Those of us who actually understand how, when dealing with things like compound interest or a series of numbers growing exponentially, the more you can lower the initial numbers, the more effect it has in the long term, may wonder why so many Republicans are acting so crazy when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic. We who have a decent understanding of math realize that the more our nation concentrates on doing the maximum amount to flatten the infection transmission curve in the early stages, the more lives will be saved and the less long term devastation will be done to the economy. Because of this, some of us have wondered why the following types of things have happened:
1. Donald Trump (R) started mumbling nonsense about "The cure cannot be worse than the disease" and saying things like he wants people back to work by Easter.
2. Arizona's Governor Doug Ducey (R) issued an order that towns, cities, and counties must get approval with the state health department before issuing any shutdown orders.
3. The Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves (R) issued an order that appears aimed at undoing shutdowns by towns and counties that already exist in his state.
4. The Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) said that America should “Get Back to Work.”
People like me have wondered how these Republican politicians can be so dense. Well, here is where this insanity comes from. Starting around 2010, a bunch of Republican Tea Party members swept into Congress. At about this time, Republican politicians started repeatedly talking about how they needed to listen to their base, and these politicians then started pushing all kinds of whacked-out ideas that their base was pushing for. Well, the base was pushing for these nutso ideas because they heard about them on Right-Wing media shows, like the programs on Fox News and the programs on Right-Wing radio. Since 2010, Republican politicians have been pushing whatever nutty ideas their bases have been pushing for, regardless of how far fetched those ideas have been.
Over the past 40 years, one of the most pervasive ideas in the Right-Wing mediasphere, which has been a continuation of Ronald Reagan's "The government is the enemy" idea, has been the idea that the government is always trying to take over things and that it is always trying to control people. Recently, this idea has been combined by the Right-Wing media with the ridiculous "Deep State" ideas that have been pushed for more than 3 years. The Deep State concept is that government members are trying to lie to everyone and that they are trying and stop Donald Trump from saving America. Because of these two ideas, we have ended up with a whole lot of Republicans who are more than ready to believe that the whole COVID-19 pandemic is some overblown story being told by the government.
Yesterday, I actually listened to Mark Levin's radio program. He's yet another Right-Wing hack in the mold of Rush Limbaugh. He was telling his listening audience how "the government" is "forcing" businesses to close--as if businesses are being told to close because of some sort of government plot to hurt hard-working Americans and their businesses--as if the closures by the government were not something done extremely reluctantly by state and local governments in order to desperately try to flatten the pandemic curve. This is where GOP politicians like Trump and Ducey are getting their thinking from.
These Republican politicians are totally focused on the idea that the whole pandemic is overblown and that crazy liberal-leaning government officials and scientists are just ready to shut down American business at the drop of the hat. It mirrors the way they have reacted to Global Warming. You see, many Republicans believe that the “Global Warming” concept is just a bunch of crazy scientists blowing everything of proportion and that these scientists want businesses to do all kinds of expensive things that American businesses cannot afford because these scientists simply do not know what they are talking about
Many Republicans believe both that Global Warming is a hoax and that the concept of a COVID-19 pandemic is also a hoax. This is why Donald Trump deliberately used the word “hoax” when talking about the COVID-19 outbreak back in February. He was trying to signal to his supporters that liberals talking about the COVID-19 outbreak was just like liberals talking about Global Warming. He was signaling that the COVID-19 pandemic was just liberals being liberals again—blowing everything out of proportion.
Meanwhile, as Republicans try to make people think that everything is so overblown, America's COVID-19 infections are shooting up like a rocket, at apparently a faster rate than any other industrialized nation, and America's infection curve seems to show the least amount of flattening of any first world country. Apparently, a huge number of Republicans still seem not to truly understand that a flood of infections is washing over America--and that this flood has been accelerating. America may still look functional now to some Republicans when the floodwaters just appear to be wetting other people's toes, but eight weeks from now, when the floodwaters are up to people's necks, that is about when a lot of these Republicans will begin to fully realize just how bad things are.
However, in eight weeks, curve flattening efforts will have much less of an overall effect on the infection rate than they do today. By the time these GOP math and science illiterates realize what is really happening, it will be much too late for hundreds of Americans who will already have died, and the full disastrous impact on our economy will only be beginning to be felt. You see, an economy cannot thrive when people are even more afraid to go shopping than they are today.