Permission to Hate
Permission to Hate
The reason for focusing on partisanship in Covid results is to give people moral permission to hate their neighbors
It seems we’re doing another round of “Covid Hit Republicans Harder”. This one was kicked off by Nate Silver in his piece on pre and post vaccine release.
The gist of Silver’s piece is
If we assume that Covid restrictions were aligned on a partisan basis (Democrats more restrictive, Republicans less restrictive), there is no good indication that Covid restrictions saved lives.
If we assume that vaccine hesitancy is aligned on a partisan basis (Democrats got vaccinated, Republicans did not), then it looks like vaccines saved lives.
I hate all this. Not the data work; I think Silver is an excellent analyst and an honest broker and I applaud his heroic efforts to try to convince the left-of-center that Covid restrictions were pointless.
Instead I hate that we are always casting the matter of Covid deaths into the realm of partisanship. The insistence that we always look at the data through the lens of who voted red or blue is vicious and terrible. It breaks families and communities, it encourages hate and derision. People have wished death on others and there is an entire community of truly awful people who celebrate the agonizing deaths of their political opponents.
Since the early days of this crisis, my line in the sand has always been “Do not blame people for contracting a disease”. Our culture is already filled with derision and hatred and Covid seems to have stripped away whatever grace and kindness used to be a default mode allowing people to put their darkest sense of moral damnation for The Other into overdrive.
I’m currently dusting off the data tools I built for my Fallacy of Red Covid piece and to re-running the analysis from a few angles more germane to the current debate. My point with that piece was that there are a lot of important factors that might cause Covid rates to differ over disparate population groups. The one that Martin Kulldorff mentioned was age (which elicited this rather acid response from Silver).
But there are others. There is clear correlation between income and Covid results, which we can see vividly when we decide to look only at the blue counties.
This is a chart from my Red Covid piece in which we look at only the blue counties and the correlation between wealth and Covid death rates is abundantly clear, with poor counties averaging three times as many Covid deaths as rich counties.
And when we look at partisanship as a factor in a state that is mostly poor counties, that partisanship correlation disappears. Below is a chart of Covid deaths in Mississippi (the poorest state) and it is similarly clear that there is no correlation between partisanship and the Covid death rate.
I also established in my piece that the red counties are more likely to be old, more rural, and poorer, all of which correlate to higher Covid death rates. I could not find county-by-county date on education, obesity, or multi-generational living situations, but I suspect some of those variable also show up in lopsided ways if we insist on only looking through our red-blue glasses.
What I really think (and Silver seems to agree on) is that it isn’t partisanship that is driving this. It’s vaccination rates. But despite 2 years of panic about the red-blue divide on vaccination, that divide is only a 13% difference and that difference is even lower among the elderly.
And (though I’m skeptical of self-reporting) the self-reported gap between college graduates and non-graduates is 21%.
So why are we talking about red vs blue when the bigger gaps are most likely between rich vs poor and high education vs lower education?
I believe it is because a lot of people find more comfort in hating the outgroup than in addressing the problem.
To be fair, there is a component of helplessness in here. After years of hammering away on Covid vaccinations, trying to force it through employers, university mandates, and OSHA mandates, there is nothing left to try. People who haven’t gotten it aren’t going to get it.
So who can we blame for this perceived policy failure? We can’t hate people for being low income. We can’t hate them for being low education. We can’t hate them for being old.
But we can hate them for being Republicans, even though that trait correlates with all those other things we can’t hate them for.
And so we do. We use partisanship as our proxy for hating all the people we claim to want to help, but secretly despise. And, as a treat, we get to hate the majority of Republicans who did get vaccinated. We get to attack the entire group as despicable and worthy of death because we found a data anomaly that is easily attributable to non-partisan factors.
This hatred does not arise from a simple view of the facts. This is a choice. This is a conscious decision: that the only appropriate way of looking at this data is a way that fosters resentment, social turmoil, condescension, and hatred. We’ve chosen this view because we need to blame someone. We need our enemies to be an inhuman Other, giving us moral permission to despise them.
Making Republicans "The Other” means you don’t have to do anything. Once you’ve turned them into “The Other”, you don’t have to worry about their poverty, their age, their lack of education or resources, or the state of a medical establishment that provides sub-par care.
Hell, you don’t even have to feel sad when they die.
I hate red vs blue discourse around Covid deaths. It is sloppy and lazy. It also means we don’t have to revisit our prior conclusions and investigate anomalies. The deep blue New Mexico had severe Covid restrictions and a 10% higher vaccine rate than their neighbor, the much redder Arizona. But the New Mexico Covid death rate was nearly identical to Arizona. Is anyone interested in why that is? The answer is “No. No one is interested because we actually don’t care what drives Covid deaths, we are too deeply addicted to partisan dunking.”
This week I’ll be running my county data along every county-by-county metric I have available to me & I’ll write about what I find. I’m going to fight the frustration and despair that expressed by Silver that none of this will make any difference. I think it will make a difference, just not immediately. The most powerful conversions I’ve seen is when someone swallows a narrative whole but, upon investigation, discovers it was built on sand.
People are reasonable and open to change, but the time frame for that is long and we have to be patient.
Looney Tunes: Cat Feud (1958)
This is the last of the four Marc Antony - Pussyfoot shorts, made 7 years after the original (review here). It’s odd how much the quality has slipped in this time. The slapstick gags are still pretty good, but instead of protecting the kitten from a owner’s misunderstanding, Marc Antony is engaged in slapstick combat with another cat who wants to steal the kitten’s food.
This is a far less sympathetic position & the wildly disproportionate punishment against the stray car for being hungry makes it all a little less funny. The antagonist doesn’t show enough malice to grant us permission to see him harmed like this.
There are other small things that make this a lesser cartoon. The kittens voice is much lower than before, so it doesn’t sound as cute, Marc Antony’s face isn’t nearly as expressive or exaggerated. It’s passable, but a far cry from the original.
I fail to see how lack of vaccination can be a policy failure. Unless your policy is to erode the right of an individual to use his or her own judgement. Then there’s the little problem of the vaccine itself causing harm. How is it not a policy failure to ignore that?
Great post, want to start with that.
My one critique:
"The reason for focusing on partisanship in Covid results is to people moral permission to hate their neighbors"
I don't think this is the primary reason, even though it has that effect. Like, I don't picture the authors of these pieces/studies saying "we need to give people moral permission to hate their neighbors".
It's more of an example of how our base instincts lead us to the well of confirmation bias. People with partisan brain view stuff through partisan lenses, and write partisan posts for partisan audiences that get a lot of likes, and people don't push back on it because it lines up with their partisan inclinations.
This doesn't undercut what you're saying; stuff like this does give people moral permission to hate their neighbors, but I don't think it's cultivated as intentionally as your subtitle suggests.
And for me, this is why I try to cultivate a nonpartisan mindset even though I certainly have partisan opinions. Tribalism short-circuits our ability to think critically.