HIV/AIDS Awareness Month
KNIGHT WATCH by Bill Knight
In a month where “Joy to the World” is a welcome refrain, it’s appropriate to think of people across the globe dealing with HIV/AIDS and to thank progressives and conservatives alike who’ve worked toward preventing or treating HIV/AIDS…
Annually, December 1 is World AIDS Day, kicking off HIV/AIDS Awareness Month. HIV, of course, stands for human immunodeficiency virus, which attacks people’s immune system. Untreated, the virus can weaken the immune system until it can no longer protect against other infections and diseases. When this happens, the infection is called AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome. There’s no cure.
In the decades since AIDS became a worldwide catastrophe, conventional wisdom about the time when it became known grew into mythology – especially about then-President Ronald Reagan and Americans’ supposed shift to conservative extremism. However, a new book by a University of Illinois-Chicago scholar shows how the AIDS epidemic affected U.S. politics in the 1980s and ’90s and argues that the era was not as politically conservative as it’s often characterized.
In “Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis,” author Jennifer Brier, a UIC assistant professor of history, writes how the crisis, despite new activism by the New Right, influenced American matters involving health care and foreign policy, reproductive health, gay and lesbian rights, and racial justice.
“As the recent debate over health-care reform has shown, arguments over the best way to keep people healthy are fundamentally political as well as medical,” Brier said. “In the first decades of the AIDS epidemic, this point was put in sharp contrast as various constituencies – from AIDS activists to health-care service providers to government officials – argued over what was necessary to deal with, and respond to, the multiple crises produced by the emerging AIDS epidemic,” she said.
Contrary to standard historical narratives of conservatism that maintain that AIDS became a rallying point for conservative activists during the ’80s, Brier contends that AIDS divided conservatives. In fact, AIDS actually brought some conservatives closer to progressives in their approach to the epidemic. For instance, former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and Undersecretary of Education Gary Bauer, who later served as Reagan’s chief domestic policy adviser, had considerable conflicts about AIDS. Conservatives argued over the role of testing for HIV, the promotion of condom use, and the need for conversations about sexual practices as the best way to change people’s behavior, Brier writes.
“While Koop was never entirely successful in implementing policies that acknowledged people’s sexuality, Bauer was equally stymied when trying to enact AIDS policies that were driven by his strict definition of morality,” she says.
The common narrative about that time was the country’s shift to ultra conservatism, as personified by Ronald Reagan. That’s incomplete and even inaccurate, according to a lengthy analysis by Joel Rogers and Thomas Ferguson for the Atlantic late in that decade.
“It is vital to know if the central claim made by revisionist Democrats and Republicans alike – that a majority of the public has reached a stable, well-informed consensus on the desirability of right, or center-right, policies – is true,” they wrote in 1986. “We do not believe that it is.”
Americans for many years have been described as ideologically conservative but programmatically liberal, meaning we’re suspicious of big government and react favorably to the idea of “free enterprise,” at least in the abstract. But Ferguson and Rogers showed that “when it comes to assessing specific government programs or the behavior of actual business enterprises, however, they support government spending in a variety of domestic areas and are profoundly suspicious of big business.”
Americans increasingly supported both social programs and regulatory reforms in the ’80s, according to polls they cite. For instance, a survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found a 26-point jump in Americans wanting to expand rather than cut back welfare programs, and a CBS News/New York Times poll found that 74 percent of the public favored a government jobs program – even if it meant increasing the federal deficit.
True, their analysis shows, U.S. citizens became more conservative on a few issues, such as imposing harsher sentences for criminals and resisting tax hikes. But even those feelings were nuanced. For example, although 74% believed the middle class paid too much in taxes, people weren’t demanding tax cuts. Instead, 76% thought the wealthy were paying too little and 72% thought corporations weren’t paying enough either.
A survey found that voter attitudes showed “no consistent evidence of change, certainly not in a conservative direction,” Rogers and Ferguson reported – even after Reagan won a landslide re-election in 1984. Reagan won 59.2% of the vote, but still governed with an approval rating averaging 50% – lower than averages by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower (69%), John Kennedy (71%), Lyndon Johnson (52%) and even Richard Nixon (56%). (By comparison, President Obama’s average approval rating through Nov. 22 is 59%, according to Gallup polls.)
About the “mis-remembered” 1980s and the conservatism that wasn’t, Brier adds, “The disagreement [about AIDS] among administration conservatives became even more visible as the Reagan administration entered the global AIDS arena in the late 1980s.”
Her book includes a look at how AIDS workers, a group Brier defines as those committed to addressing the effects of AIDS, were made up of contrasting, if not conflicting, groups such as gay and lesbian media, religious leaders, AIDS service organizations, state and local health authorities, private philanthropies and even the U.S. State Department. Further, Brier argues that their combined efforts helped to shape progressive politics in the 21st century.
“Let There Be Peace on Earth.”
