Right Wing Defiance of Public Health Directives

Many of the ugly elements of the far right - good people according to Trump -have protested state ordered shutdowns and refused to wear masks, an act that sends a message that they care nothing for those they might infect.  any in the media - especially right wing outlets like Fox News, a/k/a Faux News on this blog, have spun the resistance as a class struggle with working class whites struggling to survive financially resisting the most versus the educated "liberal elite" working from home.  The problem is that the facts do not support this false narrative.  The defining element is not one's class or socioeconomic group, but rather partisan.  If one is a knuckle dragging, religiously extreme, and/or racially aggrieved white supportive of Trump and the GOP more widely, odds are you oppose the lock downs.  If you put science, knowledge and some modicum of concern for others, then you likely support the lock downs and feel some fear as the states reopen their businesses.  A column in the New York Times looks at this fake class war meme.  Here are highlights:

A Washington Post article on Sunday described people in a posh suburb of Atlanta celebrating liberation from coronavirus lockdown. “I went to the antique mall yesterday on Highway 9 and it was just like — it was like freedom,” said a woman getting a pedicure.

“Yeah, I’m going to do the laser and the filler,” said a woman at a wine bar, looking forward to cosmetic dermatology. “When you start seeing where the cases are coming from and the demographics — I’m not worried,” said a man lounging in a plaza.

Only one person was quoted expressing trepidation: a masked clerk in a shoe store.

Lately some commentators have suggested that the coronavirus lockdowns pit an affluent professional class comfortable staying home indefinitely against a working class more willing to take risks to do their jobs. . . . On Fox News, Steve Hilton decried a “37 percent work from home elite” punishing “real people” trying to earn a living.

The assumptions underlying this generalization, however, are not based on even a cursory look at actual data. In a recent Washington Post/Ipsos survey, 74 percent of respondents agreed that the “U.S. should keep trying to slow the spread of the coronavirus, even if that means keeping many businesses closed.” Agreement was slightly higher — 79 percent — among respondents who’d been laid off or furloughed.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have been tracking the impact of coronavirus on a representative sample of American households. They’ve found that when it comes to judging policies on the coronavirus, “politics is the overwhelming force dividing Americans,” and that “how households have been economically impacted by the Covid crisis so far” plays only a minimal role.

Donald Trump and his allies have polarized the response to the coronavirus, turning defiance of public health directives into a mark of right-wing identity. Because a significant chunk of Trump’s base is made up of whites without a college degree, there are naturally many such people among the lockdown protesters.

But it’s a mistake to treat the growing ideological divide over when and how to reopen the country as a matter of class rather than partisanship. . . . . And many of those who face exposure as they’re ordered back to work are rightly angry and terrified.

[H]ere’s the thing about reopening: It’s liberation to some, but compulsion to others. If your employer reopens but you don’t feel safe going to work, you can’t continue to collect unemployment benefits. In The Texas Tribune, a waitress in Odessa spoke of her fear when she was called back to work at a restaurant that hadn’t put adequate social distancing measures in place. “It scared me, so I left,” she said. “Then I had to remember that if I do quit, I would have to lose my unemployment.”

As seems to be always the case, the far right opponents of the public health directives are self-centered and selfish - something that is also a hallmark  of evangelical Christians who put their rights and, wants and prejudices over the rights and lives of others.