War Metaphors (What Are They Good For?): Militarized Rhetoric and Attitudes Toward Essential Workers During the Covid-19 Pandemic

• Author: Jessica D. Blankshain,David M. Glick,Danielle L. Lupton
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221125713
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(2) 161–173

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221125713

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War Metaphors (What Are They Good For?):

Militarized Rhetoric and Attitudes Toward

Essential Workers During the Covid-19

Pandemic

Jessica D. Blankshain

1

, David M. Glick

2

, and Danielle L. Lupton

3



Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders and society at large invoked militarized rhetoric and war metaphors to elevate

essential workers and inspire collective action. Using a survey experiment we investigate whether this type of framing affects

public views about (1) individual responsibilities, (2) targeted polices, and (3) perceptions of those called heroes and soldiers.

We f‌ind that the war metaphor has minimal effects on public attitudes toward policies and individual actions in res ponse to the

pandemic. Framing the response in militaristic terms does, however, appear to affect perceptions of essential workers. Counter

to our hypotheses, subjects who saw essential workers called heroes or soldiers viewed them as more motivated by com-

pensation rather than service, and expressed less respect for them, than respondents in the control. These f‌indings, including

the nulls, make important contributions to our understanding of the limits of framing effects in a polarized context.

Keywords

pandemic, public opinion, rhetoric, polarization

Two very different American presidents seemed to agree on one

thing—the United States has been at war with the novel co-

ronavirus. In March 2020, Donald Trump touted himself as “a

wartime president,”calling Covid-19 “the invisible enemy”

(Bennett & Berenson, 2020;Elving, 2020). In April 2020, the

U.S. Surgeon General compared the developing pandemic to

Pearl Harbor and 9/11 (Noack et al., 2020). The Biden ad-

ministration employed similar rhetoric in early 2021, arguing the

United States is “at war with this virus”(Miller, 2021). Such

rhetoric was not limited to the U.S. Indeed, the global public

discourse has been saturated with the war metaphor. In March

2020, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros

Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual summit: “We ar e at w ar

with a virus that threatens to tear us apart.”He further asked

world leaders to “Fight hard. Fight like hell. Fight like your lives

depend on it—because they do”(Chappell, 2020). More re-

cently, a July 2021 internal CDC document noted that the “war

has changed”with the rise of the new delta variant (Yasmeen

Abutaleb et al., 2021). As the Covid-19 death toll rose, the

pandemic’s impact was often measured against the casualty

counts of various wars (Hollingsworth & Webber, 2021).

Compared to other potential frames, politicians, the media, and

even the public have overwhelming employed the war metaphor

to understand and discuss the Covid-19 pandemic (Wicke &

Bolognesi, 2020).

The war metaphor has also been extended to those bearing

the brunt of the pandemic response. President Trump de-

scribed healthcare workers “running into death just like

soldiers run into bullets in a true sense…” (Salles & Gold,

2020). Essential workers have been referred to as heroes,

warriors, or soldiers on the front lines (Meet the Heroes of the

Front Lines, 2021). Legislators have proposed bills whose

titles reinforce this framing, such as Senator Mitt Romney’s

“Patriot Pay”legislation (Romney, 2020) or the HEROES

Act, introduced by House Democrats in May 2020. Scholars

have even suggested the G.I. Bill and other veterans’benef‌it

programs as models for how to care for Covid-19 frontline

workers (Grossman & McEnaney, 2020).

This widespread use of the war metaphor suggests a

common belief that militarized rhetoric is a useful way to

1

National Security Affairs, US Naval War College, Newport, RI, USA

2

Boston University, Boston, MA, USA

3

Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA

Authors are listed in alphabetical order.

Corresponding Author:

Jessica D. Blankshain, US Naval War College 686 Cushing Rd, ATTN:

National Security Affairs, Newport, RI 02841, USA.

Email: jessica.blankshain@usnwc.edu