As the economy teeters on the brink of collapse, as the death toll from the SARS-CoV-2 virus mounts and threatens to skyrocket far beyond our nation’s ability to control it, many Americans are shaking their heads, wondering just what has happened to their country. As the crisis prolongs, as our schools struggle vainly to reopen, as businesses continue to founder, it’s as if a curtain is gradually lifting. It’s as if the willful, hopeful blindness of millions of people has finally given way to a collective shock of understanding and recognition of the actual horror that lies before us all.
Paul Krugman, writing for the The New York Times, patiently explains that what is happening right here, right now, is nothing more than the natural endgame of all Republican, “conservative” philosophy. This is where it was all headed, and where it has always been headed. And anyone paying the slightest bit of attention should have seen it coming.
Krugman starts by explaining the realities of the right wing.
You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.
Only yesterday, it seems, was the fuzzy, generalized push to “deregulate,” to “free the economy” from any constraints that might have held back corporate profits in the name of the public health, safety or welfare, that dominated Republican “philosophy.” The idea of any collective responsibility—of a social compact between Americans—was always inherently poisonous to that shiny, conservative ideal. And that aversion to any responsibility for the country as a whole has manifested itself in ways we have seen constantly unfolding during the course of this horrific pandemic, as conservative attitudes have been exposed and highlighted again and again under the harsh glare of reality.
This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.
The COVID-19 pandemic collided head-on with that philosophy, because it was unique: It impacted everyone. It may have seemed to some jaundiced eyes to disproportionately attack poorer, “essential” Americans, but in the final analysis it was coming for everyone. It simply didn’t care one whit about economic “status,” and even less about philosophy. The only way to respond to such a calamity that affects everyone is by invoking shared responsibility to defeat it. But this is exactly the message that Republicans belligerently, obstinately, even suicidally, have even now refused to accept.
Rational policy in a pandemic, however, is all about taking responsibility. The main reason you shouldn’t go to a bar and should wear a mask isn’t self-protection, although that’s part of it; the point is that congregating in noisy, crowded spaces or exhaling droplets into shared air puts others at risk. And that’s the kind of thing America’s right just hates, hates to hear.
So now we have a Republican-dominated Senate, pathologically hamstrung by its ideological refusal to accept that responsibility towards other Americans. But rather than face its shortcomings, they don’t want to acknowledge the bankruptcy of their philosophy. In fact, they’d rather die than acknowledge it—but they’re quite prepared to let others die first. Krugman cites the zombie-esque Republican mantra that providing further benefits to distressed American workers will incentivize their desire to remain unemployed. It’s a mantra that in fact ignores their own belief system (because it repudiates the inherent nature of all Americans to better their own lives), but they have fixated on it, like an illusory totem.
In an economy experiencing Depression-level morbidity, with a population desperate for work and a return to “normalcy,” it’s impossible to find any rational support for this attitude. Yet Republicans continue to cling to it because it provides them with cold comfort, even as the country threatens to crumble around them.To admit the necessity of a social compact—the idea that that those most fortunate should come to the aid of those less fortunate for the preservation of our society—is an implicit admission of failure that Republicans, blinded by their ideology, cannot make.
Because for conservatives it is more than merely philosophy at stake: It is the core of their existence that is now threatened. Everything they’ve believed and lived, oblivious or indifferent to the harm it caused, for decades, is now at mortal risk. And they would rather die than see the entirety of their prior existence trivialized, or worse, completely discredited.
The point, instead, is that they’ve sacralized selfishness, hurting their own political prospects by insisting on the right to act selfishly even when it hurts others.
What the coronavirus has revealed is the power of America’s cult of selfishness. And this cult is killing us.
The American experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has never been a battle simply against the virus. If it were, we would be in the position of other developed countries that have seen through the battle and now, having pushed it back, are once more coming out into the light.
But we cannot be one of those countries. In this country, the fight against the virus has been a war against an unyielding, inflexible conservatism—and Republicanism—from the very start. Everything we are seeing and experiencing now, and every failure still to come until the country finally throws the yoke of Republican policy into the dustbin of history, is a product of that conflict.
November 3rd literally cannot come soon enough.
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