Rethinking Reagan and the AIDS Crisis in the Age of Covid

In the contemporary United States, a culture war has broken out over masks. Public health experts count them as a crucial intervention to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Conservatives, enacting a logic of mistrust for institutions deemed “liberal,” judge masks a violation of individual liberty and make non-usage a badge of tribal identity. Masks signified something very different on the right in 1983, however when an issue of Moral Majority Report illustrated its cover story subtitled “Homosexual Disease Threatens American Families” with a family wearing surgical masks. The contrasting meanings of masks index the fraught history of the relationship between conservatism and science. If conservatism consists, in Russell Kirk’s definition, of defending “the unchanging ground of our changing experience,” and science understands itself as a practice in which everything is provisional, always open to revision based on experimentation, this tension is fundamental. Same with conservatism and the concept of “public health”—the ultimate rebuke to Margaret Thatcher’s nostrum “There is no such thing as society.” This presentation will analyze what happened when these tension s ran up against the imperative of managing exploding epidemic—for instance as AIDS slipped its former supposed bounds as a disease of “homosexual” and intravenous drug users. These complexities carried over into the Covid as many of the same conservative public health officials who served during the Reagan era reemerged in the Trump Administration. C. Everett Koop, the Reagan-era Surgeon General appointed as a sop to his evangelical base, became evangelicals’ enemy with his frank recommendations about safe sex. Trump CDC director Robert Redfield is an evangelical whose a beard, identical to that of Koop’s, is read as a symbol betokening the complexity of maintaining a dual identity as a conservative and a government public health expert.