President Trump is bleeding support in counties hit hard by the novel coronavirus, as previously pro-Trump voters rationally respond to evidence of his failures.
In recent years, democracy has come to resemble a washed-up celebrity – one who achieved peak global admiration in the early 1990s, before falling from grace amid a series of scandals, unflattering exposés, and identity crises.
In other words, it’s gotten hard to contemplate democracy without thinking of Donald Trump.
The sources of liberal democracy’s declining prestige are myriad and transnational. Throughout the West, universal enfranchisement has proven inadequate to arrest the growth of economic inequality, while checks on majoritarian tyranny have failed to protect (non-plutocratic) minorities from popular bigotry. Meanwhile, China’s rising power — and conspicuous ability to implement sweeping policy changes at exceptional speed — has increased the visibility and appeal of its authoritarian model.
Until they did.
The coronavirus crisis has done plenty to highlight our polity’s ailments. America has mounted the flimsiest pandemic response of any developed country. Incompetent federal leadership prevented the U. S. from using its exceptional resources to contain initial outbreaks. A culture of contempt for expertise and nihilistic individualism has inhibited Americans’ compliance with social-distancing protocols. As a result, our COVID-19 death toll is 130,000 and rising. And our national leadership is less interested in stemming the bleeding than benumbing the public to it, confident that a nation capable of shrugging off routine school shootings can acculturate itself to a biblical plague: According to the Washington Post,White House officials “hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.”
But they ain’t numb yet. In fact, for all the dispiriting things that COVID-19 has taught us about our country, it’s also illuminated a few signs of civic health.
The most obvious of these is the recent drop in Trump’s poll numbers. For once, the president’s gross incompetence has had political consequences. Since the onset of the COVID crisis, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s lead in national polls has swelled into double digits, while Trump’s approval rating has sunk near all-time lows. Even more encouraging than the national numbers, however, have been the trend lines among regions and constituencies hit hardest by the coronavirus.
