Virus trutherism against the liberal belief in reality

Virus trutherism — insisting COVID-19 deaths are greatly exaggerated and may reflect a vast medical conspiracy — is widespread on the right. We can expect much more of it.

At one level, this turn of events shouldn’t surprise us. The U.S. right long ago rejected evidence-based policy in favor of policy-based evidence — denying facts that might get in the way of a predetermined agenda. Fourteen years have passed since Stephen Colbert famously quipped that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

At another level, however, the right’s determination to ignore the epidemiologists is politically reckless in a way previous denials of reality weren’t.

As many have pointed out, the emerging rightwing strategy for dealing with this pandemic — or, more accurately, not dealing with it — closely follows the Republican Party’s longstanding approach to climate change: It’s not happening, it’s a hoax perpetrated by liberal scientists, and besides, doing anything about it would destroy the economy.

Indeed, the anti-lockdown demonstrations appear to have been organized in part by the same people and groups that have spent decades denying climate change.

Virus trutherism is also reminiscent of the various kinds of trutherism that ran rampant during the Obama years. Inflation truthers insisted the government was hiding the truth about rampant inflation; unemployment truthers, including a guy named Donald Trump, insisted the steadily improving job numbers were fake.

Thousands of Americans may be about to die for the Dow. We know that Trump is obsessed with the stock market, and his long refusal to take COVID-19 seriously reportedly had a lot to do with his belief that doing otherwise would hurt stock prices. He may now believe that pretending the crisis is over will boost stocks, and that’s all that matters.

And Republicans may actually believe the gun-waving, red-hatted anti-social-distancing demonstrators represent the “real America.” And there are indeed Americans who fly into a rage when asked to bear any inconvenience on behalf of the public good. Polls suggest they’re a small minority, but the GOP may consider such polls fake news.

I’d like to suggest, however, that there may be yet another reason for the dangerous push to reopen the economy. Namely, Republicans in general and Trump in particular suffer from a deep sense of inadequacy.

When officials find themselves confronting an unexpected crisis, they’re supposed to roll up their sleeves and deal with it — bring in the experts, devise and implement an effective response. That’s how the Obama administration responded to Ebola back in 2014.

But the GOP doesn’t like experts, and it doesn’t have policy ideas beyond tax cuts and deregulation. So it doesn’t know how to respond to crises that don’t fit its usual agenda. Trump, in particular, can do policy theater — sending Jared Kushner out to make noises about dealing with problems — but has no idea how to do it for real.

And I think that at some level he knows that.

Given this sense of inadequacy, it was probably foreordained that Trump and his allies, after a brief period of seeming to take COVID-19 seriously, would pivot back to insisting everything is fine. And they may, for a while, even convince some voters. But the coronavirus, which doesn’t care about political spin, will have the last word.