Strange Fortune

The following came up in a discussion about the results from this week's Presidential election:

Honestly, [the] Democrats got extremely lucky. If it weren't for Coronavirus, Trump would have easily beat Joe Biden.

Grand scheme of things, this is a true statement. While committed Democrats were sure to turn out for whomever the Democratic nominee was, even if it had been the proverbial "ham sandwich," at the margins, it's not at all clear that enough sometime Democrats would have turned up at the polls in swing states without the perception of incompetence and indifference on the part of the President.

But as a figure of American speech, it's a different matter. Thought, generally speaking, is believed to model on language. The whole point of Newspeak in George Orwell's classic 1984 was to allow the party to influence and constrain thought by restricting the language that people had at their disposal. Of course, it's hard to know if such a scheme would actually work; whether "double-plus ungood" would manage to be different from "very bad" or merely a cumbersome semantic substitution is still unknown. But it's not particularly out of left field (to use another colloquialism) to think that there's not much difference conceptually between "The Democrats were fortunate to have a deadly pandemic occur during an election year" and "The deaths of a quarter-million people were in the Democrats' interests." And from there, the idea that the nationwide outbreak is a political hoax, or even that it was intentionally triggered because of the political impacts, isn't that much of a leap.

And that sense, that one of the "silver linings" of a worldwide disaster is the partisan advantage to be gained from it, leads to the idea that the people who lead political parties simply don't care about the well-being of the average citizen. (At best.) The saying "never let a perfectly good crisis go to waste," doesn't help, either. It is, I think, just another manifestation of the idea that people involved in politics are a separate class of people from the populace as a whole, with different, and often mutually-exclusive interests. It may only be one in a myriad of obstacles to a feeling of national unity, but it's no less important for that.