Thread by @davekarpf

Folks, Bret Stephens’s latest column might be an instant-classic within his oeuvre.

He thinks the problem with the Trump administration’s bungled response isn’t corruption or incompetence.

He thinks it’s a problem of “big government.”

This is stupid, but it’s a non-malicious stupid. Bret just doesn’t have the humility or mental agility to treat a world-historic pandemic as something that doesn’t comfortably fit into his existing framework.

“Government is the problem,” so government must be the problem.
(2)

It leads him to mischaracterize the nature of the catastrophic government response.

He notes that Seattle’s testing was shut down, but categorizes it as a problem of too much red tape.

That’s... not what happened there.
(3/x)

It leaves him ignoring how trump is rewarding business cronies. He doesn’t notice that ventilators are being handed out as a partisan patronage scheme and states are being forced to bid against each other.

No no, “local control is good,” so local control must be good.
(4)

It leaves him arguing that the solution to the pandemic will come through reducing red tape by cutting regulations.

His example: Andrew Cuomo’s emergency response.

Ask yourself, if Jared Kushner’s team had *less* oversight and had to obey *fewer* rules, would that help?
(5/x)

Cuomo and basically every other governor (except the Republican governors playing for favors) have been demanding a national response.

“Big government” is GOOD at a time like this. Big government can distribute checks, and PPE, and ramp up testing.
(6/x)

“Big government” can also choose which regulations ought to be temporarily waived. And that’s good too.

But you want one big nationally-coordinated effort. Not 1,000 pandemic-response-flowers blooming.
(7/x)

This is pretty basic stuff.

The problem with Trump’s response is that it has been half-assed, focused on winning the news cycle, and undermined by the pantheon of corrupt, incompetent goons he surrounds himself with.

That can’t be mapped on a scale of big-v-small govt.
(8/x)

But Bret, bless his heart, stopped encountering new ideas around the turn of the millennium.

And Bret gets told he is very clever and thought-provoking no matter what he puts on the page.
(9/x)

So in a moment when, for instance, privacy advocates are seriously grappling with the trade-offs involved in mass surveillance for contact-tracing, Bret still sounds like a guy repurposing the Cliff’s Notes version of a Ronald Reagan speech.

(10/x)

Bret has nothing but time right now, and he uses it to rethink nothing at all.

His columns are rote, empty. They’re like a greatest hits album by a band that had one radio hit in the 90s.

His intellectual laziness is, as always, the most reliable part of his writing.
(Fin)