Thomas B. Pepinsky

Sara Wallace Goodman

Shana Kushner Gadarian

How the politicization of the pandemic endangers our lives—and our democracy COVID-19 has killed more people than any war or public health crisis in American history, but the scale and grim human toll of the pandemic were not inevitable. Pandemic Politics examines how Donald Trump politicized COVID-19, shedding new light on how his administration tied the pandemic to the president’s political fate in an election year and chose partisanship over public health, with disastrous consequences for all of us. Health is not an inherently polarizing issue, but the Trump administration’s partisan response to COVID-19 led ordinary citizens to prioritize what was good for their “team” rather than what was good for their country. Democrats, in turn, viewed the crisis as evidence of Trump’s indifference to public well-being. At a time when solidarity and bipartisan unity were sorely needed, Americans came to see the pandemic in partisan terms, adopting behaviors and attitudes that continue to divide us today. This book draws on a wealth of new data on public opinion to show how pandemic politics has touched all aspects of our lives—from the economy to race and immigration—and puts America’s COVID-19 response in global perspective. An in-depth account of a uniquely American tragedy, Pandemic Politics reveals how the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic has profound and troubling implications for public health and the future of democracy itself.

The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID

Pandemic Politics

How Ordinary People Respond to Democratic Threat

Citizenship in Hard Times

"We live in difficult times for democracy. If this book found its way to your hands, this is probably not new information. In the United States, democratic insecurity may seem rather sudden, with the presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016, an outsider candidate with weak commitments to liberal democratic norms, uncomfortable admiration for authoritarian strongmen, a toxic mix of xenophobic and racial politics, and little deference to the Constitution. This view culminates in the violent, January 6, 2021 insurrection, where Trump supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol building to disrupt the certification of Electoral College votes confirming Joe Biden the successful and legitimate winner of the 2020 Presidential Election. For others, 2016 and everything that followed only laid bare the fragility of American democratic institutions, preserving counter-majoritarian institutions and exposed by gerrymandering practices and decades of voting suppression. and, with it, a persistent second-class citizenship for America's ethnic and racial minorities. From either perspective, ordinary Americans are confronting an unprecedented crisis of democracy. This crisis is both sudden and systemic, and not easily resolved by changing Presidents"--

Sara Wallace Goodman

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