gracchusdixit

Ten days ago, Donald Trump unveiled his so-called plan for declaring the United States “open for business” after several weeks of what amounted to a national lock-down.  To pretend that his grandiose proclamation was a “plan” in any meaningful sense would be grotesque.  What Trump and his minions gave us was little more than a bullet list of “guidelines,” which lacked the force of law and were bereft of any concrete commitments on the part of the federal government.  To states and municipalities across the country, Trump declared, in effect:  “You’re on your own.  Have a nice day.”

And as it turned out, it didn’t take long for Trump himself to scuttle the very guidelines he had just proposed.  Within hours, the Great Pumpkin scurried back to Twitter—his rhetorical drug of choice—to gin up the grievances of his equally drugged-up followers, exhorting them to “liberate” themselves from the oppressive tyranny of having to stay at home in order to avoid killing themselves, their families, or their neighbors.  If Donald Trump were an ordinary citizen, rather than the coddled cuckoo who, owed to our crazy electoral system, is safely closeted in the Oval Office, he would long ago have been dragged away in handcuffs for reckless endangerment.  

None of this should surprise us, for it is merely the culmination of an orchestrated right-wing effort to downplay the danger of COVID-19.  From the pretentious pontificators who write for the National Review, to the bloviating editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, to the Trump sycophants who huff and puff for a living at Fox News, conservatives have for weeks been trying to undo every effort to fight the most lethal global pandemic in a hundred years.

Their first line of attack was to dismiss this virus as an “hysterical” hoax, likening it to “the common flu”.  As the number of infections and deaths mounted, this claim collapsed under the weight of its own implausible mendacity. 

Their next trick was to assail the statistical models used by health experts to estimate the likely consequences of the pandemic, with the aim of undermining the credibility of the experts themselves.  When the model of choice inside the White House lowered its initial estimates of the likely death toll, the aforementioned National Review bellowed:  “To describe as stunning the collapse of a key model the government has used to alarm the nation about the catastrophic threat of the coronavirus would not do this development justice.”  The statistical ignoramuses at the National Review were caught completely flat-footed, when, just a few days later, the model they had singled out for opprobrium turned out to be, not overly “alarming,” but excessively cheery.  As the death toll kept rising, that model was revised again, but this time, upward.  Faced with such inconveniently unpleasant news, the National Review and other pandemic-deniers immediately went silent.   

They next turned to bemoaning the economic consequences of trying to mitigate the virus.  Trump declared: “We need to make sure the cure isn’t worse than the disease.”  Ron Johnson, a rich but particularly stupid Republican Senator from Wisconsin, took up the refrain:   “I am concerned that the cure is worse than the disease.  If you’re a carpenter, every nail you see, the solution’s a hammer.  The same may be true for epidemiologists.”   In the midst of a global pandemic, only tone-deaf plutocrats like Johnson (or Trump) would think it might be useful to compare the handiwork of carpenters with the scientific expertise of epidemiologists.   

As stupid as such comments were, it didn’t take long for other Republicans to go much further.  A Congressman from Indiana named Trey Hollingsworth declared:

It’s time for policymakers to put on their big-girl and big-boy pants and decide between the lesser of two evils.  Do we try to save more lives or our livelihood?  Restart the economy and kill more people or keep staying home and kill more jobs?  The answer is unequivocally to get Americans back to work, to get Americans back to their businesses.

In these words, the moral philosophy of the Republican Party was distilled to its toxic essence. Forced to choose between killing jobs and killing people, Representative Hollingsworth was quite prepared to kill people.   

Needless to say, this did not go down well with millions of ordinary Americans who don’t wear “big-girl and big-boy pants” and are less than enthused by the prospect of sacrificing themselves on the altar of GDP.

So, the pandemic-deniers moved on to their last and most desperate gambit:  denouncing efforts designed to mitigate the virus as a violation of of “civil liberties”.  Libertarian loons like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky likened shelter-in-place orders to “house arrest”. Our borderline-crazy Attorney General, William Barr, hinted that the Justice Department would side with anyone who sued the states to overturn those orders.  And Donald Trump, the pandemic-denier-in-chief, urged his followers to take to the streets to “save our Second Amendment,” as if social distancing somehow threatened gun rights and blue-state governors were tyrants like George III.

In a dozen state capitals across the land, Trump’s dim-witted fans dutifully complied, brandishing Confederate flags and automatic weapons.  One of these gullible nincompoops blurted to a reporter:  “I don’t want the government telling me what to do.  If I wanna go out, that’s my right.  I’ll take responsibility.  The same for other people. “  This is tantamount to saying:  “I don’t want the government telling me I can’t drive drunk.  If kill myself or somebody else, that’s nobody’s business but my own.”  It scarcely needs saying that such moral idiots would be the first to howl if the government left them to bleed to death after wrapping their cars around a tree. 

All of this begs a fundamental question:  Why are conservatives so hell-bent on pushing the country to “open for business,” even when that almost certainly means that millions more will get sick and thousands more will die?  

One Republican congressman provided an answer to that question, with more candor than he probably intended:

If this goes on much longer, the government is gonna have to get more and more involved.  We’ll lose our freedom.  We’ll lose the free market.   Capitalism could collapse.

Our country has become the epicenter of this global pandemic, precisely because it is the epicenter of global capitalism—a system that elevates private gain over the public good.  Such a system cannot possibly solve the greatest public crisis since the Great Depression.  Conservatives know this, and they are right to be afraid, because the global pandemic has exposed the cruel contradictions of the economic and social system they idolize.  As every day passes, as the death toll mounts, as the gap between the privileged few and the disposable many becomes more painfully obvious, more and more people will ask themselves whether such a system is worth the cost.