It’s telling that Trump compares COVID-19 to the seasonal flu & to highway deaths, both of which are not, for a variety of reasons, analogous to Coronavirus, but doesn’t compare it to gun deaths, which are, & are actually deadlier more than car accidents. psmag.com/social-justice…
The disanalogy is that preventive measures, led by federal, state, and local governments, are in place so that people can get, for example, pre-emotive flu shots, and are licensed before they can drive, and then drive on roads with speed limits, regulated by law enforcement./2
The analogy is that we know, by comparison with the policies and practices in other countries, that government policies can make a difference in reducing gun deaths and Coronavirus fatalities, and that U.S. efforts in these areas have, for a variety of reasons, lagged./3
By analogizing COVID-19 deaths to seasonal flu and car accidents, Trump is trying to get us to become fatalists about them as “tragic things that are basically unpreventable,” just as the gun lobby and the “thoughts and prayers” politicians have tried to do for gun deaths. /4
All of these things are, like climate change, political in the sense that outcomes are affected by government policies and personnel. One of the tricks of those in power to make us complacent is to claim that they are, if not natural, beyond the scope of politics or.../5
...they invoke what Albert O. Hirschman called the “perversity thesis,” which is the claim that government action would make things worse than if we simply left the problem alone. /6
amazon.com/Rhetoric-React…
amazon.com/Rhetoric-React…
It is easier to note the disanalogy in the case of Trump & COVID-19 because we are seeing in real time how other countries have flattened the curve through effective government action, while Trump has repeatedly failed. We don’t need to look back or project forward./7
Another reason that the analogy to gun deaths is apt is that in both cases we are told that such deaths, while perhaps preventable, are costs we must pay in tribute to a greater, if abstract, good, such as “freedom” (in the case of gun deaths) or, as we hear now, the “market.”/8
