Don’t live in a Republican state
Jonathan Chait notes that it’s been difficult to get Trump to take the virus seriously. He’s not the only one; Republicans elsewhere are brushing it off as a mere case of the sniffles.
Republican governors in several states have downplayed the virus, either refusing to enforce social-distancing measures or even overruling local officials who attempt to do so. A new study finds that the single factor that best explains the speed of state-level reaction is its governor’s partisan identity. “States with Republican governors and Republican electorates delayed each social distancing measure by an average of 2.70 days,” the authors find, “a far larger effect than any other factor, including state income per capita, the percentage of neighboring states with mandates, or even confirmed cases in state.”
So medical science is a libbrul conspiracy?
Having a television-addled president with the memory and long-term planning capabilities of a fruit fly is deeply unhelpful. But there is more behind Trump’s intermittent disregard for the virus’s danger than simple Trumpiness. As is often the case when analyzing any of the horrors of the Trump era, Trump’s coronavirus response combines his idiosyncratic personality disorders with ingrained pathologies of the conservative movement.
Two weeks ago, Richard Epstein, one of the movement’s most prestigious intellectuals, wrote a contrarian analysis of the pandemic. Epstein argued that conventional models were dramatically overstating the pandemic risk, and predicted the coronavirus would ultimately claim a mere 500 American lives…
It was obvious almost immediately that Epstein horribly botched his projection. (The American death toll is already several times higher than he forecast, and the Trump administration’s current, most optimistic prediction forecasts some 400 times as many deaths.) In an interview with Isaac Chotiner, Epstein reveals himself as hopelessly out of his depth. He repeatedly claims the coronavirus is bound to weaken as it spreads, a claim he does not substantiate, and which is contradicted by all (real) experts. He confidently asserts that Bill Gates has endorsed his bottom-line conclusion, which is the opposite of the truth. Epstein’s model turns out to have been essentially made up out of thin air.
Maybe that’s what attracts Republicans – the freedom to just make shit up.
The skepticism has run up and down the food chain of right-wing discourse. The National Enquirer has hawked fake coronavirus cures. The Federalist published a column by a retired dermatologist urging readers to hold coronavirus parties to contract the disease intentionally, because it worked on chicken pox.
Now they’re arguing that the success of steps taken to contain the virus shows that there’s no need to contain the virus.
It is literally as if your mo[ther] warned you you’d get wet if you didn’t carry an umbrella, made you carry an umbrella, and then you claimed that the fact that you stayed dry under it disproved her prediction.
For anybody who has closely followed the world of conservative ideas for the last few decades, it would come as little surprise to see such simple errors undergirding the conclusions of even the most esteemed minds the movement has to offer. Conservatism has built an alternative-fact universe, in which pseudo-experts can confidently explain why tax cuts will increase revenue, Obamacare will fail to increase health-insurance coverage, greenhouse-gas emissions will not warm the planet, and on and on.
It’s libertarianism. Science is not the boss of me! Too bad the left is just as bad. “A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman!”
I don’t think the libertarian blanket fits this very well, it’s mostly sheer stupidity, which crosses all ideologies.
Here’s where those who think they can “create their own reality” run up against not just the “reality based community,” but Reality itself. Asserting that something is true doesn’t make it so. People might play along for a while, but physics, chemistry and biology won’t. This seems to be a hard lesson for some people. They’re not used to having their asses bitten, then handed to them so quickly by something so implacable and deadly. You can fool people who are invested in your ideology, who are willing and eager to be told that everything’s fine, that nothing more will be demanded of them than continued consumption, and that business as usual is not, in fact, murdering the planet. But viruses don’t read press releases or repeat sound bites; they don’t pick up on your slick, Gish-gallop talking points, or retweet your liberal-baiting memes, and their timescale is not the next generation, but the next day. Bold predictions of successful resistance, confident underestimations of the required material resources, and premature declarations of victory will be proved to be bullshit almost immediately. These earnestly ignorant ideologues are not used to unavoidable, instantaneous, negative reinforcement. They can’t spin this away. It’s not happening at some remote location like the ice sheets of Greenland or Antarctica, but in Times Square and the French Quarter. It’s a lot easier to ignore and dismiss distant, retreating glaciers, slowly changing rainfall patterns, and gradualy shifting biotic distributions, than it is to hide thousands of freshly minted, local corpses.
I second the title of this post. I have spent too much of my life (wasted too much of my life?) in deep red states. I want to go over the rainbow, where there are no Republicans and people have health insurance and the social safety net isn’t in tatters and education is fully funded. To name just a few things I might find in that elusive land of Oz.
Well, I would stop short of saying that the left is as bad as the right. The left has, very loosely speaking, two areas of anti-science: sex/gender, and holistic health / alternative medicine style woo. To put it mildly, the right has more than two. For starters, they share the health woo stuff, though perhaps not to the same degree, but they have a whole constellation of other bullshit all to themselves.
#3
Sorry iknklast, but we in the land of Aus are not free of batshit insane conservative politicians.
Another thing we humans are terrible at. I was involved with Y2K preparations for a number of large companies. My teams put in an enormous amount of effort and fixed an awful lot of stuff before it broke.
Ever since, people have been calling the Y2K thing a hoax because the world didn’t end. It didn’t end because a lot of people spent a lot of sweat making sure it didn’t.
Does anyone want to buy my special hat, which keeps tigers away?
Latest,
With the evident ubiquity of Tiger King, you might get more custom than you’re expecting…
Exactly why I called it elusive.
And if I recall correctly, the wizard was touched with a bit of tyranny.
Not that I particularly like the leader of NZ’s National Party (the conservative party here), but in response to the Labour lead Government locking NZ down he used the Maori phrase… He waka eke noa. Which translates roughly as ‘We are all in this together’ (more literally as ‘a canoe we are all in’).
I wouldn’t say we are Iknklast’s end of the rainbow, but it could be worse.