Images of human sacrifice have long danced in our heads. Think Abraham and Isaac, Jesus on the cross, the Aztecs, Faye Raye and King Kong, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But seeing voluntary and “voluntary” human sacrifice occur on a mass scale seemed something out of the history of exotic, remote cultures until the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, one group in our society has, as Jaws‘ Matt Hooper suggested of Amity beachgoers, lined up to be the virus’ hot lunch. Those would be Republicans.
Kurt Andersen writes in The Atlantic that he came to the same conclusion upon seeing a graph generated by Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy that plotted the number of COVID deaths by the degree of Republicanism in the country’s 3,000-plus counties:
In the reddest counties—those where 70 percent or more voted for Trump—the COVID death rates from last June through November were five or six times the death rates in places at the other end of the political scale. And step by step up the blue-to-red scale, the statistical correlation is amazingly consistent—the more Republican your county, the more likely you are to die of COVID.
Through 2020, most of us had little beside masks and isolation for protection. But when by the summer of 2021 vaccines were readily available, protection was there, for free, for the willing. Under the new Biden administration, however, those who bought Donald Trump’s stolen-election lie demonstrated fealty to Trump by rejecting vaccinations and masks in the name of freedom. Refusal, even at the risk of death, became a badge of belonging, of obesisance to their lord and of rejection of the “Democrat” usurper.
The Kaiser Family Foundation found that counting only the “COVID-19 deaths [that] could have been prevented by vaccination,” 163,000 Americans died, Andersen writes, “unnecessarily and avoidably” from last June through November.
Andersen was not the first to invoke mass human sacrifice. Metaphorical references were already in the air. Early in the pandemic, then-president Trump balked at shutting down businesses to control the spread of the deadly virus he was at the time downplaying. “We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem,” Trump said as he sent workers deemed essential, but expendable to their deaths in meat-packing plants. Faced with a viral version of the “trolley problem,” as an American conservative, you save the trolley company. Referencing conservatives whose first duty was to the economy rather than to human life, I posted the Moloch scene from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis in which workers march to their deaths in the angry god’s fiery maw.
In exploring the history of human sacrifice in scientific research, Andersen found several common features that correspond eerily to our present situation. But aside from social conditions, social stress, and religious elements, there was a political element:
A long-standing theory of human sacrifice, the “social-control hypothesis,” has argued that social elites used it to keep the hoi polloi subservient. But the evidence was scattered and anecdotal, untested by the most rigorous modern scholarship. One big question: What distinguished the cultures that practiced human sacrifice from those that did not? Thanks to a massive historical database of the social and genetic particulars of a hundred traditional societies spread over a sixth of the planet, from the eastern Pacific to Australia and East Asia, in 2016 we got one definitive answer: “Ritual human sacrifice,” an official summary of the research said, “played a central role in helping those at the top of the social hierarchy maintain power over those at the bottom.”
Researchers from the University of Auckland, Australia’s Victoria University, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History categorized 93 Austronesian societies, 40 of which practiced human sacrifice, according to three levels of socioeconomic fairness—from most egalitarian, where children didn’t inherit wealth or status from parents, to totally nonegalitarian, where children could acquire wealth and status only by inheritance. The results are stark: The less fair a society’s socioeconomic system was, the more likely it was to practice human sacrifice—67 percent of the least egalitarian societies versus only 25 percent of the most egalitarian and 37 percent of those in the middle. More specifically, the researchers wrote, “human sacrifice substantially increased the chances of high social stratification arising,” “increased the rate at which” those societies “gain high social stratification,” and “stabilizes social stratification once stratification has arisen.”
For his part, Trump eventually relented on vaccines, at least. He wants credit for their development and to set himself apart from rival Ron DeSantis. Plus, it dawned on him that vaccine refusal was a losing get-out-the-vote strategy for 2024:
For the past six years, few of his masses of fervent supporters—whether evangelical or irreligious—have objected much to any particular Trump heresy or inconsistency. Indeed, his extreme unpredictability is part of the show. And as he considers running for president in 2024, he must be acutely aware that his margins of victory and loss in 2016 and 2020 were mere thousands of votes in a few states, and that his voters are disproportionately the ones now being sacrificed.
Trump may not be smart, but he is calculating in a feral way as opposed to a “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” way, speaking of social control. He is at best a wannabe autocrat. The real deals are in the wings, waiting.