Why does the political right engage in denialism time after time? After all, multiple studies suggest the conservative brain is wired for a higher sensitivity to threatening stimuli. That should make them sentinels who serve to alert the tribe to potential threats instead of denying them. Perhaps it is the nature of the “threat,” how it is presented and by whom, and who counts as their tribe. But it’s hard to keep (or put) a good zombie lie down. COVID-19 denialism is no different, says Paul Krugman.
The rich relentlessly promote the notion that tax cuts boost the economy and pay for themselves. In paper after lecture after failure to produce promised results, the lie won’t die because those with financial interest in perpetuating it keep feeding it brains. Climate denial? Same mechanisms, only funded by fossil fuel interests.
But who benefits from COVID-19 denialism? Krugman suspects it is related to other denialism by patterns of thought:
First, when you have a political movement almost entirely built around assertions than [sic] any expert can tell you are false, you have to cultivate an attitude of disdain toward expertise, one that spills over into everything. Once you dismiss people who look at evidence on the effects of tax cuts and the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, you’re already primed to dismiss people who look at evidence on disease transmission.
This also helps explain the centrality of science-hating religious conservatives to modern conservatism, which has played an important role in Trump’s failure to respond.
Second, conservatives do hold one true belief: namely, that there is a kind of halo effect around successful government policies. If public intervention can be effective in one area, they fear — probably rightly — that voters might look more favorably on government intervention in other areas. In principle, public health measures to limit the spread of coronavirus needn’t have much implication for the future of social programs like Medicaid. In practice, the first tends to increase support for the second.
And we can’t have government giving “free stuff” like medical treatment to undeserving Irresponsibles, the lowest caste in the conservative firmament. It’s something I wrote about long before the T-party uprising:
… fellow citizens who need help succeeding in the private sector deserve only pity, if that. It’s the law of the meritocratic jungle. Social Darwinism. If they aren’t smart enough, talented enough, disciplined enough, educated enough or well-born enough it’s because they are Irresponsibles. Helping them enables their dependency and unjustly burdens the more virtuous and successful.
Disdain not just for experts but for those judged unworthy — Guess who gets to do the judging? — fueled the dismantling of public systems built to mitigate the capricious nature of … well, nature, not to mention the short-term unpredictability of market economies. No one could have predicted the consequences of that, yes?
“This… waves at everything… is what happens when you put people who hate government in charge of running it,” Josh Holland tweeted Saturday in response to a tweet Meghan McCain has since deleted — this one:
McCain is shocked, shocked to find Ronald Reagan’s shining city shrunken and drowning in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. She’s spent decades as a member of a movement dedicated to doing just that.
“You wouldn’t trust a mechanic who hates cars to fix your carburetor,” Holland said. Or a failed businessman to run the government even if you think it ought to be run like a private-sector business. Yet, here we are.
For more on why Jerry Falwell Jr. ordered the reopening of Liberty University in the middle of a plague, and on the “nationalist, white-identity, Neo-Confederate” apocalyptic cult that worships “power, white supremacy, and hypercapitalism” (in Jesus’ name, of course), see Jared Yates Sexton’s “The Cult of the Shining City Embraces the Plague” at the New Republic.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.