I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how American conservatism is slowly killing its adherents.
As recently as the early 2010s, there was no significant difference in American death rates by political affiliation. But sometime within the last decade, that started to change. Conservatives have started dying at higher rates than liberals, not just from COVID-19, but across all causes. This pattern holds true even after controlling for confounding factors like race, income, or geography.
What could be causing this? Here’s one answer: COVID conspiracism, like a malignant cancer, has mutated and spread throughout the ideology of the conservative body politic. They’ve come to mistrust not just the COVID vaccine, not just vaccines in general, but all medical science – and they’re paying the price for it. The Republican party has long fostered a mistrust of science and expertise among its adherents, and now it’s coming back to bite them.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:
Even as the world was going into lockdown and hospitals were swamped with the dying, conservatives refused to believe any of it. They told themselves that the timing was suspicious; that the pandemic must be a plot to oust Donald Trump from office by causing economic and social disruption just before the election. To that end, they concocted all manner of conspiracy theories to convince themselves that the virus wasn’t real or wasn’t a threat.
But while Fox News pundits and QAnon podcasts could sway conservative voters, they couldn’t alter reality. The virus was real, and it was a threat. Many who refused to believe this fact paid with their lives.
A famous example was the conservative talk show host Phil Valentine, who decried lockdowns, promoted quack therapies, and streamed anti-vaccine documentaries from his website. He argued that it was “common sense” that the coronavirus wasn’t a serious threat and that no drastic measures needed to be taken to stop it.
He then got sick with COVID, was hospitalized, was put on a respirator, and died.
”It’s about how American conservatism is slowly killing its adherents”
That’s terrible news.
Why slowly?
I remember when we used to joke about how we could get Tea Partiers (remember them?) to kill themselves by just getting Michelle Obama to do a public information campaign about the dangers of drinking bleach or sticking forks in electrical outlets… I don’t think anybody expected it to get quite so real, quite so quickly.
I also really don’t want to be the sort of person who celebrates the deaths of their political opponents, but damn, these people make it difficult.
I think that there are people in America who would rather die, and take the country down with them, than see the US become a modern civilized democracry. With, you know, lessened white privilege and systemic racism, women not controlled by men, civil rights for LGBT people, exclusion of religion from government, adequate social safety nets, health care, and education, etc.
I thought that they might violently rebel to achieve that, but apparently they”ve taken it into their own hands to die for their privilege by voting for the policies that kill them.
One interesting thing is that it doesn’t even have to be this way.
In Canada, for example (as I know I’ve mentioned before, just can’t remember if it was here or not), there is a long tradition of ‘Red Tories’: centre-right conservatives who believed government intervention when and where it was needed, and left-leaning on social programs as a form of something like noblesse oblige. Rather paternalistic and hence full of its own problems, but less damaging in general. These are people who, for the most part, took the ‘socially liberal, fiscally conservative’ concept seriously rather than as just a catchphrase to get people to vote for them.
That particular strain of conservatism exists in England to a lesser extent, but it never really happened in the U.S. at all: conservatism in the U.S. got tangled up in the racist politics very early on. And, sadly, it’s a lot less common in Canada than it used to be, as our Conservative party got effectively taken over by the Reform/Alliance party people who had previously split off because our previous Progressive Conservative party wasn’t right-wing enough for them. That said, our current Prime Minister Mark Carney may be officially running as head of the Liberal party, but in terms of actual political ideology he’s a classic Red Tory.