Love in the Time of Covid: The Expert, the Hysteric and Trump

A striking aspect of the current American cultural divide is divergent attitudes towards expertise, generally, and masking and vaccination mandates to mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically. Liberal pundits profess shock that Red State America won’t just “trust the science”. On the right, politicians and television personalities encourage the rejection of mandates in the name of individual “freedom”.Discourse theory can give us some insight into this. The rejection of expertise is an example of a “hysteric discourse” challenging a “university discourse”: the regime of experts. An hysteric discourse is a critique of rules imposed by experts by the subjects-subjected-to them. Hysteria can lead, in turn, to a “master discourse”. I will show how this his helps explain the personality cult of love for Donald Trump. In addition, I will also suggest how these three discourses relate to law and jurisprudence.