How, exactly, have the most powerful and influential voices on the American right—from President Donald Trump on down—come to place so much faith in an unproven miracle cure in the midst of a deadly pandemic? Hydroxychloroquine is an antimalarial drug that’s also used to treat chronic conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, but the conservative commentariat has rallied to it as the great panacea of the moment—a Covid-19 knockout drug that will bring the present plague of mass suffering and mass death engulfing the nation to a blessed halt, if only the forces of liberalism will let it.
Of course, there’s more than a little desperation in the president’s own infatuation with the drug. There’s nothing that Trump would like more than to emerge as the champion promoter of a dark-horse cure for the devastation wrought by the coronavirus. It would be the ultimate confirmation of his notorious pledge in his nomination speech before the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland: “I alone can fix it.”
But the cultural appeal of hydroxychloroquine runs far deeper on the modern right, as New Republic staff writer Alex Shephard explains. Peddling the fantasy of quick-fix, mail-order remedies to many of the country’s most intractable political and socioeconomic challenges has been the stock in trade of the American conservative movement for four decades and counting. That the pitch can now be wrapped up in the person of a huckster-president is just further proof of its wonder-working promise for true believers on the right, Shephard notes:
The right’s embrace of hydroxychloroquine points to a larger distrust of elite expertise, even in the midst of a crisis. The president, desperate to stem the damage of an outbreak that he personally exacerbated through negligence and denial, is consulting Fox News hosts and hucksters alongside the country’s top experts. Conservative media is following his lead, while also assembling a narrative that can be used to defend the president down the line: that the president’s opponents are suppressing a miracle drug in order to damage the country economically and the president politically.
In other words, the quest for a quick finish to the Covid-19 crisis maps perfectly onto the crude mobilization of culture-war grievances that helped elevate Trump to power in the first place. All the key elements are already there—a sinister coterie of elite, educated experts ordering the economy to a functional standstill; a pandemic initially dismissed as a politically motivated “hoax” and now being briskly repurposed into a foreign-minted agent of biomedical subversion; and—not least, by a long shot—a durable messaging system carefully refined and modulated over the years to present a strong dose of snake oil to serve as an eleventh-hour remedy for the savvy ideological initiates clued in to its miraculous healing properties. “The mailing lists that kicked off the country’s postwar turn to the right were a mix of strident conservatism and direct-marketing schemes,” Shephard observes—and the same formulaic appeals have kicked all but automatically into gear in the face of the coronavirus pandemic: “The right-wing media is funded by sketchy cures being touted by sketchy merchants and is thus hard-wired to push dubious medical advice.”
And in hydroxychloroquine, this vast promotional apparatus has found a plausible-sounding cure-all to hawk to its audience. One controversial study conducted in France indicated that the drug could effectively treat some Covid-19 symptoms, but four of the tiny sample of 42 patients treated with the drug died. The study also didn’t come under double-blind review, or meet many other standards of comprehensive drug testing.
But never mind: Armed with only the faintest, most dubious reports of clinical success, the conservative media complex has been relentlessly promoting hydroxychloroquine as though it were the second coming of the polio vaccine. Over a three-day period in late March, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters reports, Fox News featured no less than 109 rapturous mentions of the drug, with at least one dispatch claiming, in defiance of all research findings, that it boasted a “100 percent cure rate.” Such irresponsible, fact-averse journalism has dire real-world consequences: Not only has the hydroxychloroquine craze resulted in one death; it’s also created dramatic shortages of the drug for patients who need it to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other debilitating conditions. That, of course, has done nothing to arrest all the overheated hype and hucksterism on Fox and elsewhere: Prominent right-wing leaders and pundits have made it clear that they’d condone a mass die-off of the population in order to get the investment economy back on its feet, after all; they can easily rationalize more suffering and death in the name of their own time-honored business model of culture-war profiteering.
—Chris Lehmann, Editor |
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