Although we are not even halfway through the current health and economic crisis brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not too early to consider how it will be remembered.
Not years from now — that is the responsibility of future generations — but rather this fall, when we cast our votes in state and federal elections. Neither Democrats nor Republicans want us to think that they are trying to use the memories of those who lost their lives or jobs to the virus for political gain. Nevertheless, the political battle over how in November we will remember what happened in March is well underway.
At a superficial level, the battle is between two different versions of events. Donald Trump and the Republican Party want us to remember March as a time when strong and capable presidential leadership defended the nation from the duplicity of China and the World Health Organization.
Joe Biden and the Democratic Party want us to remember March as a time when an inept president missed one opportunity after another to prepare the nation for a pandemic obviously heading our way.
Conflicting instant histories of COVID-19 are now circulating far and wide, especially among each party’s highly partisan followers predisposed to believe what they want to hear. The algorithms of Facebook and the programming decisions of cable news networks designed to monetize this confirmation bias all but guarantee it.
But at a deeper level, the battle is over how individuals and families will remember their personal experiences with COVID-19 and place them within a larger context. Memories shared among family and friends gain a powerful conversational truth. Although these intimate collective memories can be influenced by political ads and stories heard in the mass media, they have the quality of being authentic and real, because they are.
Whatever story the Trump administration tells about its actions this spring, families across the nation will remember their direct experiences with the virus: whether or not they were able to get tested; whether or not the hospitals where they were taken, or worked, had enough protective equipment; whether or not the government paid for their medical care to recover from the virus, as promised; whether or not the loan to keep their small business from going under arrived on time; and whether or not they heard reliable information from administration officials about the extent of the problem and what they should do.
This fall, President Trump will claim that he did all that he could earlier in the year to head off the crisis, but the tens of thousands of families still mourning their dead will remember otherwise.
Will the Democrats turn those memories into votes? In the decades after the Civil War, both political parties practiced a nearly surefire campaign tactic that their opponents derided as “waving the bloody shirt.” Every election, Republicans in the North reminded voters that the Democratic Party and its Southern leaders had caused thousands of Union deaths, while Democrats in the South reminded voters that the Republican Party and its Northern leaders were to blame for Confederate casualties.
Appeals for sectional reconciliation were no match for the powerful memories of the war dead that defined politics North and South for over two generations. In Massachusetts, Republicans held the governorship for all but 12 of the 66 years between 1865 and 1931, while in South Carolina, after the Democrats regained control of the State House when Reconstruction ended in 1876, they remained in power for the next 98 years.
In the midst of a national emergency, the party in power will demand that the crisis not be politicized. However, President Trump’s briefings are almost nakedly political, part of his aggressive efforts to shape the memory of the crisis as it is happening.
Biden and the Democratic leadership have been slow to counter this effort for fear of being accused of waving the bloody shirt and jeopardizing the bipartisan cooperation needed in Congress to pass relief legislation. Democrats can break free from that constraint in the fall election campaign by calling on us to act on our personal and indelible memories of COVID-19.
Like the memories of the Civil War dead, the memories of the countless additional deaths that resulted from the Trump administration’s inadequate handling of the pandemic will haunt our political landscape for several generations.
David Glassberg teaches History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the author of “Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life.”