It’s as if conservatives are unable to grasp the concept of a positive-sum global problem, writes jonathanchait
Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images If you have followed coronavirus news through the mainstream media, you have experienced a story about a global pandemic, economic and cultural fallout, and federal government dysfunction. If you are following it through the conservative media, as tens of millions of Americans do, you have probably understood the story as a narrative centered primarily around China.
The crisis that grips conservatives is not the prospect that hospitals will be overwhelmed beyond their capacity and that hundreds of thousands of Americans might die. Indeed, some of the China-obsessed conservatives downplay the severity of the epidemic even as they foment rage at China for causing it. “If you point out that this whole thing came from China, why, that’s racism and xenophobia and all that — and yet we’ve got a bio-threat,” says Rush Limbaugh.
This is a completely bizarre passage to those of us who have read mainstream news. It credits Biden with outlining a “detailed plan,” but brushes aside this fact to complain that he describes the virus as a “global threat,” which it demonstrably is. And the reason the mainstream media and liberal elite are using the standard terms for the virus rather than the conservative movement’s preferred labels isn’t some delicacy about offending China. It’s that we don’t actually care at this point where it started. Biden focused his speech on ways to prevent Americans from suffering and dying, instead of on ways to blame China, because that seems more important, not because he’s secretly in hoc to the Chinese Communist Party .
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