I agree with Congressman Chris Stewart that America needs to pull together as one team to contain, mitigate and otherwise manage the COVID-19 (corona virus) which is now a pandemic. And I have long been confident in the research and health care services here in the Beehive State and the contributions that Utahns can and do make to national health and security.
What I can’t validate, is the Congressman’s admonition not to politicize this or other national emergencies we are facing. That politicization has been going on and will continue for some time, and the Congressman has played an enduring and what appears to be an intractable role in that politicization and now division in the country.
Calls to “can’t we all just get along?” and “Divided we fall!” are maddening attempts on Stewart’s part to cash a check voided months and months ago by the current administration, enabled, applauded, and endorsed as it has been by Stewart and others in the GOP. This is the problem when you hitch your wagon to an authoritarian leader and an entire political party that appears to have abandoned its moral compass: everything is always going to be politicized.
Why? Because partisanship is the only thing that can keep authoritarianism and its modus operandi of obstruction, denial, and deflection—resulting in national division–so securely in place. And staying in place, in “power,” at any cost is authoritarianism’s only objective.
So, when the time comes to make a call for unity during a medical or other kind of crisis, Stewart’s credibility vanishes. That the Congressman secured his seat back in 2012 largely because of a savagely gerrymandered Congressional District 2, hasn’t escaped those of us who have watched him relentlessly pander to the administration, the GOP leadership and its base of Trump supporters and single-issue voters. These are Americans who play an ideological game and they have always been in the minority nationwide, and arguably even in the politically conservative state of Utah.
These are Americans, with Congressman Stewart out leading the “band,” who seem riven with an ideological (as opposed to principled) orientation. These are Americans who for whatever reason are willing to look the other way, or worse, rationalize why it’s okay or “necessary” to treat undocumented children as caged animals; to alienate our allies abroad; and most troubling at this singular moment in our national health to systematically decimate the very public health infrastructure that the previous administration had put into place designed to fight the very pandemic we are currently subject to.
The Congressman and his “base” seem to continually tolerate and thus endorse the president’s incompetence and cruelty as somehow just being his unfortunate “style” as opposed to, how another concerned Utahn has recently put it in the press, what it really is: “juvenile, inexcusable and wrong.”
Little wonder then that the Congressman’s call to come together and, at this late hour, spend a lot of federal money on the pandemic seems hollow and disingenuous. To me it’s a call of desperation and vaulting irony. The virus is neither something that his fans’ unfettered access to war-styled weapons, personally owned, can combat; nor is it really consistent, with Stewart’s unrelenting gaslighting of his constituents and the rest of the country on the evils of “socialism.” (Apparently, socialism for the Congressman is anything that publicly funds and regulates anything with which his politically ideology finds suspect, like healthcare.)
It’s time for Congressman Chris Stewart to go. And Utah Policy is suggesting what the possibility might be if the Democrats can field a strong candidate.
An edited version of this op-ed piece appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune March 19, 2020
A shorter, letter version of this piece appeared in the Deseret News, March 18, 2020.
