only on the margins.
So, which way will the novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19, ultimately push the political pendulum?
From Denial to Weaponization
Imagine if Hillary Clinton were in the
White House today. The far right, led by the head of the anti-Hillary forces,
Donald Trump, would have immediately used the “China virus” to demand that the
Clinton administration close all borders and ban all immigrants and refugees.
Under ordinary conditions, in other words, the far right would have had a field
day in the United States using the coronavirus threat to advance its xenophobic
agenda in the face of a liberal, cautious Washington consensus.
But with President Trump in the Oval Office
rather than sitting on the sidelines lobbing the pundit’s equivalent of Molotov
cocktails, the far right started out in denial. When the COVID-19 pandemic
began in China at the end of December 2019, after all, it was far away and it
was not infecting Americans. Even when the pathogen was detected for the first
time in the US on January 21 — in a young man returning to Washington state
from China — right-wing pundits continued to downplay the risk for weeks on
end.
On February 24, for instance, Rush
Limbaugh told his radio audience that
“the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down
Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m
dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” He would
say on another occasion that
the greater threat to the country was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and the
Democratic Party more generally. Just as becoming president didn’t make Trump
more presidential in conduct, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom clearly
didn’t make Limbaugh any more professional in conduct.
The breakdown of concern among Americans
has followed the political contours of the country. Ronald Brownstein writes
in The Atlantic this
week:
“A flurry of new national polls released this week reveals that while anxiety about the disease is rising on both sides of the partisan divide, Democrats consistently express much more concern about it than Republicans do, and they are much more likely to say they have changed their personal behavior as a result. A similar gap separates people who live in large metropolitan centers, which have become the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition, from those who live in the small towns and rural areas that are the modern bedrock of the GOP.”
As the Trump administration finally switched into its own incompetent version of engagement, some sections of the far right zoomed well past the denial phase. Those of a survivalist and apocalyptic bent are already halfway to their bunkers, with Alex Jones of Infowars infamy trying to profit off the panic by raising the prices on his prepper products. It’s part of a more general wave of profiteering that encompasses Amazon price-gougers and traffickers of inside information like North Carolina Senator Richard Burr in the Senate.
Neo-Nazis and sovereignists, meanwhile, are rejoicing at the failures of the federal state to handle the crisis. They are anticipating the realization of their cherished dream: the collapse of the liberal order. Still, other extremists in the QAnon camp believe that Trump will use the virus as a pretext to arrest members of a global liberal pedophile ring (like Trump, they simply double down when their assertions are proven wrong, as in the Comet Pizza debacle).
Then there’s the blame game. Jerry Falwell
Jr. fingered North Korea as the
culprit behind the coronavirus. California Republican Joanne Wright, like many
of her tribe, has asserted that China
manufactured the disease but added the twist that Bill Gates financed the plot.
And it wouldn’t be a wacky right-wing conspiracy if George Soros somehow weren’t
implicated as well.
Chinese and Asians more generally have
faced a terrifying uptick in
attacks and discrimination. With the appearance of each new hotspot — Iran, Italy — targeted xenophobia has
been sure to follow. Soon, thanks to Trump, it will be Americans in the
crosshairs.
As far as the American far right’s
anti-immigrant agenda, the Trump administration is already carrying that water.
Trump closed the border with Mexico. He announced that all undocumented
migrants trying to get into this country will be summarily turned back.
Even the migrant workers who are seasonally granted H2-A visas to work on American farms are finding it difficult to cross the border. Farm owners pushed back against a ban, forcing the administration to accept workers previously granted such visas. But the absence of new workers will still leave US agriculture dangerously understaffed.
Borderline Issue
For decades, Europe has been at war with
itself over borders — both its internal borders and its borders with the rest
of the world. The coronavirus has taken that war to a new level.
The overwhelming obsession of the far right
in Europe has been to reduce or eliminate immigration from points east and
south. Some political parties, like Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland, even
support “remigration” — namely, forcing established immigrants to leave the
country.
The coronavirus offers the far right yet
another arrow in its quiver. “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is
called migration and the other one belongs to the coronavirus,” Hungarian Prime
Minister Viktor Orban has said. “There is a logical connection
between the two as both spread with movement.”
In Italy, far-right leader Matteo Salvini
has used the pandemic to push his “closed ports” policy. In February, even as
the outbreak was gathering steam in his country, Salvini declared that “allowing the
migrants to land from Africa, where the presence of the virus was confirmed, is
irresponsible.” At the time, there was only one reported case on the whole
continent, in Egypt.
In Germany, the identitarian movement hung banners proclaiming
“Defend Our Borders” on the Brandenburg Gate, once a potent symbol of the
erased border between eastern and western Germany. Throughout Europe, far-right
parties were retooling their
“great replacement” narrative — that immigrants are poised to overwhelm
majority populations — to incorporate the coronavirus. The threat that
outsiders supposedly pose to the health of nations has long been a singular
obsession of fascists.
It wasn’t just the threat from outside Europe. In 1995, seven European nations created the Schengen Area, which abolished their internal border controls and visa requirements. Eventually becoming subject to European Union law, the area expanded to include 26 states. Practically from the beginning, the far right has taken aim at Schengen as an unacceptable abridgment of sovereignty. It has argued that Schengen makes control of immigrants more difficult (as with the influx of Tunisians into Italy in 2011) and compromised anti-terrorist policing (in the wake of a terrorism suspect’s flight from Germany to Italy in 2016). Still, Schengen survived.
What the far right wasn’t able to do, the coronavirus managed in a matter of weeks. Some members reestablished internal border controls without notifying the EU Commission, as required by the Schengen Border Code. These moves prompted the EU to declare last week that all internal borders will be closed for 30 days. The next step for the far right, and its more mainstream conservative allies, is to try to make this temporary change permanent.
Separating the Competent…
For some illiberal leaders, the coronavirus
is like a golden ticket. It allows them to sweep away what remains of the rule
of law in their countries. Consider Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
extraordinary moves to hang onto power. Up until recently, things weren’t
looking so good for him. He was supposed to go on trial this week for
corruption. The last election provided a narrow victory to his opposition, and
the head of the Blue and White alliance, Benny Gantz, was given first shot at
forming a government.
But the coronavirus, a death sentence for
so many people, has been a lifeline for Netanyahu. As part of a more general
lockdown, the prime minister froze the judiciary. And that just happened to put
his own trial on hold. Meanwhile, the speaker of the Knesset, a member of
Netanyahu’s Likud party, resigned this week and
closed down parliament rather than allow a vote to elect his successor, who
would likely have been from the Blue and White alliance.
Because of new rules that limit public
gathering, it’s impossible for people to come out on the streets to protest any
of this. It goes further, as Gershom Gorenberg explains in The Washington Post. Even as the
government was freezing the justice system,
“Netanyahu himself announced that the government would use electronic means to track the locations of citizens in an effort to enforce self-isolation. That quickly turned out to mean giving the Shin Bet security service the power to locate people via their cellphones. That measure, an extreme infringement on civil rights, should be vetted by a Knesset committee. Instead, Netanyahu enacted it under emergency regulations.”
Think of it as a stealth coup. Plus the
transformation of Israel into a police state. Or, put another way, Israelis are
now going to understand a little more of what Palestinians have known for a
long time.
Viktor Orban has done something similar in
Hungary. He has put a new law in front of parliament that would give his
government extraordinary power to detain pretty much anyone, as Kim Lane
Scheppele points out on the Hungarian Spectrum website:
“Anyone who publicizes false or distorted facts that interfere with the “successful protection” of the public — or that alarm or agitate that public — could be punished by up to five years in prison. And anyone who interferes with the operation of a quarantine or isolation order could also face a prison sentence of up to five years, a punishment that increases to eight years if anyone dies as a result.”
The first set of controls is aimed at what
remains of an independent press in Hungary. The second could incarcerate anyone
who objects to anything the Orban government does.
As if that’s not enough, the prime minister
could, according to the proposal, “suspend the enforcement of certain laws,
depart from statutory regulations, and implement additional extraordinary
measures by degree.” These would be permanent changes in Hungarian law.
Many sectors of Hungarian civil society
have vehemently opposed this
proposed “enabling act.” And parliament failed to pass the bill on the first
attempt this week. But it’s likely that Orban will try again next week,
relying on his party’s comfortable majority in parliament to get it through.
…From the Incompetent
Donald Trump’s dangerously ill-informed response to the coronavirus — including such basic failures as providing test kits and other basic resources to hospitals — has incredibly not spelled his political demise. According to a recent Monmouth poll, 50% of Americans think he’s done a good job versus only 45% who give him poor marks. His approval rating has even increased a couple points. That might change as the casualties rise, particularly if the US president attempts to end the policies of social isolation early, as he has threatened to do. Or it might not, if the virus disproportionately affects blue urban areas.
For all his incompetence, Trump hasn’t been
so stupid as to miss the political opportunity to
push through parts of his cherished economic agenda, like further tax cuts. The
Justice Department, meanwhile, is asking Congress for new
emergency powers to detain people indefinitely without trial. The Trump
administration is clearly looking to Israel and Hungary as examples.
Other incompetent leaders, however, may not
survive politically. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro has largely followed the same
script as Trump by downplaying the risk of the pandemic. On March 15, despite
having been in close contact with several members of his administration who had
already contracted the disease, Bolsonaro joined a demonstration of his
supporters where he touched a reported 272 people. The Brazilian
president has claimed that his tests have come back negative. He also continues to argue that
the crisis is little more than a media conspiracy.
Last week, millions of people appeared at their windows in the big cities to bang pots and pans in a demand for Bolsonaro to step down. Even some of his conservative backers are outraged and have turned against him. After declaring in a December column in the conservative Estado de São Paulo that Bolsonaro is “unbeatable” in the next election, political commentator Eliane Cantanhede argued more recently, “I think he’s fatally wounded for the election [in 2022] … If the election was held today there is a big chance Bolsonaro would be defeated.”
COVID-19 affects people differently depending on their underlying conditions. The same holds true for politicians. The fittest will survive, while the politically weak will be weeded out.
Time for Transformation
A nuclear apocalypse is hypothetical. The worst effects of climate change are in the future. Neither nuclear disarmament nor radical cuts in carbon emissions have been on the table because of the unfortunate tendency of politicians to minimize the risks and ignore the already considerable short-term impacts.
The coronavirus crisis is not abstract.
It’s happening right now. Country after country has imposed quarantines,
dramatically changing how people live, work and interact. Governments are
considering massive bailouts to save the economy and bolster medical systems.
But those are just quick fixes.
“We changed the way we live, work and
travel to counter this pandemic, why can we not do the same to counter the
climate emergency?” asks Lorenzo Marsili on Al Jazeera. “Why should we go back to
a deadly status quo now that we know it is within our power to transform the
way we live and organise our economy and society?”
When the quarantines end, as they
inevitably will, the world will experience the same kind of rebound in carbon
emissions that happened after the end of the 2009 financial crisis. So, the
economic response to this pandemic must incorporate features of the Green New
Deal, or we will be jumping out of a frying pan and into a literal fire.
COVID-19 is a near-death experience for the
human race. Just as individuals often react to such experiences by transforming
their lives, the current crisis should force a reevaluation of the status quo. Anything
less will be just a temporary stay of execution.
*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]
The views expressed in this article
are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial
policy.
