The section in the highlighted paragraph (below) excerpted from The Washington Post column by Greg Sargent “Opinion: The latest GOP anti-mask lunacy is stirring a backlash. New polling reveals it” jumped out at me:
To people like DeSantis and Abbott, of course, none of this matters. While they piously pretend to be defending the liberty of their constituents, they appear to be speaking primarily to very narrowly conceived national Republican primary electorates — as well as the Fox News audience — to nourish their own higher ambitions.
On this score, the new polling is instructive. Ipsos (read polling results here) tells me that large majorities of non-college-educated Whites — a demographic that is supposed to thrill to Trumpian cultural warmongering — oppose gubernatorial prohibitions against local mask mandates and the cutting of school funding as retaliation. Those numbers are 58 percent and 75 percent respectively.
Meanwhile, other polling shows the potential for backlash to these GOP antics. Ron Brownstein obtained data from numerous pollsters and found that sizable majorities of vaccinated Americans want tougher requirements imposed on those who refuse to get vaccinated.
When I learned yesterday that Texas governor Greg Abbott tested positive I saw this as good news, but it occurred to me that news that, to use Greg Sargent’s term, a Trumpian culture warmongering governor “merely” tested positive for Covid may not be enough for a hard-core fellow Trumpian culture warmonger testing positive and not getting really, really sick (or worse) may not be enough to change deeply held beliefs.
A positive test in someone else can be dismissed as an abstraction. “So what, he tested positive and he’s fine” these people may think, rationalizing the news away as irrelevant to their beliefs.
The polling data, as Sargent notes, “shows a potential for backlash” to “GOP antics.” The keyword is “potential”.
What will it take for the backlash to be really significant as more prominent anti-mask mandate and anti-vaccination mandate GOP Trumpian culture warmongers like Greg Abbott contact Covid?
Florida’s Ron Desantis, who by some accounts edges out Abbott for first place as the worst Covid governor, has led a charmed life, presumably avoiding Covid so far, perhaps by making sure he wears his mask as often as possible.
It may be that either the Covid near death or actual death of a loved one, or an admired leader, will be what it takes for the hard-core group to change their minds.
The Holocaust poem, First They Came, by Martin Niemöller comes to mind:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
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