Symbolic politics and government response to a national emergency: Narrating the COVID-19 crisis

Abstract The U.S. government’s response to the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has raised questions of whether its role is in fact limited to symbolic politics courtesy of its highly fragmented authority. This paper deconstructs the most prominent federal government outreach to the American people at the outset of the COVID-19 crisis—the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings, to show how government actions have been communicated to the public. Within the Kübler-Ross’ five-stage theory of grief, several narratives are surveyed as they are being circulated, tested and/or abandoned. It is argued that engaging in the enactment of narratives is one logical avenue for a crisis mitigation reimagined in postmodern terms. This serves as yet another reminder of how policy deliberation could be replaced with symbolic acts via discursive manipulation to the detriment of democratic public administration.