The Liberal Conspiracy Theory We’ve All Been Waiting For

[Note: by Liberal Conspiracy Theory I mean not a theory about liberals, but a theory held  by liberals about the Deep Right.]

Who’s dying of Covid-19?

To state the obvious—I know you’ve been thinking it, but are wary of seeming too paranoid—the Trumpian Right is getting just what it wants out of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Steven Miller goes home at night chortling at the latest death toll—OK, he may be sorry about some bigoted Trump fans dying (there’s always collateral damage in a righteous war), but not enough to suppress his glee at the bigger picture.

Those who are dying in the greatest numbers, out of proportion to their fraction of the population:

(1) People in big cities: New York; Philadelphia; Chicago; Detroit; Boston; Baltimore  . . .

(2) Minorities, African-Americans in particular: for example, in Wisconsin 40 percent of Covid-19 fatalities are blacks, and they represent 6 percent of the population.

(3) Prisoners, with blacks being imprisoned across the U.S. at five times the rate of whites.

(4)  The elderly—in the U.S. as of March 16, 80% of Covid-19 deaths were in people age 65 or older.

(5) People with serious underlying health conditions.

Yes, there’s a pattern here that  you don’t have to look too deeply to find . . .

What the groups  above have in common are either a propensity to vote Democratic (1 -3); and/or are a drain on social services: (2-5); and/or are staunch supporters of Medicare and Social Security  regardless of political affinity (1, and to a much greater extent, 4). All  are targets of Trump’s antipathies, and all are conveniently victimized by the virus.

Furthermore, in the minds of Steven Miller and those of his white-supremacist ilk, non-whites are genetically inferior, and undeserving of more respect than dogs. (For a moment I thought, “Am I being too hard on Steven Miller?” and then I thought, “Nah . . .  Miller is proud of his racism.”)

As a cruel side effect, the pandemic provides the Trump administration cover for continuing to keep aspiring immigrants, even asylum seekers, from entering the U.S. across the southern border. Covid-19 will surely wreak havoc among them as well.

I don’t have stats on homeless people, but my guess is in the end they too will suffer illness and death out of proportion to their numbers. This too will bring a smile to Steven Miller’s lips.

The Accidental Conspiracy

The distribution of Covid-19 deaths definitely works to the political advantage of right-wingers, and slakes their prejudices. If Trump and allies had planned to diminish their political enemies, recipients of entitlements, and racial minorities, while appearing to be merely incompetent, they could not have done much better.

Of course I’m not saying they planned it, but if I had the paranoid mentality of your typical political conspiracy theorist, I certainly would.

Planning and executing something of the kind—i.e., deliberately working the pandemic to their advantage—would have taken the evil genius of a Hitler or Stalin. Those men, to the world’s great misfortune, had goals firmly in mind, focused on achieving them, and had a level of intelligence far above average. Trump lacks any of these, although his instinctive sociopathy might be a match for theirs.

Once Trump stumbled into the catastrophe that is the Covid-19 pandemic, he sensed that his inability to take command had an advantage in unleashing yet more chaos upon the nation, in which his lying, boasting,  blaming, accusing, and other distractions, would take the public’s eye away from the truth.

At some point Trump became aware of actual gains to be had from aspects of a growing death toll, and somewhere inside him a little voice said, “What the hell? Why should I lift a finger to slow this thing down, when I can get the governors to do all the work and then blame them for anything that goes wrong? Meanwhile the Democrats will be losing big chunks of their constituencies.”

Once Trump’s enablers and surrogates caught on to how well these developments were working for them, they joined an accidental conspiracy by doing nothing to stop it.

I say “little voice” because Trump’s mind is such a jumble of hates and suspicions and fears and all-around malignity, that he might not recognize it clearly; nevertheless it nudges and nudges him along, and his daily briefings manifest its influence.

– finis –

===========some notes on Sweden ==============

Sweden is taking a lot of  heat for continuing its lenient pandemic coping policy, leaving social distancing and other pandemic safety measures up to the choices of its citizens.

Rachel Maddow, in particular took shots at Sweden’s government for irresponsibility, stupidity, and callousness.

(More interesting was Maddow calling attention to the irony of Trump surrogates’ rush to praise Sweden—they  seeming not to mind the contradiction between tearing down socialism on the one hand, and building up Swedish policy as a fine model for Americans to follow on the other.  But, consistency be damned! This is the Trump narrative we’re talking about!)

As for Rachel’s knocks on Sweden—hold on.  The Swedish government is neither stupid nor callous. The Swedes are taking a calculated gamble, that the  pandemic will play out its first wave in an exponential rise and logistic flattening in the manner shown in the video I included in my last post on flattening the curve in the U.S.  The bet is that with Sweden’s lower population density, the exponential part of the curve will  be less steep and/or less long than in places like France and Italy.

The Swedish death toll will look bad during the next few months—its “first wave.”  However, the gamble is that by taking a hard hit in the first wave, by the time the second and third waves roll around (as they will everywhere over the next year), the Swedes will be approaching herd immunity even before an effective vaccine is developed.   Meanwhile, they may keep their economy limping along to minimize the financial hardships and the illness and deaths that come from them.

That might work, although another part of the gamble is assuming that acquired immunity will last for at least 9-10 months—a tricky bet with this exceptionally “novel” virus.  One might think of the government’s policy as “aspirational” (Anthony Fauci’s word) similar to Trump’s speculation just a month ago that the U.S. could be back to business-as-usual by Easter.

Sweden can take the kind of gamble that the U.S. cannot because it has only three large cities (only Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö are over 300,000),  a well-run universal public health care system, and a small and for the most part well-integrated minority population.  (I  derive “well integrated” second-hand, never having been to Sweden, but I’ve read it in two places, and it fits with our stereotypical view of Sweden.)

We don’t know for another year if Sweden’s gamble will pay off.   We also don’t know if they will revise their policy midstream if the contagion takes off at an unexpectedly high rate. It’s still an experiment, but there is much that is experimental everywhere that Covid-19 is raging.

I’m not ready to bash Sweden for a policy that is surely ugly in the short run, but in the long run may incur less overall pain than in the U.S. and other nations in Europe.  It’s a trade-off that could be very hard to measure.

That is not to say that the Swedish gamble would play well anywhere else—certainly not in the U.S. with its broken health care system.

Addendum: Some in Sweden think policy may already show promise of success.