Speaking to the Washington Examiner recently, Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank entrepreneur, talked about working on President Trump’s task force figuring out how to open the economy.
Why, he was asked, is that huge practical, but difficult, goal, which everyone should want, so divisively partisan? “It shouldn’t be,” he answered, “It shouldn’t be at all. And my interactions with the White House have not been partisan.”
He speculated that mutually exclusive certainties of Left and Right on this key question are stoked by social media, which has accelerated the velocity and ferocity of communication, and overwhelms facts and data with “tweets and opinion.”
This echoes Douglas Murray’s latest book, The Madness Of Crowds, in which two interwoven theses suggest not only that social media destroys the lives of people who step out of line on ideological matters, but also that we live in an epoch in which we are increasingly coerced into pretending we believe what we know to be untrue.
Murray’s focus is on “gender, race, and identity,” but conformity is imperiously demanded and viciously policed on other matters, too, and the coronavirus lockdown is one of them.
The question of when, how, and how much to revive commercial activity now that the curve of infection has been flattened has created an ideological fault line cleaving America, and the problem is no longer regarded, as it should be, as merely a serious, practical challenge.
It is usually fairly easy to tell where someone is on the ideological spectrum when one knows whether they approve or disapprove of decisions by states such as Georgia that have lifted restrictions so citizens may do such normal things as get a haircut or eat in a restaurant.
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, spoke in terms characteristic of the Left when he said, “Until we have a vaccine or an effective treatment or enough widespread immunity that new cases fail to materialize, the option of returning to normalcy doesn’t exist.”
This is a straw man. No one sensible argues that we should immediately return precisely to the status quo ante. They demand the lesser and entirely achievable goal of society being made functional again with new precautions in its modus operandi.
Certainly, there are some cranks who deliberately flout precautions and appear to think eschewing masks is a sign of freedom-loving self-reliance rather than a gross discourtesy to other people. But such people are exceptions. Most of those who want “normalcy” are like the owner of the place I get my hair cut, who emailed clients Wednesday aghast that Mayor Muriel Bowser extended the District of Columbia’s shutdown until June 8.
“We received some help through the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] to keep paying our employees and kept our staff intact but now the difficulty of another 4 weeks of shutdown are becoming dreadful,” he wrote plaintively. He would create a safe environment, he said, and asked customers to petition the mayor to treat his business as essential. He’s desperate.
But he is no radical, no knuckle-dragging militant — just a man who wants to avoid going bust and having to sack his staff. He and millions like him want to run their businesses sensibly for customers who wish to purchase their goods and services.
Praising the highly restrictive lockdown imposed in her state, Michigan Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow told the Washington Examiner, “It’s about medical science. That’s all this is about.” Actually, no, it isn’t. Politicians are not elected to take instructions or advice exclusively from medics, but to weigh difficult and often conflicting claims and make decisions for the general good.
They should not be hiding behind “science,” as though, especially on this novel plague, it was settled and generally agreed that restrictive lockdowns were the way to go. One of the reasons Sweden has been so heavily criticized is that it has allowed “normal” life to carry on, with modifications, and might prove that our leaders’ decision to drop America into an economic deep freeze was unnecessary.
With partisanship and ideological intransigence over the pandemic, we have blundered into the same rhetorical rut as we do on so many other issues. Instead of seeing differences of opinion as the inevitable outcome when normally intelligent people of goodwill consider a hugely difficult policy matter, too many people suggest disagreement can result only from foolishness or malignancy.
Mark Cuban said there were many things he’d recommended to the White House that had not been acted on. But he didn’t assume bad faith. He had sufficient humility to say that maybe some of his ideas “weren’t good enough.”
More of that spirit of compromise might help get this country off its knees and back to work.
