Much Ado About Masks

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By Michael R. Ford
March 22, 2021

It is just a piece of cloth with two strings that loop around your ears. I think I wore one once at an urgent care when I had strep throat a few years ago. Other than that, I did not think about, nor care about masks, until the last year. Now masks are a fixture of daily life. They serve as a symbol of safety, government oppression, belief in science, virtue signaling and many other things depending on where one sits on the ideological spectrum. Frankly, the impassioned debate over the efficacy of masks and the wisdom of the government actions mandating their use feels bizarre. But, I think the mask issue is symbolic of some of the most serious divides surrounding the governing of our democratic republic.

A Broken Federalism

It begins with a broken federalism. The concept that areas of national concern, like a pandemic, are handled at the national level, broke down when the federal government proved not up to the task of responding to COVID-19. While some states produced coherent policies, many, like mine, did not. Instead we engaged in abstract debates about liberty while a patchwork of local government orders attempted to address an issue that demanded broader collective action. In practice, the failure of federalism forced local officials to struggle with legitimate questions, like why should one city require masks when a neighboring city won’t, stemming from a situation that never should have existed in the first place. Most difficult to accept is the fact that the abandonment of governing responsibility was often a choice. Us in PA must wrestle with understanding why this choice was made, and what we can do about it in the future.

Distrust of Experts

“Nobody knows if masks work.” Someone said this to me in April 2020. Someone said this to me in March 2021. Of course the truth is masks are an effective Covid-19 mitigation tool. The statement that there is no evidence that masks work is simply not true. I am reminded of a lesson from Masha Gessen’s remarkable Surviving Autocracy, in which they concludes that the point of a lie is often not that the spreader believes it, but rather to demonstrate that truth does not matter in a particular context. If it is believed that mask mandates were designed by experts to oppress the masses, any evidence produced by experts in support of a mandate can be immediately dismissed. In reality a mask mandate is a matter of policy, while the efficacy of masks is a matter of scientific evidence. One can logically oppose a mandate without rejecting the science used to justify it.

But the larger point is, in practice, the debate over mask mandates is about distrust of experts and alienation from government. When one says they just follow the science in support of a specific public policy, they are in practice saying any disagreement with said policy is illegitimate. It is easy to deduce that those taking the position deemed illegitimate feel that they have no voice in their government. Being told to trust the science is akin to being told that your voice does not and cannot matter. In a democratic society, this is a huge problem.

Virtue Signaling

I cringe when I see Facebook posts calling out specific businesses or individuals for not wearing a mask or enforcing a mask policy. I similarly cringe when I see Facebook posts bragging about flouting mask mandates. In both cases people are virtue signaling; either that they are with the ones who really care about the common good, or that they are with the ones who really care about personal freedom. In both cases masks are not the issue, but a prop in an ongoing political debate. There is nothing wrong with debating that tension between the common good and personal freedom, indeed that is baked into the American experiment. But there is a cost when everything, including one of the few tools we have to fight a global pandemic, is coopted as a prop in this never-ending debate.

I share these issues because when COVID-19 subsides, our divisions will still remain. The hard work of fixing our structural divides, as well our personal divides, is necessary to ensure our divisions do not define our response to the next crisis. It is not about drawing equivalencies between ideologies or behavior, false or real, but about administrative capacity and ultimately government performance. Policy disagreement is healthy and necessary in a functioning democratic society. Ideological groupthink dressed up in the language of policy debate is not.

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Author: Michael R. Ford is an associate professor of public administration at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where he teaches graduate courses in budgeting and research methods. He frequently publishes on the topics of public and nonprofit board governance, accountability and school choice. He currently serves as the president of the Midwest Public Affairs Conference, and as an elected member of the Oshkosh, WI Common Council.

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