Southern governors’ bizarre response to Covid-19 (opinion)

Editor’s Note: Issac Bailey is a longtime journalist based in South Carolina and the Batten Professor for Communication Studies at Davidson College. McMaster, only days after describing the state as a “unique” place where a stay-at-home order wasn’t needed, issued an order requiring South Carolinians to stay home – unless they’re at work, visiting family, exercising or shopping for necessary items. The whole experience represented an accurate distillation of what’s been happening in South Carolina and in some, though not all, other parts of the South – a confusing, haphazard, bizarre kind of social distancing mixed with a healthy dose of the kind of defiance that has long defined – and always will define – a certain kind of Southerners. That’s why I can answer the question Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response, asked on CNN recently, about why there isn’t a stay-at-home order in every state. Join us on Twitter and Facebook After South Carolina seceded in 1860, lawyer James L. Petigru said the state was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” It’s a quote that is recycled every time we do something mind-boggling, and that seems to be often.