The Morning Dispatch: Is the Pandemic Emboldening Authoritarian Leaders?

Happy Thursday! As you scroll, you might notice something different about how we’re displaying the latest coronavirus data this morning. If you find it more helpful—that’s great! If you hate it, blame Declan. We’re always looking for ways to improve, so if you have thoughts, let us know in the comments.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• As of Wednesday night, there are now 1,228,603 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States (an increase of 24,124/2 percent since yesterday) and 73,431 deaths (an increase of 2,361/3.2 percent increase since yesterday), according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, leading to a mortality rate among confirmed cases of 6 percent (the true mortality rate is likely lower, but it’s impossible to determine precisely due to incomplete testing regimens). Of 7,759,771 coronavirus tests conducted in the United States (215,443 conducted since yesterday), 15.8 percent have come back positive. Meanwhile, 189,910 have recovered from the virus. See our chart below:

  
  

• Recordings of government conference calls obtained by Politico revealed that Trump administration health officials were deeply concerned about the state of the coronavirus pandemic in America even as the president called for reopenings to begin. And the Associated Press reports that a CDC blueprint for safe reopening has been shelved by White House.

• A day after Vice President Mike Pence suggested the coronavirus task force would wind down by the end of May, President Trump reversed course, saying the task force will continue on indefinitely. “I thought we could wind it down sooner,” he said. “But I had no idea how popular the task force is until actually yesterday when I started talking about winding down.”

• Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was released from the hospital on Wednesday night after being treated for a gallbladder infection on Tuesday.

• The Pentagon is barring any COVID-19 survivors from joining the military without a waiver.

• President Trump vetoed a bipartisan war powers resolution that would have limited the executive branch’s authority to conduct military action against Iran without congressional approval.

• Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released her final guidelines on how colleges and universities should handle sexual assault allegations, providing additional protections for the accused. Joe Biden, who claims he’s been falsely accused of sexual assault by former staffer Tara Reade, vowed to reverse the changes.

Is COVID Emboldening the World’s Strongmen?

The spread of the novel coronavirus has forced us all to ask hard questions about some of the most fundamental values of our civilization: how to reconcile freedom with security, individual rights with the common good, democratic consensus with the prescriptions of the experts. The harsh measures taken by states around the world have undeniably done much to stem the spread of the deadly disease. But they have also provided cover for authoritarian regimes around the world looking to consolidate their power domestically under the pretext of taking on temporary emergency powers.

In the early days of the pandemic, it was unsurprising to see regimes like the Chinese Communist Party take a mail-fisted approach to the virus, enforcing ubiquitous surveillance and draconian quarantine measures far outstripping anything seen in the U.S. What has been more unnerving has been seeing authoritarian measures taken by countries that theoretically aspire to more democratic rule.

In Hungary, for instance, the dominant Fidesz party passed legislation in late March giving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a hero of many nationalist conservatives in the U.S., the ability to bypass parliament altogether and rule by decree. Although the measure is ostensibly designed to allow Orbán the flexibility necessary to best fight the virus, the authorization contained no sunset provision, and, in fact, has served so far to keep Hungarians in the dark about the disease, since it has permitted Orbán’s government to suppress voices critical of their approach in the press.

Such moves are particularly concerning because they do not occur in a vacuum. Owing partly to the growing anti-democratic influence of nations like Russia, China, and Turkey, the trend in recent years in nations from Central Europe to Central Asia has been away from the representative and democratic and toward the covertly or overtly unilateral. That’s the conclusion of a new “Nations in Transit” report from the pro-democracy non-profit group Freedom House, which warns of a “stunning democratic breakdown” in the region over the last few years. In their assessment, not only Hungary, but Russia, Poland, Serbia, Montenegro, and a slew of other countries in the region have taken steps to erode already fragile democratic institutions in recent years.

“There are fewer democracies in the region today than at any point since the annual report was launched in 1995,” research director Zselyke Csaky wrote. “The erosion has left citizens especially vulnerable to further rights abuses and power grabs associated with the coronavirus pandemic.”

Many nations in the region took strides toward democratization in the decades after the end of the Cold War, when the world had seemed to settle into a stable order founded on the principles of liberal democracy into which the price of admission was the establishment of representative institutions. The rise in recent years of countries that reject that order, however, has given would-be strongmen a new set of potential international friends to depend on for financial and diplomatic protection.

“These institutional shifts, these attacks on liberal democracy, are taking place amid a fraying global order where the democratic consensus has really been replaced by great power rivalry,” Michael Smeltzer, a research analyst at Freedom House, told The Dispatch. “In the authoritarian half of the region, incumbents have made further plans for indefinite rule, and there’s been no push-back on this.”

The best-case outcome here from the current pandemic: Despite providing would-be despots an opportunity to expand their unilateral control, the backlash against such actions—not to mention the wider Western backlash against China for its early bad behavior regarding the virus—leads to a renewal of international pressure to crack down on political corruption and leave the franchise in the hands of the people.

“COVID-19 serves as an inflection,” Smeltzer said. “It can either accelerate and exacerbate the democratic breakdown we’ve been observing, or it can provide an opportunity for in-depth positive change.”

Gender, Race, and Voting in the COVID-19 Era

Yesterday, we shared a heartbreaking story from Laura Barrón-López detailing the coronavirus’ disproportionate effects on black Americans. On the site today, Sarah has a piece examining how this reality could intersect with President Trump’s re-election campaign.

First, some numbers on COVID-19’s health disparities.

Deaths aren’t equal. One study showed that counties with disproportionately African American populations accounted for 52 percent of COVID-19 diagnoses and 58 percent of deaths nationally. Another found that nearly a third of those who have died of COVID-19 are African American—even though black people represented only 14 percent of the population in the areas it analyzed.

Notably, support for Trump among minority voters is split along gender lines—just as it is among white voters.

Trump won 8 percent of all black voters in 2016, but exit polls at the time “showed him getting 13 percent among black men, more than three times the support he got from black women.” And that support from men has only increased in the last three years. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 24 percent of black men approved of Trump’s job performance—four times as many as the 6 percent of black women who said the same. 

But coronavirus complicates things.

Will more black men still vote to re-elect a president who has overseen a pandemic with such a disproportionate impact on their communities?

Even a small increase in Trump’s share of the black male vote could have enormous ramifications in states like Michigan and North Carolina. But even short of voting for him, minority men could just stay home, which could have nearly the same effect. 

Worth Your Time

• Is coronavirus really “just a New York problem?” In a fascinating new study, The New Atlantis looks carefully at this question, comparing COVID-19 fatalities with leading causes of death in states across the country. “It is plainly true that the greater New York region has been much harder hit than the rest of the country. But the greater Northeast region, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, and Louisiana and Colorado have also seen severe outbreaks. Only a small number of states have seen peak death rates that are relatively low—on the order of car crashes or flu and pneumonia.”

• What does Joe Biden believe? How would he govern? In an insightful column (paywalled) in today’s Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove writes that Biden is far behind Donald Trump’s re-election campaign in dollars and digital reach. “Yet Mr. Biden faces a more important deficit. First elected to the Senate in 1972, he started running for president in 1987, 33 years ago. After nearly half a century in Washington, what does he stand for? What’s his vision? That voters have to ask is a weakness.”

• The headline of this New York Times piece by Carina Chonao says it all, really: “What’s the Point of a Celebrity in a Pandemic?” It’s a good rundown of what has been the deeply strange experience of experiencing a concentrated dose of celebrity culture online while we’re all stuck at home—but stripped of the ordinary artifice of million-dollar production that colors our ordinary relationship to such things, since, after all, they’re all stuck at home too. 

• Speaking of million-dollar artifice, no company on Earth does it better than Disney. In ordinary times, the House of Mouse is an unstoppable terminator of an entertainment company, churning out nuclear-grade family fun and making absolute bank doing it. Surely, if anyone was equipped to come through this crisis unscathed, it was Disney? Not so fast: As NY Mag’s Josh Barro writes, much of Disney’s business has taken quite a hit. “Because Disney is in so many businesses—theme parks, hotels and resorts, cruises, movies, television, streaming, retail—it will provide a nice case study of whether the coronavirus ‘changes everything’ in the long run.” Read the piece here.

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Also Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Another Wednesday, another midweek G-File (🔒). In it, Jonah examines the argument feminist writer Linda Hirshman made in the New York Times this week: She believes Tara Reade, but she’s voting for Joe Biden anyway. “As a practical matter, I don’t begrudge Hirshman for voting for Biden, and I admire the honesty in her reasoning. But it’s worth recognizing that America is suffering from a collective action problem unfolding before its eyes. Hirshman’s theory of feminism is clearly her highest good, just as Christianity is for many of those who opted to acknowledge and then ignore Donald Trump’s behavior. Without gainsaying anyone’s individual choices, it seems nonetheless obvious to me that the world we’ve created is demanding that people compromise their abstract ideals in order to live in it.”

• This week’s Dispatch Podcast features the gang dishing on China’s coronavirus response and military might, before turning to economic reopenings, masks as the newest battle in the culture war, and the political fallout of a potential second wave of the pandemic. Plus, what’s the worst job each member of the team has ever had?

• President Trump said on Tuesday that the IHME coronavirus model—which recently revised its projected death totals by August 4 from 72,000 to 134,000—“assumes no mitigation.” Alec investigated the claim in his latest Fact Check, and found that President Trump didn’t give the model enough credit.

• Maybe you have seen the video circulating that shows Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man, being chased down by three white men and shot while apparently jogging through a neighborhood in Brunswick, Georgia. It’s haunting. On the site today, David French walks through the 911 call that set off the “hot pursuit,” Georgia’s citizen’s arrest laws, and other details. He writes, “Their vigilante action looks less like the heroic actions of armed citizens upholding the law and more like an old-time posse, executing a vile form of street justice on a young, unarmed black man.”

Let Us Know

As we mentioned yesterday, all members of The Dispatch are welcome to join us for a Dispatch Live event featuring The Dispatch Podcast crew tonight at 8:30 p.m. ET. If you haven’t RSVP’d, you can do so here.

We hope to see many of you tonight—well, we won’t actually be able to “see” you, but we’ll know you’re there. Let us know what you’re hoping to hear discussed in the conversation by leaving a comment or replying to this email with your proposed questions for the crew.

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph of Viktor Orbán by Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images.