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So in all the talk about why the current UK government is so bad at handling the pandemic, something I've been wondering about is a certain mindset (calling it an ideology seems too strong), which Fabricant has here: Things *must* be better than they are https://twitter.com/oceanclub/status/1346412835073626112
You see it everywhere once you notice it. It's not just a government of relentlessly positive people being unable to handle a pandemic, it's also in the coverage that's sympathetic to them - perhaps inevitable when you have a government headed by a former Spectator editor.
I spent some time last summer looking through old copies of the Spectator from when BJ was editor, and it's striking how often the editorial line, on big problems of science like climate change or foot and mouth, was to reject pessimistic predictions *because* they were downbeat.
And throughout his time as a columnist, Johnson was (mostly) one of those "we can grow and innovate and Tesla our way out of the problem" guys on climate in particular, rather than an outright denier - and the alternative, systemic change, was not just unpalatable, but absurd.
Obviously that mindset is proving disastrous in a pandemic, where you can't hand-wave away science because it's bumming you out. But something I've found striking throughout the pandemic is how so many others with the same gut instinct are smashing against the same wall, daily.
Lockdown "sceptics" aren't actually conducting a debate about public health measures and civil liberties (which is a debate that is worth having) - instead, they're forcefully rejecting the reality that the virus itself. That's a very different intellectual response.
Considering how many of these figures also have atrocious track records on climate change and more - especially when expert consensus requires deep self-examination of prior assumptions and ideologies - I wonder much the "things MUST be better than they are" mindset plays a role.
I'm going from personal experience here as well - from years of dead-end conversations with people who insist that it's impossible for poverty to still exist in the 21st century, for the UK to come out worse-off from Brexit, for things to get as bad as in Italy (in March).
I get the sense that this plays into lots of things on the right - patriotism, obviously, but also why saying things could be better, with an implicit argument in there that it means things are bad *now*, is not just wrong but offensive. You can see it in the US just as much.
I don't really know how to respond to it, because it's clearly potent. But it's certainly another way a pandemic is like climate change, compressed - so much of what we're seeing is only so obviously bullshit now because the bullshit is so quickly disproven by reality.
(Oh, and if anyone knows of any research into the psychological role of relentless positivity on right populism - or anything in the same kind of ballpark - I'd love a link.)
