A friend who is an attorney in Cocoa, Florida, sent this article as a commentary on yesterday’s blog entitled “Seven Days Away.” I hope you find it interesting as an insight about conservative\/Republican doublespeak.<\/p>\n
This article is from the Century Foundation, a progressive and independent think tank founded in 1919. Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow.<\/p>\n
The Fatal Flaws of Conservatives Championing the \u2018Recklessly Unmasked\u2019
\nConor Williams
\nTue, September 14, 2021, 10:27 AM<\/p>\n
Whether they\u2019re shrouding their policy preferences under \u201coriginalist\u201d jurisprudence or mounting angry defenses of the Western intellectual tradition against perceived threats from Critical Race Theory, American conservatives are fond of framing their arguments in terms of a rigid code of fixed ideals.
\nThey pride themselves on their allegiance to a moral code, a firm compass that distinguishes them from progressives who are always \u2014 allegedly \u2014 trying to erode the core principles that make America great.
\nWhich is why it\u2019s so tragicomic to witness conservative state leaders in Florida, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona, and beyond search for some shred of principled moral reasoning to justify their mandates forbidding school districts from requiring masks on their campuses.
\nIt\u2019s a tough task, since most of conservatives\u2019 usual lines just don\u2019t fit. They certainly can\u2019t justify their actions in the name of American federalism and local control of schools. It\u2019s hard to squash local school boards\u2019 abilities to determine whether or not students and staff must wear masks \u2026 in the name of local control. In his government\u2019s announcement determining the masking rules for every locale in his state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott explained that \u201cTexans, not government, should decide their best health practices.\u201d
\nNor can conservatives shield themselves in the name of protecting personal responsibility. If the last 18 months have taught Americans anything, it\u2019s that the cautious also suffer when their feckless, carefree neighbors ignore the pandemic\u2019s risks. Which, by the way, is also why they\u2019ve shelved their \u201cpro-life\u201d rhetoric for this particular debate.
\nSo conservative leaders have made a desperate grab for the banner of individual freedom. For instance, in his executive order limiting districts\u2019 pandemic mitigation efforts, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis insisted he was acting to \u201cprotect parents\u2019 freedom to choose whether their children wear masks.\u201d That is, masks can\u2019t be required at school during a still-raging pandemic because that would disempower families from choosing what\u2019s best for their children and, presumably, teachers from managing their own tolerance for risking infection.
\nBut this is a profound distortion of America\u2019s traditional approach to freedom. The Founders wrote comprehensively about how virtuous behavior and personal responsibility were fundamental to sustaining individual liberty. It was obvious to them that the stability of America\u2019s limited, representative government rested upon individuals behaving responsibly. \u201cVirtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,\u201d George Washington wrote in his Farewell Address. And, when it\u2019s politically convenient, modern conservatives know this. \u201cFreedom relies on virtue for its survival,\u201d announced a 2007 report from the conservative Heritage Foundation. Its authors continued: \u201cIt is virtuous citizens taking personal responsibility for their actions and exercising mutual responsibility for the welfare of others who make ordered liberty possible.\u201d
\nIn his towering 1859 essay, \u201cOn Liberty,\u201d English philosopher John Stuart Mill, articulated his \u201charm principle,\u201d one of that tradition\u2019s famous definitions of individual freedom. \u201cThe only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will,\u201d Mill wrote, \u201cis to prevent harm to others.\u201d The gist of the principle should be intuitive to most conservatives \u2014 indeed, to most Americans. It\u2019s the intellectual ancestor of the old American saw: my freedom to swing my fist ends precisely at the point where it hits your nose.
\nIn that vein, then, the case for curtailing families\u2019 liberty to send their children unmasked hinges upon whether or not this will cause harm to others. This is not a complicated calculation.
\nTo be sure, throughout the pandemic, it has been both tempting and fashionable to claim that the coronavirus is not particularly threatening for children. Further, advocates from across the political spectrum have made a series of cavalier claims about the relative safety of school settings. Last March, Brown University economist and prominent school reopening advocate Emily Oster wrote an article for The Atlantic under the headline, \u201cYour Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma.\u201d In his executive order Gov. DeSantis cited Oster\u2019s research as proof that school masking was unnecessary.
\nHowever, much of the confident talk about the safety of school reopening comes from earlier moments in the pandemic when fewer children were being tested and attending in-person schooling. As in-person school reopening launches across the country, there is increasing evidence that children are more susceptible to catching the Delta variant than previous strains of the coronavirus. It\u2019s driving higher numbers of cases among children, perhaps because those under the age of 12 are still not yet eligible to receive any of the coronavirus vaccines. There is some evidence that it increases the risk of hospitalization for people of all ages.
\nData on the latest pandemic spike suggest that these concerns are warranted. Pediatric hospitals \u2014 particularly in hotspot communities in the South \u2014 are running out of beds. Test positivity rates for school-aged children appear to be increasing almost everywhere in the country. That is, more of the kids being tested for COVID are testing positive. The World Health Organization has set an overall 5 percent case positivity rate as the baseline threshold for when it is safe for governments to reopen in general. Perhaps we might tolerate a slightly higher rate for school reopenings, but Florida\u2019s positivity rate for kids is four times the WHO\u2019s benchmark: in that state, one in five children tested between Aug. 20 and Aug. 26 had COVID. Meanwhile, over 98 percent of Americans live in counties above the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\u2019s threshold for requiring universal indoor masking.
\nFinally, in elementary schools with universal masking and widespread COVID testing, the CDC estimates that nearly one-quarter of students will be infected in the first three months of school. Remove students\u2019 masks, and their models suggest that nearly 80 percent of an elementary school\u2019s students will be infected in the same time frame. These CDC models are looking gloomily prescient: as Georgia schools near the end of their first month since reopening, the state\u2019s Department of Public Health reports that in-person schools are spreading the pandemic. Gwinnett County Public Schools, just outside Atlanta, is averaging enough cases per day to infect at least 20 percent of its students and staff by the end of the school year, and possibly more if case rates increase with colder weather \u2014 despite requiring masks at all times on campus.
\nIn such an environment, at such a precarious moment for public health, the application of Mill\u2019s harm principle is relatively straightforward. The new variant of the virus is already threatening the health of children and families, and it will threaten more if schools reopen without mitigation measures in place. Universal masking is just the simplest, easiest and cheapest of these. Political and education leaders are absolutely justified in taking all of the standard approaches to slowing the spread of the coronavirus \u2014 including mandatory masking, vaccine mandates and strict quarantine protocols for schools with new COVID cases.
\nNotably, as the Delta variant began taking hold of campuses around the country, even Prof. Oster tweeted a few caveats and Brown University took its page touting Gov. DeSantis\u2019 citation of her research offline.
\nThat conservatives are abandoning their prior moral convictions to explain their behavior makes clear that the whole effort to \u201cprotect the freedom\u201d of the recklessly unmasked is really about scoring political points in a moment of enormous peril for children, families and the country. Indeed, in the face of school districts\u2019 opposition to his executive order, conservative leaders in Florida are offering school vouchers to families determined to send their children to schools unmasked. Note, of course, that this extension of freedom, in the form of \u201cempowering families,\u201d doesn\u2019t isolate the risks only to the private schools willing to tolerate these unmasked families\u2019 choice. It simply provides the virus with more vectors to transmit, threatening everyone in Florida \u2014 and the rest of the country.
\nWorst of all, it\u2019s not even the first time that conservatives have tried to use the virus as leverage for attacking public schools and educators. Last summer, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos threatened to convert federal education funding into a school voucher system that would allow parents to enroll in private schools willing to open into the teeth of the fall\/winter 2020 surge in COVID cases.
\nTo be fair, modern conservatives\u2019 brand of radical individualism is taken into account elsewhere in the Western intellectual canon. English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that this rugged freedom was something like humans\u2019 natural state \u2026 each of us fending for ourselves and charting our own life courses. Famously, however, he warned that this was incompatible with civil society, for in this state of nature, life was \u201csolitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend who is an attorney in Cocoa, Florida, sent this article as a commentary on yesterday’s blog entitled “Seven Days Away.” I hope you find it interesting as an insight about conservative\/Republican doublespeak. This article is from the Century Foundation, a progressive and independent think tank founded in 1919. Conor P. Williams is a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-by-robert-fischer"],"yoast_head":"\n