War As Crisis Management: How The Republican Party Plans To Blame China For Their Failings
When Senator Tom Cotton appeared on Fox News this Sunday, his intention was made clear. After hitting his favorite notes - that China was responsible for the coronavirus pandemic that has now killed tens of thousands of Americans - he went a step further and proposed that Chinese students at America colleges not be allowed to study science or technology. “If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America. They don’t need to learn quantum computing.”
This staggeringly racist and xenophobic proposal is nothing new from Cotton, who has chiseled out for himself a niche for attacking China and constantly manning the war drum, but it has alarmingly taken hold throughout the Republican Party and conservative America. As many might know, the GOP is relentlessly disciplined when it comes to organizing and strategizing talking points, and are now coalescing behind a strategy to escalate tensions with China as a smokescreen for their own failures.
Over the weekend, the architecture of this plan was discovered as a 57 page memo was distributed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee that prescribed for Republicans a strategy to blame China for the pandemic’s destruction while intentionally avoiding any defense of President Donald Trump, intentionally creating distance between the party and its standard bearer.
It is a complicated and clumsy strategy that attempts to manufacture a pseudo-reality wherein the Republican Party is the only choice to defend the American people from a conspiracy involving the Chinese, a possible manufactured bioweapon, and traitorous Democrats. The narrative is absolutely convoluted and invented, but it has worked in the past to win Republicans elections by weaponizing paranoia, prejudice, and warring nationalism.
Arguably, it should come as no surprise. As we are stuck in an authoritarian cycle, history gifts us a few easily understandable lectures. Donald Trump, as an authoritarian, is incapable of doing anything but making a bad situation worse. That crisis, compounded by the authoritarian, necessitates a complete lack of culpability and thus the scapegoating of consequence. This always focuses on a vulnerable population or minority group, in this case the Chinese and Chinese Americans, and it fueled by paranoid conspiracy theories that wrap in political enemies, or the Democratic Party. This is as predictable as anything and has been taking shape since at least early March. People will be harassed, discriminated against, and killed. If everything goes according to plan, America will become a howling wilderness of discriminatory hate and tensions will rise by the day.
With time, we will see more and more focused attacks on China that also hint toward conspiracies involving Democratic leaders betraying America and killing America. It is inevitable at this point. The rhetoric will grow by the day and will spill over at the extreme edges, with crackpots like Alex Jones and his like dragging the party ever further into the abyss. And, as history tells us, with every crisis, particularly economic crisis, there is always the possibility of war.
That’s where this is leading. All roads here point to escalating tensions that could cascade into war as the world shudders and convulses from the economic impact of the pandemic. As a party, Republicans have made a pact with the devil over the last forty years and will happily drive this country into a grave if it means maintaining power. If the only way to hide the horror of what Donald Trump and Republicans have done is to push this country into a ghastly, unwinnable, unnecessary war that might shake the very foundations of the world, then so be it.
It is, after all, all part of the plan.
Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.