{"id":34658,"date":"2022-05-06T12:43:43","date_gmt":"2022-05-06T08:43:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=34658"},"modified":"2022-05-06T12:43:43","modified_gmt":"2022-05-06T08:43:43","slug":"why-covid-19-gaslighting-by-politicians-is-so-dangerous-for-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/why-covid-19-gaslighting-by-politicians-is-so-dangerous-for-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Covid-19 gaslighting by politicians is so dangerous for democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jason Hannan<\/strong><\/span>
\nAssociate Professor of Rhetoric & Communications,
\nUniversity of Winnipeg<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"A near-naked participant protests during a \u2018Rolling Thunder\u2019 demonstration in Ottawa on April 30, 2022.<\/span>\u00a0THE CANADIAN PRESS\/Sean Kilpatrick<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As Covid-19 continues to evolve, surprise, disappoint and frustrate us, efforts by politicians to pretend it\u2019s behind us is a dangerous form of gaslighting that will deepen societal divisions.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, uprising at the United States Capitol building, the Republican Party faced a crucial moral test: whether to reject\u00a0the baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 general election had been \u201cstolen\u201d from Donald Trump or to embrace that dangerous falsehood as official party dogma.<\/span><\/p>\n

After gauging the political winds, the Republican Party cynically chose to embrace the falsehood,\u00a0going so far as to ostracize\u00a0party members who upheld the truth. In doing so, the GOP solidified its mutation from a political party to a political cult.<\/span><\/p>\n

After two years of acknowledging the dangers of Covid-19, something eerily similar has happened with public health policy across the western world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Live with it\u2019<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Federal and municipal governments in North America, Europe and Australia\u00a0have begun lifting basic protections\u00a0like vaccine and mask mandates, winding down public testing, ending contact tracing and withholding critical public health data, like case counts,\u00a0hospitalization numbers, wastewater results and\u00a0even the size\u00a0of local outbreaks. Pandemic management has been transformed from a public health problem to an individual one.<\/span><\/p>\n

The now-quaint 2020 slogan \u201cWe\u2019re all in this together\u201d has since been replaced with the dire prescription \u2014 \u201cAssess your own risk.\u201d Political leaders have reversed course, urging their constituents to \u201clearn to live with Covid.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The dismantling of pandemic infrastructure, however, suggests that those constituents must learn to live instead as if Covid-19 no longer exists. By removing basic protections that enabled us to survive the pandemic for the last two years, public health policy has effectively been rewritten in light of the desires, demands and delusions of anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers and Covid-19 denialists.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fiction vs. reality<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Western politicians and public health officials have managed to craft a fictional universe\u00a0in which we have reached endemicity, where\u00a0infection is now \u201cmild\u201d and\u00a0getting \u201cmilder\u201d by the variant, where Covid-19 is \u201clike the flu,\u201d where mass infection builds a \u201cwall of immunity\u201d and where voluntary vaccination alone is our ticket out of the pandemic.<\/span><\/p>\n

This sunny picture has numerous problems.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, not only are we\u00a0nowhere near endemicity, there\u00a0would be nothing\u00a0to celebrate about it if we were.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, the glib talk of mild infection overlooks Covid-19\u2019s frightening vascular and neurological effects.\u00a0Those infected by it\u00a0are at increased risk of serious\u00a0heart complications, including inflammation, acute coronary artery disease and cardiac arrest. Even mild cases can lead to changes\u00a0in brain structure.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to\u00a0one recent meta-analysis, 43 per cent of Covid-19 survivors experienced symptoms of\u00a0what\u2019s known as long Covid, signalling a coming nightmare for\u00a0public health,\u00a0the economy\u00a0and education. For a supposedly mild disease, Covid-19 notably led to hospital collapse in both the\u00a0United Kingdom\u00a0and Canada in April 2022.<\/span><\/p>\n

Public gaslighting<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Yet none of these grim realities are acknowledged by politicians who insist that we \u201cjust move forward\u201d and \u201cget on with our lives,\u201d and who repeat the \u201cfreedom convoy\u201d talking point that we\u00a0need not be \u201cafraid.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a vast chasm between the Covid-19 fictions of politicians and the realities of\u00a0hospital wards\u00a0and\u00a0long Covidclinics. The downplaying, dismissal and denial of these realities amount to\u00a0public gaslighting, a reckless political manoeuvre with unsettling implications for the future of western democracies.<\/span><\/p>\n

As it turns out, we are still living in a\u00a0post-truth world. But this time, it\u2019s not Donald Trump who\u2019s distorting reality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead it\u2019s federal and municipal governments across the political spectrum gaslighting their citizens and constituents, denying the reality and severity of a pandemic that, once again, is\u00a0tearing through our communities\u00a0at\u00a0frightening speed, driven by\u00a0a highly contagious\u00a0and\u00a0rapidly evolving\u00a0virus.<\/span><\/p>\n

Undermining democracy<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A functioning democracy requires some common ground upon which its citizens can agree. Covid-19 gaslighting erodes that common ground. It erodes trust in government and public health, as well as institutions, like\u00a0school boards, that follow their cue.<\/span><\/p>\n

It undermines the public authority of medicine and biomedical science to guide us through the pandemic. Just as climate change has been subjected to \u201cbothsidesism,\u201d we now increasingly hear about \u201cboth sides\u201d of Covid-19. When politicians encourage us to \u201cmove on,\u201d Coviddenialism becomes a respectable opinion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite our habit of entertaining \u201cboth sides\u201d of many issues, some things just aren\u2019t a matter of political opinion: whether\u00a0Trump won the 2020 election, whether climate change is real and whether we\u2019re still in a pandemic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, western political leaders and some public health officials have decided to indulge the worst kind of individualist impulse: the desire to\u00a0choose your own reality, including the fantasy that the pandemic is over.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is the unfortunate consequence of a market-driven society in which truth is just\u00a0one more commodity, where the line between citizenship and consumerism is dissolved and where many feel entitled to cancel election results and the pandemic alike just as they would an order from Amazon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Erosion of trust<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps most tragically, Covid-19 gaslighting erodes our trust in each other. It feeds our mutual suspicion, paranoia, hostility and division. When infection risk is intrinsically social, the promotion of noxious ideological concepts like \u201cindividual choice\u201d and \u201cassessing your own risk\u201d only encourages us to blame each other in the event of an outbreak.<\/span><\/p>\n

Public health policy modelled on\u00a0The Hunger Games<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0is a recipe for confusion and chaos.<\/span><\/p>\n

Covid-19 gaslighting will only deepen our existing social divisions and exacerbate our culture wars, further eroding our already fragile democracies. As SARS-CoV-2 continues to\u00a0evolve,\u00a0surprise,\u00a0disappoint\u00a0and\u00a0frustrate\u00a0us at every turn, Covid-19 gaslighting will drive citizens deeper into isolated and self-enclosed silos, online and off-line.<\/span><\/p>\n

It will further encourage the violent trolling of\u00a0health-care workers\u00a0and scientists, and feed dangerously reactionary politics. Extremism is the only possible beneficiary of this erosion of public trust.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 6 May 2022<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Jason Hannan Associate Professor of Rhetoric & Communications, University of Winnipeg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":34659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8348],"tags":[32848,25780,21808,22005,32849,32847,24878,14864],"class_list":["post-34658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-conversation","tag-anti-maskers","tag-anti-vaxxers","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-freedom-convoy","tag-gaslighting","tag-lockdowns","tag-public-health"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/protests.jpg?fit=1200%2C565&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-910","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}