500,000 dead Americans: One year of COVID exposes the rot of GOP ideology
The U.S. is expected to cross a grim milestone on Monday that was unimagined by even the worst projections from the beginning of the pandemic nearly one year ago: Half a million dead from COVID-19. And those are just the direct deaths from recorded instances of the disease. Excess mortality rates show that for every two official COVID-19 deaths, there's another excess death, likely due to myriad related causes, from increased rates of poverty to strains on the health care system to undiagnosed cases. What is clear, however, is that the past year has exposed the rot of GOP ideology that led to such excess death and despair.
While Republicans love to quibble to muddy the waters around pandemic failure assessment, there is no denying that Donald Trump's approach to the coronavirus — do as little as possible, push for premature re-openings, hide the evidence by discouraging testing — led to hundreds of thousands more dead Americans than we would have seen under a competent administration.
Yet, as tempting as it might be for some to attribute those failures to Trump's unique combination of laziness and malice towards the public, the situation in Texas is a cold reminder of how well his failures fit with the larger GOP approach to policy. The state is in shambles, laid flat because the power and water systems — poorly managed due to the Republican mania for low regulation — were no match for the kinds of extreme winter storm events that climate change is making more common. Texas's situation illustrates how Trump's approach to the pandemic is just one aspect of the Republican approach to everything, which is to say, to neglect government duties in favor of pandering to wealthy interests and to deflect and deny when the consequences inevitably occur. Democrats must now do more to seize the moment.
The utter failures of the GOP's ideology have never been better illustrated than they are right now. The villains, such as Sen. Ted "Cancun" Cruz and Donald "Let's Have A Coup" Trump, couldn't be more sinister. And Republicans themselves know it, which is why, as Greg Sargent of the Washington Post said, they are resorting to "scorched-earth distraction politics and counter-majoritarian tactics to insulate themselves from accountability." (Changing course to suck less, of course, was never on the table.) The moment is, in other words, ripe for Democrats to undo decades of conservative propaganda demonizing the very idea of government services and to usher in a new, FDR-style approach where the government is once again viewed as the solution to collective problems.
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