Are you running a faraway country and looking to destroy your nation’s public services and social solidarity? Here is a small guide of suggestions based on the best practices observed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Quebec and Canada.
Step 1. Start slowly. To undermine citizens’ confidence in a universal public health system, for example, you have to take time. In 1976, there were about 7 hospital beds per 1,000 population in Canada. In 2019, we were at 2.5. The decline in the hospital capacity of the public health system has been slow, amid budget cuts and questionable reforms. So much so that for many people, it is now normal for emergencies to overflow and human resources are not sufficient. When, even in routine flu season, with no other exceptional stressor on the public system, the emergency room is full, you’re ready. Any public health crisis will crack institutions.
2nd step. Be sexist, but subtly, all the same. When you think about creating good jobs, think about investing in traditionally male trades, such as construction and natural resources. And when it’s time to balance public finances, squeeze the lemon from nurses, teachers, social workers, early childhood educators, community workers. To devalue traditionally female professions is almost automatically to cut the social net and the preventive aspect of public health. A quick method to achieve your goals.
Step 3. When your public services have been sabotaged enough, and their fragility has been trivialized, a crisis can accelerate your efforts. In response to the COVID-19 epidemic, for example, here the government has come to insist, with good reason, on the individual responsibility of citizens, who must act to avoid clogging the health care system and protect them. more vulnerable. The same government then used this share of individual responsibility to distract from its own failings. We have thus created a rather particular political narrative: if the institutions collapse, it is because of a minority of individuals without particular power portrayed as necessarily harmful (here, the unvaccinated), and not because of officials of these institutions. Such a rhetorical tour de force is of crucial importance if you are looking to remain a popular leader.
Step 4. For the use of the scapegoat to work, you must first have devalued the social sciences and have excluded them from the scientific expertise on which the public dialogue is based. To demonize the unvaccinated, for example, here we had to let people speculate on their motives and demographic profile from personal anecdotes, without seeking to produce comprehensive studies on the issue. As we know, a face hidden in the twilight appears to us more easily monstrous. The contempt for “soft sciences” will also allow you to put in place liberticidal measures, such as a curfew, and then either ignore or show you surprised at the deleterious effects of these policies on children, women and the most vulnerable. .
Step 5. Depresses natural persons, but spares legal persons as much as possible. Create an ideological universe where it is legitimate to close schools, but unthinkable to close Amazon warehouses. A human being whose life is reduced to working, consuming and sleeping is an anxious human being, isolated, and whose analytical capacity is undermined by exhaustion. A discouraged, frustrated and angry population will be more receptive to populist policies that target the scapegoats of the moment, rather than the real places of power.
Step 6. Then propose a populist measure that will open a debate on the fundamental principles underlying public services. For example, a “health tax” for the unvaccinated. By launching this idea, the Quebec government is proposing a differentiated contribution from each citizen to the public health system based on information contained in their medical file. A principle that already prevails for private insurance. Immediately, on social media, the population wonders: why not also target smokers, sedentary people, drug addicts? We are torn apart over the individual responsibility of each person to make healthy “lifestyle choices” so as not to clutter up hospital beds. We no longer even wonder why there were only 2.5 beds per thousand inhabitants before the crisis struck. All the intellectual energy (which remains) is then absorbed by a reflection on the force of punishment that one can legitimately exert against a cursed minority.
Step 7. All you have to do is let the popular mood movement demand even more punitive measures against the demonized group, unrelated to the need to save lives and reduce the number of sick people. You have also opened the door to what “urgency” justifies other attacks against the principle of universality of the public system. If you take these additional steps, we can consider that your objective of destroying the social safety net is in the process of being reached.
Of course, this method is not foolproof. The success of each step depends mainly on your ability to screw up the system while placing the blame for social and political ills on ordinary people. If the critical popular energy stops flowing to the fringes and concentrates on what is happening at the top of the social and political echelons, your plan may falter. As the trendy saying goes: Don’t look up. I hope for you that in your own context, too few of them will look up in time.