“America vs. Socialism” was the theme of the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, though as fights go this one was pretty one-sided. An anti-socialist message thrummed through the halls while the crowds celebrated free-market capitalism over $4 cups of coffee and $20 chicken-salad sandwiches wrapped in cellophane.
As the panelists likened socialism to a disease, an actual disease, the coronavirus, shadowed the gathering. One participant would later test positive for the pathogen, touching off a scramble that sent four lawmakers (and counting) who attended into precautionary self-quarantine.
Read: The coronavirus outbreak could bring out the worst in Trump
But the White House officials and Trump allies who spoke from the main ballroom urged calm. The real threat, they said, was socialism. “The virus is not going to sink the American economy,” Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser and part of the White House’s coronavirus task force, told the audience, in comments that were premature given the market tailspin that would come soon enough. “What is or could sink the American economy is the socialism coming from our friends on the other side of the aisle.”
Even as Kudlow spoke, the Trump administration was taking aggressive measures to halt the epidemic’s spread—measures that rely on the sort of big-government intervention that was a CPAC bogeyman. In the 2020 election, Donald Trump’s aim is to brand his opponent an avatar of socialism, whether it’s Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders. But the COVID-19 outbreak demonstrates the emptiness of these sorts of ideological labels. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, in a national emergency, there’s no truly laissez-faire government.