I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about how American conservatism is slowly killing its adherents.
As recently as the early 2010s, there was no significant difference in American death rates by political affiliation. But sometime within the last decade, that started to change. Conservatives have started dying at higher rates than liberals, not just from COVID-19, but across all causes. This pattern holds true even after controlling for confounding factors like race, income, or geography.
What could be causing this? Here’s one answer: COVID conspiracism, like a malignant cancer, has mutated and spread throughout the ideology of the conservative body politic. They’ve come to mistrust not just the COVID vaccine, not just vaccines in general, but all medical science – and they’re paying the price for it. The Republican party has long fostered a mistrust of science and expertise among its adherents, and now it’s coming back to bite them.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is members-only, so consider signing up! Members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like a subscriber newsletter:
Even as the world was going into lockdown and hospitals were swamped with the dying, conservatives refused to believe any of it. They told themselves that the timing was suspicious; that the pandemic must be a plot to oust Donald Trump from office by causing economic and social disruption just before the election. To that end, they concocted all manner of conspiracy theories to convince themselves that the virus wasn’t real or wasn’t a threat.
But while Fox News pundits and QAnon podcasts could sway conservative voters, they couldn’t alter reality. The virus was real, and it was a threat. Many who refused to believe this fact paid with their lives.
A famous example was the conservative talk show host Phil Valentine, who decried lockdowns, promoted quack therapies, and streamed anti-vaccine documentaries from his website. He argued that it was “common sense” that the coronavirus wasn’t a serious threat and that no drastic measures needed to be taken to stop it.
He then got sick with COVID, was hospitalized, was put on a respirator, and died.
”It’s about how American conservatism is slowly killing its adherents”
That’s terrible news.
Why slowly?