A Google search reveals a definition for hysteria as “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people.”
I can’t think of any famous pundit or talk show host who is not a hysteric. Perhaps there is no viable business model for non-hysterical punditry?
I just read a 1999 book called Listening In: Radio And The American Imagination. I liked its analysis of talk radio:
As Bob Grant’s vocal bullying and Joe Frank’s ode to a ladybug indicate, talk radio and NPR also offered very different models of manhood on the air. While NPR built on and elaborated the more socially conscious, antiviolent, aesthetically appreciative versions of manhood as articulated on free form, talk radio provided a platform for what can best be called male hysteria, a deft and sometimes desperate fusion of the desire to thwart feminism and the need to live with and accommodate to it…
[RUsh Limbaugh] was a gender activist, an ideological soldier in the war to reassert patriarchy, to reclaim things as they “ought to be.” He himself lamented the state of masculinity in the 1990s. “On the one hand, we want men who are sensitive and crying, like Alan Aldas, and then, after so much of that, women finally get tired of wimps and say, ‘We want real men again!’ O.K., so now we gotta change, we’ve got to go back to tough guys, we’re not gonna take any shit. And our memories tell us, we go back to high school, look at who the girls went for—the assholes! The mean, dirty, greasy sons of bitches.” The ads on the show, for hair loss products, memory enhancers, and health care organizations that seek to prevent heart attacks, impart a worried subtext about emasculation that can, and must, be reversed.
But Limbaugh is more than a throwback. He personifies a new kind of 1990s man, the antithesis of the allegedly new age, sensitive, feminized kind of guy. He is a male hysteric who skillfully uses his voice to signal the easy slide between rationality and outrage. Real men don’t eat quiche; they have a point of view and voice it. So Limbaugh deftly does blend “feminine” traits into his persona, because he gives men permission to get hysterical about politics. Here is a man who is emotionally unchecked, yet simultaneously reasonable, combative, and avowedly antifeminist. There is no equivocation here, no “on the one hand, on the other hand,” no genial, get-along stance. This is not the persona of the organization man who goes along with institutional idiocy because his boss says to. This is not some Dilbert forced to seethe in silence in his cubicle. No, this man loses it, his naturally deep voice shooting up an octave as he denounces something he thinks doesn’t make a lick of sense. When quoting from newspaper articles, especially a section he’s about to mock, Limbaugh theatrically lowers his voice, parodying the paper’s supposed aura of authority. As soon as his pitch zooms up, we know we’re back to Limbaugh, who interjects comments like “Idiocy! Pure idiocy!” or “Get this!” or “That can’t be!”
Limbaugh, and many of his fellow hosts, attacked post-Vietnam media and corporate versions of masculinity; they attacked what Christopher Lasch labeled in the late 1970s the narcissistic personality, the bureaucratic operator desperately dependent on the approval of others who learns how to wear a variety of amiable masks to get by. Limbaugh’s special talent is how he flexes his vocal cords to enact this critique. He understands that radio needs clear auditory signposts that instantly produce an emotional reaction. It was this delicately calibrated balance between letting go and holding on that staked out the male hysteric as not just a reasonable but an enviable persona, a man more authentic, more in touch with the connection between his feelings and his ideas than circumscribed TV reporters or political spin doctors.
Yet such an emotionally accessible and explosive guy has to maintain that he is still a real man. Hence the special importance of feminist bashing—for Limbaugh this is done through his regular “feminist updates” on the movement’s alleged idiocies—to the presentation of the male hysteric as appropriating some “feminine” prerogatives while still not acquiescing to women’s demands for equality. Because his hysteria requires that he come up with deliberately perverse assertions, he can charge, for example, that the controversy over smoking in the United States is really the fault of native Americans, since they grew tobacco here first.
There seems to be plenty of hysteria on the Right and the Left. The Left dominates the MSM and the hysterias it promulgates there include Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign, systemic racism, and that failing to lockdown in the face of Covid amounts to human sacrifice. The Right promotes its own hysterias through talk radio and dissident media — things like voter fraud, vaccines, the UN, that “the world-wide lockdowns are the greatest mistake in human history” (Dennis Prager), etc.
Michael Hiltzik writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Numerous studies from across the world have found that lockdowns succeeded in suppressing transmission rates. An Italian team found that lockdowns start to reduce the number of COVID infections about 10 days after they start, and keep reducing the case rate for as long as 20 days following initiation.
French researchers, in a paper published in January, compared the experience in countries that imposed stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and lifted the restrictions gradually — New Zealand, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Britain— to that of Sweden, which imposed no lockdown, and the U.S., which had (and still has) a patchwork of state policies often involving late orders followed by abrupt and premature lifting.
The first group saw rapid reductions in infections and a rapid economic recovery, compared to the second. “Early-onset lockdown with gradual deconfinement allowed shortening the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic and reducing contaminations,” the researchers concluded. “Lockdown should be considered as an effective public health intervention to halt epidemic progression.”
The UCLA researchers, meanwhile, estimated that reductions in movement resulting from stay-at-home orders reduced transmission in the hardest-hit communities, such as Seattle, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles by 50% or more.
All these findings point to savings of millions of lives globally. None of it is especially surprising. Compliance with stay-at-home orders meant reducing one’s exposure to strangers whose viral conditions were unknown. That was especially crucial in locations where COVID was raging and therefore the prospect of coming into close contact with an infected individual was relatively high.
That leaves the economic question. Critics of lockdowns typically advocate balancing the public health gains from stay-at-home orders against the economic losses from keeping bars, restaurants, hair salons, and other small businesses closed. They argue, as has DeSantis and other red-state governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas, that concerns about the latter should take primacy over the benefits of the former.
The problem with this argument is that there’s very little evidence that lockdowns themselves damaged local economies more than individual behavior that would have happened anyway, lockdowns or not. Nor is there much evidence that lifting lockdowns produced a faster recovery.
Those who have studied the course of the pandemic in the U.S. and Europe understand why the lockdowns have less economic impact than one might expect. The reason is that people made their own choices to stay at home or to patronize only businesses where they felt relatively safe.
As Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syversen of the University of Chicago said of their study of the economic slump during the pandemic, “The vast majority of the decline was due to consumers choosing of their own volition to avoid commercial activity.”
That’s evident from the chronology of the business slump. Most counties and states didn’t impose stay-at-home orders until late March or early April; even Newsom, who is depicted as having shut down the California economy particularly aggressively, didn’t act until March 19.
Yet in California and throughout the country, residents started withdrawing from face-to-face commerce well before then, with the sharpest reductions in the first half of March. Government-ordered shutdowns did less to force people to stay home than to give them legal grounds to do so.
Foot traffic fell by about 60% during the pandemic, Goolsbee and Syverson concluded from their study of smartphone mobility statistics. But government orders accounted for only seven percentage points of that.
In short, it wasn’t government policy that kept people home. It was fear.
