Gun vio­lence and the opi­oid epi­dem­ic are good barom­e­ters of U.S. pol­i­tics. Hillary Clin­ton and Don­ald Trump spoke about both dur­ing the 2016 cam­paign. Trump even gave a speech and offered details of a plan to address the opi­oid cri­sis. All the talk hasn’t got­ten us very far, though. It’s most­ly been a shame­ful exer­cise in the pol­i­tics of hopelessness.

'In a lot of these places, good-paying jobs and the dignity that goes along with those good-paying jobs has been replaced by suffering and hopelessness and the belief that people in power don't really care about them or their communities.'

Gun vio­lence has long been a polit­i­cal issue, of course, but the mur­der count in Chica­go—762 last year, the high­est lev­el since the mid-1990s — has moved it to cen­ter stage again. That’s because the Chica­go angle allows the GOP to talk about some of its favorite themes: the fail­ure of lib­er­al­ism in urban Amer­i­ca, the gen­er­al chaos of big cities and the futil­i­ty of gun-con­trol laws.

Trump tweet­ed that if Chicago’s may­or can’t get the city under con­trol, ​“he must ask for Fed­er­al help!” At Nation­al Review, edi­tor Rich Lowry blamed the vio­lence on the influ­ence of Black Lives Mat­ter and the ACLU, whose push­back against police vio­lence has, sup­pos­ed­ly, neutered law enforce­ment: ​“Chica­go demon­strates that in swathes of inner-city Amer­i­ca, you can have a chas­tened, pas­sive police depart­ment, or a mod­icum of pub­lic order, but not both,” Lowry wrote. His solu­tion? ​“Chica­go sim­ply needs to stop, arrest, and jail more dan­ger­ous people.”

Down­ward spiral

The recent spike in opi­oid-relat­ed deaths isn’t as divi­sive, polit­i­cal­ly, but it’s been about equal­ly dead­ly. The annu­al death toll from over­dos­ing quadru­pled between 1999 and 2015, accord­ing to the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion, which recent­ly report­ed that more than 33,000 peo­ple died of an over­dose in 2015. The same year, more than 35,000 peo­ple died from gun vio­lence, includ­ing 22,000 suicides.

After the elec­tion, a soci­ol­o­gist at Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty, Shan­non Mon­nat, stud­ied the returns and found that both epi­demics had a grim con­nec­tion to the out­come. Coun­ties where where Trump over-per­formed Mitt Rom­ney in 2012 also had a high­er-than-nor­mal rate of death from sui­cide and alco­hol and drug abuse.

Trump’s promise to be their ​“voice” res­onat­ed pow­er­ful­ly with those com­mu­ni­ties. The find­ings are ​“about down­ward mobil­i­ty and the dis­man­tling of the Amer­i­can dream at a larg­er com­mu­ni­ty lev­el,” Mon­nat told NPR. ​“In a lot of these places, good-pay­ing jobs and the dig­ni­ty that goes along with those good-pay­ing jobs has been replaced by suf­fer­ing and hope­less­ness and the belief that peo­ple in pow­er don’t real­ly care about them or their communities.”

Treat­ing the symptom

You can look at solu­tions to these epi­demics in two ways: aim­ing to fix the root caus­es or aim­ing to treat the symptoms.

Get­ting to the root of things would mean think­ing about the fac­tors that lead peo­ple down cer­tain paths, about poli­cies that redis­trib­ute wealth and pow­er, and so on. It would mean tack­ling a range of ques­tions that our pol­i­tics and media aren’t equipped to deal with in a seri­ous way. That leaves us with treat­ing the symptoms.

One solu­tion to gun vio­lence is to put more cops on the street. The con­ser­v­a­tive ral­ly­ing cry has been that we need not only more cops but more aggres­sive cops. The great advan­tage of this solu­tion is its sim­plic­i­ty. It’s an easy, pop­ulist talk­ing point, which is why a recent 60 Min­utes piece focused on it in a seg­ment about the gun vio­lence in Chica­go. It spot­light­ed an agree­ment between the ACLU and the city of Chica­go that reduced the num­ber of street stops by cops, and blamed it for the rise in gun-relat­ed deaths over the past year.

The ACLU of Illi­nois not­ed in a response that there is, in fact, no rela­tion­ship between street stops and a reduc­tion in crime. In New York City, the rela­tion­ship was actu­al­ly the reverse: crime dropped when the num­ber of stops dropped. ​“The most effec­tive way to address vio­lence in poor, black neigh­bor­hoods is to address eco­nom­ic dis­par­i­ty and improve edu­ca­tion and youth pro­grams,” the ACLU said.

If the root-prob­lem reme­dies invoked by the ACLU aren’t an option, nei­ther is the most obvi­ous mit­i­gat­ing solu­tion: gun con­trol. Repub­li­cans still claim that Chica­go has the strictest gun-con­trol laws in the nation, but courts long ago struck down the laws that once dis­tin­guished Chica­go from most of the nation: a ban on hand­guns, for exam­ple, and an Illi­nois ban on con­cealed carry.

Gun con­trol is an imper­fect solu­tion, at best, to the epi­dem­ic. But in a more ratio­nal polit­i­cal cul­ture, some basic reforms would be high on the agen­da of the GOP, the ​“pro-life” par­ty. Last year, a con­tro­ver­sial study pub­lished in The Lancet found that pass­ing three gun-con­trol laws nation­wide — uni­ver­sal back­ground checks for both gun pur­chas­es and ammu­ni­tion, and an ID sys­tem mak­ing it eas­i­er to trace weapons — would low­er firearm fatal­i­ties by 90 per­cent. Crit­ics dis­put­ed the method­ol­o­gy of the study. But the idea that such mea­sures would reduce gun deaths isn’t real­ly in doubt. It’s just a mat­ter of how much.

Hope­less politics

Chicago’s rep­u­ta­tion as ​“the Left’s city,” as one con­ser­v­a­tive writer recent­ly put it, is more myth than real­i­ty. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic polit­i­cal machine that runs Chica­go seems main­ly inter­est­ed in keep­ing its grip on pow­er. Tar­get­ing the city’s struc­tur­al inequal­i­ties isn’t high on the agen­da of many lead­ers, least of all that of the may­or, Rahm Emmanuel, who has bur­nished his neolib­er­al cre­den­tials across a range of issues, most notably by clos­ing dozens of pub­lic schools in the city’s poor­est neighborhoods.

But in the cur­rent U.S. con­text, the low bar for being on the ​“Left” is that you sup­port pub­lic pol­i­cy that actu­al­ly works to treat the symp­toms of struc­tur­al prob­lems. Being on the ​“Right” means sup­port­ing pol­i­cy that doesn’t work, or has a mod­est effect, but is an easy polit­i­cal sell. Cut­ting tax­es to increase rev­enue, for exam­ple, or unleash­ing more — and more aggres­sive — cops to low­er crime rates.

We may be mov­ing toward that kind of a split on the opi­oid epi­dem­ic. Dur­ing the elec­tion cam­paign, Clin­ton offered a detailed plan for fight­ing drug addic­tion. One pri­or­i­ty was to ​“ensure that every per­son suf­fer­ing from drug or alco­hol addic­tion can obtain the com­pre­hen­sive, ongo­ing treat­ment he or she needs, and stay in recovery.”

And Trump? In his speech about the cri­sis, he gave pri­or­i­ty to law enforce­ment and to keep­ing drugs out of the coun­try. He would pur­sue and pun­ish drug traf­fick­ers, he promised, and close loop­holes that allow Chi­na and oth­ers ​“to send dan­ger­ous drugs across our bor­ders in the hands of our own postal ser­vice.” Trump also promised to ​“give peo­ple strug­gling with addic­tion access to the help they need,” and not­ed that Con­gress had ​“already tak­en the first step by pass­ing the Com­pre­hen­sive Addic­tion and Recov­ery Act.”

That law, approved by Con­gress last year, passed by a near­ly unan­i­mous vote — a rare moment of bipar­ti­san agree­ment on solu­tions. Will that uni­ty last? Maybe. But one of the dev­as­tat­ing effects of the GOP’s pledge to repeal Oba­macare is that it would strip treat­ment from peo­ple with addic­tion prob­lems. It’s also not like­ly that the GOP-con­trolled Con­gress will make addic­tion treat­ment a pri­or­i­ty, what­ev­er replace­ment for Oba­macare it comes up with. On the cam­paign trail, Trump claimed that his wall along the U.S.-Mexico bor­der would help stem the tide of opi­oid over­dos­es. And it’s easy to see that claim becom­ing the cen­ter­piece of the GOP’s strat­e­gy for deal­ing with the epi­dem­ic: tighter bor­ders and harsh­er sentencing.

It’s iron­ic and all too famil­iar: the hope­less­ness that helped elect Trump breeds even more despon­den­cy. When the Right’s solu­tions don’t work, the prob­lem inspires more dem­a­goguery. We throw up our hands and claim that noth­ing can be done, oth­er than more aggres­sive law enforce­ment. The pol­i­tics of hope­less­ness rolls on.