Motus Mentis

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of this Wuhan-virus emergency is how clearly it reveals the breadth and depth of the great fissure dividing the nation. In times of crisis, families set aside their internal squabbles:

Me and my brother
We fight with each other
But woe betide
The guy from outside.

When the towers fell in 2001, George W. Bush was the U.S. president, and Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York. Both were polarizing figures, to say the least, and both were roundly despised by the the Blue faction who, then as now, held the commanding heights of culture and media. But in those grim days, with the stench still rising from Ground Zero, and the certain knowledge that an invisible enemy was out to kill us all, a great surge of fellowship bound us together as a nation. It didn’t last all that long, but at least it happened.

Not now. As frightening an enemy as this virus has been for the nation and the world, for Blue there is an enemy still greater: the man in the White House. Whatever comity and commonality still existed in 2001 was enough to remind us of what remained of our familial national ties — and, as several now-deceased parties in the Dar-al-Islam were to learn in the following years, “woe betide the guy from outside” was still in effect. Now our own president is, for half the nation, “the guy from outside”: the external enemy who must be destroyed, no matter what the cost.

The extent to which this is now an axiom, an unshakable article of moral faith, is easily seen by the way that people who associate with the president are treated. I have a very close friend, a man of high intelligence, with whom I was chatting about the crisis the other day. Being generally a Blue-leaning sort, and a consumer of mainstream news (we usually get around this by just not talking about politics), he lit into Mr. Trump for what he understood to be catastrophic mismanagement. I said that while I’m sure in hindsight errors could be found, I thought there was an awful lot of hostile spin going around, and suggested that if Barack Obama were still president, and had handled every aspect of this emergency just as Trump has, he’d be getting much softer treatment from the press. My friend disagreed, with considerable vigor. I pointed out that even Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom (!) had praised Trump for his response, and my friend said they were just saying that because they had to.

Think of that: the strength of this faith is such that, rather than entertaining, even for a moment, the possibility that Donald Trump had done a single thing right, my friend was forced instead to accuse two prominent Democratic governors of lying — and he did so entirely without hesitation or reflection. The same has been true about other public figures, formerly universally respected, such as William Barr, Anthony Fauci, and Deborah Birx; they have all been assumed after decades of distinguished and uncontroversial public service, to have been corrupted by the Devil. That is the power of the repulsive force that divides us. One half of the nation believes that the other half is not merely wrong, but evil. And there can be no compromise, no alliance, with evil. Even if it kills us.

To borrow a metaphor from Chiang Kai-shek, the Wuhan virus is a disease of the skin — but the nation was already sick unto death with a disease of the heart.