This blog post started as a YouTube video. You can see it here.
You may have noticed that certain Republican leaders have evidently decided that coming out against masks and vaccines during a pandemic is a winning strategy.
The Republican governors of Texas, Florida, and Mississippi, for example, have taken particularly strong anti-mask positions.
Mississippi governor Tate Reeves said that the new CDC mask guidelines that masks should be worn inside are ‘foolish and harmful.’
Texas governor Greg Abbot issued an Executive Order prohibiting government entities (including schools) from mandating masks.
Florida Governor DeSantis “heavily criticized the idea of wearing face coverings in Florida schools” and even went so far as to threaten to cut funding to schools that require masks. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting state government entities from mandating masks.
Not surprisingly, these states are seeing dangerous spikes in Covid cases, including among children.
In Florida, within 24 hours, 3 Broward County teachers and one assistant died of Covid.
I won’t give any more examples. You get the idea.
This seems short-sighted, right? It’s hard to see how this can be good politics when a disproportionate number of anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers die or become seriously ill with COVID.
It also seems short-sighted when the citizens in these states (Texas, Mississippi, and Florida) die in high numbers.
In fact, a question often asked is: What is the endgame?
I’ll offer an explanation, but first, consider how well the anti-mask, anti-vaccine nonsense plays to key segments of the Republican base.
It plays well with White Evangelicals who embrace “Christian nationalism” and believe that God will protect them from illness, and if God doesn’t, well, that’s God’s will. They tend to have a fatalistic attitude, like this anti-mask person who said:
“I almost feel like if I’m going to get Covid and die from it, so be it.”
It also plays well with the segments of the Republican base that is anti-science and “anti-government.”
Tony Spell a pastor who made a national name for himself protesting Covid-19 rules in Louisiana, told Life Tabernacle Church congregants this: “I’ll just tell you today, if being anti-mask and anti-vaccine is anti-government, then I’m proud to be anti-government.”
Cole Beasley asked, “What happened to God’s will?”
The problem here is that leaders who embrace a far-right ideology are not equipped to deal with a real crisis. They only know how to handle a manufactured crisis, like Critical Race Theory or Hillary Clinton’s emails.
That’s why Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
They don’t know how to deal with facts and reality, which of course is a natural result of rejecting science and academic authority.
It’s also a result of the fact that far-right wing ideologies are based in myth and lies: In the United States, that would be the myth of white supremacy and the myth that there was a glorious past when America was great and we must try to return to that mythic past, which, of course, is Trump’s whole slogan: Make America Great Again
They only know how to manipulate myths and lies.
People like Trump and DeSantis are accustomed to making up their own facts and being affirmed by their favorite media outlets. When a real crisis hits, they don’t have the tools to deal with it. So they minimize it. Sometimes they contort themselves to minimize it like this person who told me that the number of children who died from Covid is statistically insignificant.
The next problem: They don’t believe that the role of government is to make lives better for people. That’s why they spend their time in office doing things like take away health care. They don’t like taxes because they don’t want to fund social programs.
They run for office on an anti-government platform, although they’re not really anti-government. They think it’s fine to use the government to do things like banning critical race theory in school. They just don’t like the regulations that stop [White] men from cheating and that even the playing field to make things fair.
The best way to understand it, is to think of people as either fairness people or hierarchy people. A lot of what I’m about to tell you I learned from Yale professor Jason Stanley’s book on fascism called the How Fascism Works: Politics of Us v. Them, and a few of his talks available on Youtube.
Some people think nature naturally forms a hierarchy. The strong and capable end up at the top, and the others, the weak, at the bottom.
When a government tries to help people, they think the government is boosting the weak at the expense of the strong.That’s why they deride these kinds of government programs as “handouts” or “socialism” or “communism.”
For them, the purpose of government is to maintain the hierarchy. If you think nature forms a hierarchy, you don’t think equality is possible. What they think is that other people are trying to replace them at the top.
This even has a name: Replacement theory or “White Genocide.”
Rep. Scott Perry tried to articulate this when he said:
“For many Americans, what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening “we’re replacing natural-born Americans”
By “native” he didn’t mean “Native American.” He meant White Protestants.
Tucker Carlson said this:
“I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical”
For hierarchy people, the purpose of government is to allocate power. When they are in power, they try to grab more. They cynically assume that everyone sees government this way.
Fairness people, on the other hand, believe that fairness and equality are possible, so they look to the government to issue regulations to keep people from cheating and to even the playing field.
Hierarchy people think such regulations are evil because they think these things are upsetting the natural order of things—they think these kinds of regulations are taking away from the people who deserve more and giving to the unworthy.
Hierarchy people don’t like “rules” or regulations that prevent them from doing as they please. Because they think they are (or should be) at the top of the hierarchy.
So nobody tells them what to do.
Of course, they’re fine with telling other people what to do–those lower beings who don’t understand, for example, that America was meant to be White and Christian. I quoted this a few weeks ago, from Christianity Today, explaining this view:
They think they will lose their freedom if America stops being defined as a White Protestant nation.
That’s why they spent years and millions of dollars investigating four deaths in Benghazi but they minimize hundreds of thousands of deaths of Covid. They didn’t really care about the four people who died. They were weaponizing the government to consolidate their own power.
They’re also not really anti-government, as explained in the Christianity Today piece. While they are opposed to the government mandating masks or vaccines, they’re fine with the government banning critical race theory in schools. As the Christianity Today piece says, “Government should take active steps to keep America White and Protestant.”
That, for them, is the role of government: To consolidate [White] Christian power.
This hierarchical view of the world also explains the hypocrisy of someone like Ted Cruz, who introduced a bill to ban mask and vaccine mandates, but puts his own kids in a school that requires masks. In the view of hierarchical people, the families who can’t afford private schools are not protected, because if you can’t pay, you don’t get.
Still, it seems odd. Won’t it hurt them with their base when their own anti-mask policies cause their constituents to suffer?
The explanation for that comes from Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, who coined the word Sadopopulism to describe a pattern he noticed, a strategy used by right-wing governments.
Here’s how Sadopopulism works.
- First, the leaders enact policies that hurt their supporters.
- Second, they identify an enemy.
- Third, they blame the pain on these “enemies.
Here you go. Ted Cruz tweeted:
Another example: Sen. Rand Paul posted a Youtube video claiming that masks don’t limit the spread of Covid. (Youtube suspended him for a week for that.) Then he claimed that Democrats are . .
One more example: After taking a stand against masks, Florida governor DeSantis then blamed Biden and immigrants for the spread of the virus:
Aside: no the borders are not “wide open.”
And yes, the Republicans do hurt their own constituents and then blame the “enemies.”
You see, a problem that the Republican Party has is that their policies do hurt their constituents. For a bit of historical context: Heather Cox Richardson, historian, has written about our history of oligarchy.
Our first oligarchy was slavery, when 1% of the population controlled most of the nation’s wealth and all three branches of government.
The second oligarchy was the age of robber barons and business tycoons, from after the Civil War until the New Deal. The tail end of the second oligarchy came in the 1920s when income inequality levels were extremely high.
This income equality chart from economist Thomas Piketty, and published by the New Yorker tells the whole story:
In the 1920s income inequality was very high. Then it flattened out between the forties and the seventies. Then in the 80s, it took off again.
Okay, so back to the 1920s. We got out of what Heather Cox Richardson calls our second oligarchy with the New Deal. The New Deal offered protections for workers and safety nets like social security. That’s when we got the minimum wage. The New Deal also regulated businesses in ways that kept businesses from cheating and hurting people. The New Deal lifted a lot of people out of poverty and as a result, our income inequality levels evened out.
Ever since the New Deal was enacted, Republicans have been trying to roll it back.
By the 1950s the Republicans had a problem: The New Deal was popular. So what could they do? They solved the problem through what has been called the Southern Strategy.
I’ve talked about the 1950s as a turning point. That’s when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, which marked the end of racial segregation in America and the start of the modern Civil Rights movement.
Nixon and Reagan figured out that they could win elections with unpopular economic policies if they lured angry Whites into their party.It worked. Reagan was able to achieve large electoral majorities—because the electorate was still mostly White.
Look what happened to the income chart after the Republicans were able to win elections with large electoral majorities in the 1980s: Income inequality started opening up again. Reagan cut taxes and rolled back regulations on corporations. He did this by putting forward a lie called Trickle Down Economics, which says if you give lots of tax breaks to corporations and rich people the money will trickle down.
As you can see from the chart, it doesn’t and it didn’t.
Now that the Republican Party has openly embraced White Supremacy, and people like the Proud Boys and the insurrectionists, the Republican base is whittling down to a few radicalized segments. So they’ve backed themselves into a corner. They have to play to this base — a base consisting of radicalized, anti-science wingnuts. It’s all they’ve got.
They also have to lie because if they try to have a fact-based discussion, they’ll lose. The facts are against them. Their policies hurt people.
These lies and tactics work because the lies and tactics speak to the underlying fears of their base.
When Republican leaders like Ted Cruz or DeSantis blame Covid on immigrants, many of their followers may know it’s not literally true, but for them, it’s metaphorically true: They think America is being ruined by immigrants.
I don’t mean to suggest that the Republican leaders are anti-mask because they’re smart and playing three-dimensional chess.
Many of them do these things and say these things because it comes naturally to them. They are their base. They are scared of immigrants. They do think that they’re being replaced. They do think that demands for equality from minority communities means that they’re in danger, that someone is trying to replace them at the top of the hierarchy. They hear demands for equality as an existential threat.
A real world crisis stemming from something like a virus pulls back the facade and shows the Republican“governing” strategy for what it really is:
It’s nihilistic and it’s based on a governing strategy that says that the purpose of government is to consolidate power and to maintain what they think is a natural hierarchy.
It does appear that the Republican Party will continue shrinking and becoming more radicalized as moderates who can’t stomach what they’ve openly become flee the party. As moderates flee, they’ll be forced to cater to an increasingly radicalized base. They will then become even more unhinged from reality, unhinged from science, and more dangerous.
The silver lining is that they’re shrinking. Unfortunately, they’ll probably never disappear. All we can do is keep beating them back.