Kettell and Kerr continued
I put up some notes on an article by Kettell and Kerr last time (https://buttondown.email/nateholdren/archive/depoliticization/). Here are the rest of my notes. Here's a link to the article by the way - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13691481211054957
They looked at two months of UK press briefings and found four main kinds of stories used - unprecedented government action, working to plan, wartime analogies and appeal to national security, and appeal to science. They also noted that the government created a context where it could switch between different stories in order to politicize and depoliticize as needed ('interlocking and simultaneous politicising and depolitisicing effects', p15) - depoliticizing to avoid responsibility and politicizing to take credit. They also note that a lot of existing scholarship on depoliticization tends to look medium- or long-term, while their inquiry focused on just two months. In a shorter time frame, government rhetoric can be 'frenetic and disjointed during highly politicised crisis moments, where events are rapidly changing and where governments are forced to respond in real time.' (p.15.) It seems to me that one takeaway point from this is that government action in riding the tiger of capitalist crisis has the consistency of trying to hang on, with any thicker or more substantive consistency likely emerging over time as strategies get worked out, actions get linked up into strategies etc (tactics without strategy are fundamentally different from tactics in a strategy; I suspect a lot of the time crises create a scramble in which disparate strategy-less actions head in lots of different directions, followed by reflections which help give rise to more unified strategies; I also suspect a lot of the time strategies are retroactively applied to the initial disorder in a way that provides greater illusion of plan and deliberateness than is warranted, I think some left critics of government action do this as much as government supporters do).
Reading the piece I suspect that the US's privatized medical and insurance industries let the pandemic start here with a higher baseline degree of apolitical status - Kettell and Kerr note that early on there was great concern about the NHS being overwhelmed for instance, and protecting the NHS and patients were closely related. (I also think one strength of the depoliticization literature is that it helps get at how state actors might want privatization for state reasons, not only because they're ideologically anti- public provision but because public provision creates political responsibility sometimes).
Kettell and Kerr found that appeals to national security and wartime analogies declined over time and were more prominent early on, as did reference to unprecedented government action. They claim that these frames served to depoliticize mitigation measures and to sidestep government criticism. That's interesting and fits with their emphasis on depoliticization and politicization working in tandem; I'd say that those narratives were also part of promoting people's willingness to engage in solidaristic responses to the pandemic which I'd say is politicized rather than depolitcized but I suppose the heart of the matter is government effort configure or organize the scope of politics in the moment, and the point about seeking to be insulated from criticism is important. Emphasis on plan and even moreso following scientific guidance served important depoliticizing effects for the government - plan appeals rising over time and science appeals present all along - they note, adding that there was an overall attempt to shift from a situation "of crisis management towards" a relative return to normality. That normality was (my words, not there's) a new normal with much higher costs and harms to ordinary people, and the depoliticization strategies helped to obscure that reality, as did agnotological strategies (at least here in the US; my sense is that the UK's effort was less agnotological at first, I suspect this has a lot to do with the differences in public vs private provision between the two countries).
In the conclusion Kettell and Kerr say that the government was repeatedly "called upon to demonstrate they were delivering appropriate levels of government action." (p28.) I think that's a good way to put the issue, with it being important to note that there's a simultaneous multi-faceted fight over what government actually does and over what is expected of government - government does something in response to various demands and also both stresses that what it does is the appropriate response and tries to shape the criteria by which appropriate is defined.
I think it's a good article and worth reading to be sure, and I also think (as Kettell and Kerr obviously know from their review of literature on depoliticization) that emphasis on government rhetoric is important to contextualize in relation to other kinds or level of action in terms of both response to catastrophe in terms of actual social interventions and institutional measures, with those actions being simultaneously management of catastrophe and of the political effects of catastrophe on the government. The conditions pre-catastrophe matter a great deal too, like the public/private arrangements that differ between the US and UK, the long running attacks on the NHS pre-pandemic, the pre-pandemic degree of partisan polarization etc. On that last, polarization, I don't buy the partisan explanation of the pandemic - this by Abby is great on that https://www.pestemag.com/large-scale-medicine/partisan-pandemic-cottage-industry. Instead I think the 'fuck those red staters!' 'ugh stupid blue stater!' kind of bullshit that was playing out pre-pandemic offered some resources to the government for scapegoating as the pandemic broke out. I also think that capitalism likely tends to create fights that serve to channel discontent in directions that are pro-systemic or certainly less focused on major institutional overhauls. Like the Biden administration drew a line in the sand about vaccination and masking for a while, say, and a lot of conflict clustered around that line. The line could have been drawn elsewhere. What I'm trying to say is that picking what fight to have, with what stakes, is part of politicking and capitalism fosters politicking that reinforces the system and institutional inertia, even as the system's violent dynamism erodes current institutions.
Two final notes, one, they cite this article that I want to look at later - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41293-021-00180-w. Two, unrelated, I've started trying to write ten minutes a day just recalling the day or day before - 'I took a walk, the weather was nice,' it's dull, pedestrian, meandering, as a writing exercise. I thought I'd mention it here in case it's of any interest, since part of the motivation for starting this newsletter/blog/thing was wanting to set up ways to be in touch if (when!) twitter goes down/becomes fully intolerable. That's here https://tenminutewrite.blogspot.com/. As ever no promises as to quality or to continuing it!