Virus shutdown turns conservatives into outlaws
SAN DIEGO — Here’s another unforeseen symptom of the coronavirus: It causes madness in conservatives.
And we’re not talking about run-of-the-mill lunacy spurred by two months of social isolation, an inability to engage in leisure activities, or prolonged exposure to the spouses you picked and the children you said you wanted.
This strain of COVID-19 madness is marked by spasms of inconsistency and convenient flare-ups of situational ethics.
The population that is particularly vulnerable is that of socalled “law and order conservatives” who are eager to get back to business. This rule-of-law posse has spent the last 50 years protecting the have’s from the have not’s. They specialize in alleviating the anxiety of white people by arresting, incarcerating, or deporting nonwhite people.
From Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in the early 1970s that scared up support from white voters by appealing to their racist fears of African Americans, to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and the sentencing disparity it created between crack and powder cocaine, to the Willie Horton ad that helped George H.W. Bush win the 1988 presidential election. Then came California Gov. Pete Wilson’s racially tinged attacks on undocumented immigrants in the mid-1990s, and Arizona’s GOP-sponsored immigration law in 2010 mandating racial profiling, and finally Donald Trump’s anti-Latino screeds and crackdown on a population he described as composed almost entirely of criminals, rapists and drug dealers.
That’s quite a rap sheet for the Republicans. But they haven’t always acted alone. They have accomplices. They’re called Democrats, who often play the same game. It’s called Us vs Them: “Vote for Us, and We’ll Protect You from Them!”
Still, more so than the opposition, Republicans have branded themselves the law and order party. Conservatives are, we’re told, all about upholding the rule of law.
Until they aren’t.
We’re here. We got here because of COVID-19. To be more exact, we got here because of something that is uglier than the virus itself, or attempts by government to fight it — the uprising of the anti-shutdown mob, which mistakes anarchy for patriotism.
Yes, that’s right. Anarchy. When you threaten the lives of public officials, what else should we call it?
Among the threatened is Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who now gets daily death threats with her morning coffee, because she refuses to lift her state’s “shelter-at-home” order until it is safe. A few weeks ago, protesters — many of them armed — stormed into the Michigan state Capitol. They cursed and shouted at the Michigan state troopers who stood sentry, protecting Whitmer and state lawmakers. Cussing at cops. That’s an interesting look for the law and order crowd.
Things aren’t much better in Texas, where an African American judge is also getting death threats from anti-shutdown conservatives. His sin? Locking up someone who broke the law, the owner of a Dallas hair salon, who opened up her shop in defiance of a statewide “shelter-at-home” order because, she said, she had to feed her family.
What a great excuse. Remember that one the next time an African American or Latino gets arrested for shoplifting groceries because they have to feed their families.
And this week — in my hometown of Fresno, California — an overwhelmingly white crowd went directly to the home of the official they most blame for that city’s shelter-at-home order. Not the Republican mayor, city manager, or police chief. But the president of the city council, who happens to be a Democrat and a Latino. Funny how that worked out. City Councilman Miguel Arias told me some in the mob were wearing MAGA caps. He said they hurled racial insults as he tried to shoo them off his property to protect his two children, who were sleeping inside his residence. The incident was videotaped and spread through white nationalist social media. Arias got “hundreds” of death threats from around the country. He also got cited by police for battery after lightly shoving protesters away from his front door. Had it been me protecting my kids, I’d have done more than shove.
Much of this clumsy conversion on the right — from respecting the law to rebelling against authority — stems from the fact that some conservatives have a higher regard for commerce than they do their fellow human beings. They’re dying to reopen businesses and get back to making money. Maybe they can use some of the profits to pay for their own medical costs down the road, as they try to hold on to their health — the very thing that, in this crisis, they so cavalierly put at risk.
Unfortunately for them, money and medicine can’t fix defective souls.