On Our National Angst-Fatigue

I have been dedicating all my free time to ancestry research these past few days, so blogging something reasonably intelligent almost every day has taken a back seat. But at least I did discover that Robert E. Lee was my "4th cousin, 7 times removed." So, ummm, there's that.

The news of late is about skyrocketing COVID-19 infection rates. My state is one of the few that has not seen increasing numbers of late. But deaths from the infections remain low (relative to the peak back in April and May), so my admittedly unscientific read on the situation is that much of the public is decidedly unconcerned. 

I think there is often a natural lifespan to feelings of intense anxiety. Any rationale that would allow people to loosen the restrictions, or to simply relax and get back to real life, provides thereby a plausible relief from the strain of longterm worry. This is another way of saying that people often believe what they want to believe. People are tired of the restrictions, and so theories that the books are cooked, that the numbers have been tinkered with for political reasons, seem all the more acceptable. Thus, they spread like wildfire in the form of social media memes.

Secondly, these theories serve the interests of the president. They justify support for his desire to fully ramp up economic activity. He is facing two interlocking crises, the pandemic and the economic slowdown. He needs to downplay the former (or declare it a politically-motivated hoax) in order to conquer the latter. 

And, given that the election is just 4 months away, he needs to do it quickly. He needs to undermine trust in the statistical reporting. He needs to Tweet endlessly about hoaxes. He needs to threaten school districts if they don't fully re-open in the Fall, and threaten hospitals with the sending of the National Guard to collect their statistics. He is fighting an imaginary war against an imaginary enemy, rather than a real war against the real enemy. 

But the problem is, as people grow tired of all this passionate intensity, they are for the same reason tired of Trump himself. Because while Trump needs to play down the Coronavirus, he needs to play up a sense of intense angst about his various imagined enemies. And people are just tired of it all.

Anyway, that's my read. It's going to be difficult for him to drum up the requisite angst on a national level to insure his re-election. He needs an angry, resentful, spitting-mad demographic base. He has his 43% who fit the bill, but can he find 8% more? I think people are tuning him out.