Pandemics and Extremism

 A Washington Post article today explored the historical ties between pandemics and extremism.

"Since ancient times, pandemics have spurred sharp turns in political beliefs, spawning extremist movements, waves of mistrust and wholesale rejection of authorities. Nearly a year into the coronavirus crisis, Americans are falling prey to the same phenomenon, historians, theologians and other experts say, exemplified by a recent NPR-Ipsos poll in which nearly 1 in 5 said they believe Satan-worshipping, child-enslaving elites seek to control the world....The United States was not the only country affected: A British study found that the pandemic boosted radicalization globally, as people found more time to delve into extremist arguments....New insecurities and fears loosed by the pandemic fed into an existing erosion of trust in leaders and institutions, according to those who have studied how people react to rampant, uncontrolled disease."

"...Over the past year, the pandemic was a constant undercurrent as Americans took to the streets to protest racial injustice, police brutality and President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. As much as they were motivated by the causes themselves, many who participated in street actions were probably also eager for human contact, according to psychologists who’ve studied the effects of social isolation....By that view, the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was both an insurrection plot and an impromptu meetup, an assault on the infrastructure of American democracy and a social gathering for people who believed they were defending their idea of nationhood....With many houses of worship, schools and workplaces closed for much of the past year, millions have sought community online. Some found and adopted baseless fantasies about conspiracies in government and among the nation’s elites: Election fraud, the QAnon theories about a malign “deep state,” false assertions of blame for the origins of the coronavirus."

"...2020 was a perfect storm,” said John Fea, a historian at Messiah University, an evangelical Christian school in Mechanicsburg, Pa. “You had many evangelicals believing that this strongman president was protecting them from secularization. You had this belief in a God-ordained president who was not doing anything against the pandemic, who was feeding this ‘Don’t tell me to wear a mask’ attitude. It’s an incredibly explosive mix that led to the Jan. 6 attack — and now this almost Lost Cause mentality that ‘we have to fight on for Trump.’ ..."Plagues,” Fea said, “have always led to apocalyptic thinking.”

"..The pandemic has tapped into long-standing anxieties and let people band together in their search for answers, experts said, whether about the disease, or about immigration, or about globalism or socialism, or about any of the other bugaboos that have animated fringe movements in the past year....Pandemics create insecurity, while extremism offers a kind of certainty...In the current pandemic, white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups have used shutdowns and mask mandates to recruit followers...American extremism is not limited to hard times; it has been present in every generation. But it has mainly stayed on the fringe, lunging into the mainstream during periods of rapid, unsettling change..."

"...Pervasive, epidemic diseases — and especially plagues such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS and covid that are perceived to have come from some foreign place — crystallize and exacerbate the core fears of their time, Susan Sontag said in her influential 1988 essay, “AIDS and Its Metaphors.” “Plagues are invariably regarded as judgments on society . . . as a sign of moral laxity or political decline,” she wrote."

"...Like pandemics, spasms of extremism eventually end. Some historians warn that those endings do not necessarily arrive in lockstep, but Kruglanski argues that the process of easing away from extremism begins with the approach he sees in the Biden administration, which appears to have adopted a strategy of “cooling down the temperature, attending to the issue, bringing concrete, visible results.”

In a way, it is reassuring to know that what we are going through is somewhat normal, albeit distressing, human behavior, and that sooner or later it eases off, when the cause, in this case, COVID 19, abates.