It was always the right-wing pushing everyone to the right. And politicians need to be pushed back, and the only people who can do that is constituents. Quite a catch 22.
People have been misled about the opposition to public health, and the dangers of MAGA MAHA.
It doesn’t excuse the Democratic party or politicians generally for ceding ground on public health, but just like with the immigration issue, many of these people in positions of power really believe they’re moving with majority public sentiment. And maybe it’s public sentiment to some degree or maybe it’s a lot of disinformation. These politicians aren’t special in any way, and are subject to manipulation, corruption, disinformation, and all the rest of it.
The CDC had been a flawed institution for decades, but the Trump administration has certainly dismantled the CDC in a way no other president ever did.
So this comment aged like milk, as they say. But it’s still strangely incredibly common to see this sentiment online, and people hyper focused on someone who isn’t president anymore and ignoring the drastically bad person in power right now.
I have been highly critical of Jeff Zients and the public health corruption of the left, liberals, and Dems. But Joe Biden wasn’t the one whose administration was inviting in all the Great Barrington Declaration weirdos back in 2020… that was the Trump administration in 2020. If Trump had two consecutive terms they would’ve implemented their forced infection schemes and who knows if the vaccines would’ve made it to the public at all at that point. There’s no reason to think a Trump win in 2020 would’ve been better than the Biden administration, and it’s obvious now, and most of us knew this would happen, that the Trump win in 2024 is exponentially worse for public health.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people still don’t fully understand the extent of the damage that’s already been done by RFKJr and the big boondoggle bill. And it was always the right-wing plan, they laid it out in the Great Barrington Declaration published in October 2020, and Project 2025 published in 2023. None of what’s happening now is a surprise; it was predicted with a Trump election win.
And I don’t let public health and doctors and scientists off the hook for covid minimizing or otherwise helping the right-wing. There were so many covid twitter hotshots and people who abandoned the vulnerable, the disabled, and any serious efforts at covid mitigation the minute they presumed they personally weren’t in serious danger, or thought it wasn’t lucrative or beneficial for their personal brand to go against “covid is over” propaganda. And now those people are claiming to be able to save us, and are making a comeback on social media too, after helping the contrarians and the pandemic deniers by soft-selling manufacturing mild. And yeah, these people are “pushing back” now that it’s their thing again, but what good is it doing? Do we really expect them to accomplish anything when they never did before?
So Democratic party politicians largely just believed they were moving to meet the people, just like my representative in Congress, Matt Cartwright thought the way to win in this district was to go anti-immigration in campaign ads. He obviously believed his constituents and his devoted base would either vote for him either way or that we were mostly all anti-immigrant racists. This is while Rob Bresnahan, who won the election, ran on fighting utility companies for the little guy, and making it illegal for congresspeople to trade stocks. In other words, left policies. He also promised not to cut Medicaid. And of course all this is pretty rich considering he’s been making out like a bandit stock trading ahead of key votes where he voted to cut Medicaid.
It’s true that Dems haven’t been hearing enough from enough Dem voters. For years I’ve urged people to write reps. And I’ve constantly heard from leftists and liberals alike all sorts of reasons they didn’t want to write their reps, or thought it wasn’t necessary or effective. In the absence of people writing their reps, lobbyists fill that void, and the consultants and the operatives move in, and I can’t help thinking that they’re double agents, who tell politicians all sorts of lies about what their constituents really believe. That’s got to be what explains a lot of those social media influencers who’ve made a comeback for Trump 2.0.
And just look at how some of the polls are phrased. It’s like asking someone if they think cancer is a terrible disease, and everyone agrees with that, but what you don’t know is that some small strange percentage of those people think various cancer treatments should be banned and people should just take supplements and go to spiritual healing sessions. So are you really on the same page with those people? Do you even know? And I think that’s what’s happened to a lot of people who think they’re on the same page with public health and disability justice, but in reality they’re finding community with people who are angry about the same things, at least in the moment, only to not realize people have some really problematic ideas about public health or the type of solutions for disease.
It’s dangerous to lean into apocalyptic hopium, the accelerationist fantasies that if things get bad enough some tipping point will be reached and things will just miraculously right themselves. That’s never how things happen, that’s never how change happens. It’s also something pushed by James Carville. I’ve also heard people surmise that a Trump presidency could bring a communist paradise, even though “fully automated luxury communism” is a well known joke by now surely. Politics is not a crockpot and there’s no set it and forget it. Wherever there’s a power vacuum someone will fill it. The uncomfortable truth is that once there’s an authoritarian government, even if it gets overthrown, it typically gets replaced by another authoritarian regime. This has happened in Rwanda, Uganda, Egypt, and it could happen anywhere because it’s actually typical.
It’s a far more practical plan for people disgusted with whatever in society to find other people who want the same solutions and policies, not just the same gripes, and then figure out what have been actual effective strategies, and what not to spin your wheels on. And don’t buy behind the scenes hopium peddling or people pushing inaction via doomerism. The truth is that politicians are politicians and once in a position of power, they have to be pressured to do the right thing – they’re all corruptible, but many are also moveable.
Don’t wait for everybody before speaking up. We don’t need to convince everyone before moving forward, and we may already have more on board than it appears anyway. We won’t know until we try. Chloe Humbert Aug 08, 2023 In 1928, James A. Tobey wrote in the American Journal of Public Health and urged people to write their representatives and senators to support a public health science bill that was being countered with reactionary mischaracterizations, and Tobey said, “It would be helpful if sanitarians would communicate with their United States Senators and Representatives regarding this important matter. Do it now.”13 This was taking place “after” the 1918 influenza pandemic. But there were more surges of the flu throughout the 1920s,14 as well as the spread of other preventable infectious diseases like tuberculosis.15 Interested people moved things forward, and pressured for the prioritization of health & safety, and so public health advanced to a point where flu epidemics and a lot of infections became a thing of the past by 1950, including smallpox. Warren G. Harding ran for president in 1920 with “return to normalcy” as his slogan,16 but there were as many as 110,000 reported cases of smallpox in the United States that year, then cases fell in the 1930s and disappeared by 1950.17 During that time, research, epidemiology, and disease control measures expanded greatly, because “From Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s through Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s, a federal role in services affecting the health and welfare of individual citizens became well established.”18 This was because the sanitarians and others communicated with their representatives.