It looks like I’ll have reason to write more on this issue soon, but as we reckon with the rather extraordinary incompetence of the authorities, local and national, in the face of just one Ebola case from overseas, I thought I’d say something about the argument here, from Jonathan Last, speculating about an ideological element in the administration’s approach to the disease. This point in particular, about the White House’s reluctance to institute a travel ban, is a version of something I’ve heard a lot of conservatives raise and float and talk about of late:
You might wonder why the Obama administration has been so reflexively resistant to the idea of stopping flights to the U.S. from infected countries. It’s incredibly easy to get here: Just to pick a day at random, Kayak says you can fly from ROB in Monrovia to JFK for $1,459. That’s prohibitively expensive for your average Liberian, but not for everyone. Closing off flights seems like a no-brainer, yet the administration rejects it out of hand. Why? I suspect it’s because they sense how Ebola has the potential to reshuffle the political landscape. Starting with immigration.
If you agree to seal the borders to mitigate the risks from Ebola, then you’re implicitly rejecting the entire ideological framework of the “open borders” mindset and admitting that there are some cases in which the government has a duty to protect citizens from outsiders. I suspect that some folks see that as the thin end of the wedge. Because what happens then if Ebola breaks into Central America? Then you have to worry about masses of uninfected immigrants surging across the border–not to mention carriers of the virus, too. What do you do? If it was okay to cut off flights from Liberia, is it okay to try to seal the Southern border?
These things tend to have a logic of their own …
My guiding assumptions, in this case and others (certain Bush-era crises very much included), is roughly the reverse of what Last sketches here: I think that precisely because leaders in a democracy are very aware of the potential political implications of everything they do, they are less likely to let ideological considerations get in the way of taking certain steps in a crisis, because they are well aware that whatever damage those steps might do to their own favored causes, the political fallout from a mismanaged, spiraling disaster would be infinitely worse. To wit: Sure, maybe the Obama White House isn’t wild about the potential implications for immigration politics of giving ground on a quarantine or travel ban … but the potential implications of a hundred Ebola cases spread across five cities are so, so much worse that the political-ideological incentive cuts, if anything, in favor of overreacting. And what’s true of crisis politics around a specific issue like immigration is true of crisis politics writ large: Because there is nothing, nothing that would wreck Obama’s legacy and his party’s immediate fortunes alike more than a real Ebola outbreak in the United States, I have to believe that people in the White House have what they consider sound, non-ideological reasons for why a travel ban isn’t a no-brainer — that they are fully convinced that the potential damage it would do to West Africa would further the spread of the disease, and with it chaos and misery and politico-economic collapse and related threats to the U.S. national interest, in ways that eclipse any risk from Ebola cases domestically.
Now: This doesn’t mean they’re right. You can only trust in self-interest so far: I knew many hawks, liberal as well as conservative, who felt that they could trust the Bush White House’s post-war planning in Iraq because there was such a strong incentive, geopolitically but also in terms of domestic politics, for them to get the occupation right. That trust was misplaced, and we paid for it; we may end up paying a price this time as well.
But to the extent that ideological commitments, in particular, blinker leaders in a crisis, I think it mostly happens on a much more subconscious level than Last implies here … and that in genuinely perilous situations we actually may want our leaders thinking a lot, in a very conscious way, about the implications of their crisis management for their ideological agenda, because those thoughts will tend to be part of what overcomes the more immediate and instinctive objections that they might have to certain forms of swift, decisive action. The power of political self-interest can’t reliably save us from the ideologically-infused marches of folly, clearly. But to the extent that politicians think on their political position and the fate of their party’s goals during such a march, those meditations can often be a force diverting them toward a safer, erring-on-the-side-of-caution path.
And so I hope it is in this case, since I’m scheduled on a flight to Dallas tomorrow.