You can see it glowing in the fried dough of his face. Not only does El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago want to “reopen the country,” as he put it in his Fauci-less meeting of the Coronavirus SuperFriends on Monday night, he wants to do it with parades and banners and buntings and fireworks, the whole ceremony celebrating himself, the Wartime President who apparently is adapting George Aiken’s solution for Vietnam to the current pandemic crisis. He wants to declare victory and get out.

However, it’s not just the president*. Over the past couple of days, the response in certain quarters has turned ghoulish. Quite simply, it is becoming a kind of revealed wisdom on the right that we’re going to have to take some casualties—especially among we Olds—to get the economy moving again. The editorial page of The Wall Street Journal pointed the way, as it has on so many soulless conservative projects since the Reagan days, gently hinting that some sort of balance has to be struck between public health and the health of the economy. This is not an unreasonable discussion for reasonable people to have at some point. Unfortunately, it engaged that spark-gap in the presidential* cortex that makes him glom onto any passing idea and ransack it for something that will make him look good. (See also: chloroquin). And once the president* started sharing this view, the other, lesser maniacs in the ranks of Republican politicians threw open the afterburners.

Take, for example, Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, who took the opportunity on Tucker Carlson’s program Monday night to go all Soylent Green on himself and the rest of the old folks.

Tucker, no one reached out to me and asked me, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren. If that’s the exchange, I’m all in. That doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like that. I just think that there are a lot of grandparents...that we most care about are those children. I want to live smart and see through this, but I don’t want to see the whole country sacrificed...My heart is lifted tonight by what I heard the president* say.



Speaking as someone who’s been a grandparent for five months now, I would like to tell Mr. Patrick that I intend to continue to be one, come what may, for as long as I damned well please, and that I certainly don’t intend to immolate myself on the altar of Steve Mnuchin’s stock portfolio or the jerry-rigged books of the Trump Organization. I also would like to commend Republican governors Ron DiSantis of Florida, Tate Reeves of Mississippi, and Greg Abbott of Texas, who aren't gonna let no pointy-headed epidemiologist slow their rolls. Oh, hell, no. From the Jackson Free Press:



"It is my goal to make sure we make good, solid decisions based on experts,” the governor said in an afternoon Facebook Live address, where he took questions from Mississippi residents. “No one at the State Department of Health has recommended that we have a statewide shelter-in-place order," Reeves added. One Mississippian asked the governor why the state was not emulating China, the first country to detect COVID-19 and the first to control the spread of the virus.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves is also taking things casually. Rory Doyle Getty Images

“Mississippi's never going to be China. Mississippi's never going to be North Korea,” Reeves responded. He added that “when looking at the numbers China’s putting out, claiming that they have no new cases over a period of time—I’m not entirely sure we can trust that data.”...The Mississippi State Department of Health’s newest information on COVID-19 lists 249 detected cases out of 1,392 tests—a 213% increase since Friday.



Conservative punditry went even further than Patrick did. R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, American Catholicism’s most prominent Pius IX fanzine, explained at length that demonic forces may be at work in the efforts to keep people from being dead.

There is a demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost. Satan rules a kingdom in which the ultimate power of death is announced morning, noon, and night. But Satan cannot rule directly. God alone has the power of life and death, and thus Satan can only rule indirectly. He must rely on our fear of death. In our simple-minded picture of things, we imagine a powerful fear of death arises because of the brutal deeds of cruel dictators and bloodthirsty executioners. But in truth, Satan prefers sentimental humanists. We resent the hard boot of oppression on our necks, and given a chance, most will resist. How much better, therefore, to spread fear of death under moralistic pretexts...

Just so, the mass shutdown of society to fight the spread of COVID-19 creates a perverse, even demonic atmosphere. Governor Cuomo and other officials insist that death’s power must rule our actions. Religious leaders have accepted this decree, suspending the proclamation of the gospel and the distribution of the Bread of Life. They signal by their actions that they, too, accept death’s dominion.

Reno goes on to compare those of us in self-quarantine to the brave, God-fearing casualties of the 1918 flu pandemic who, in Reno’s words, "bowed their head before the storm of disease and endured its punishing blows, but they otherwise stood firm and continued to work, worship, and play, insisting that fear of death would not govern their societies or their lives.” And, of course, spread the disease to a lot of people who didn’t particularly want it, but who died anyway.

And whoever it is that funds The Federalist got in on the action as well.

Of course, it sounds very callous to talk about considering the costs. It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die. Probably for that reason, few have been willing to do so publicly thus far. Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly.



It also seems stupid, but do go on.

The current response is quickly driving the United States into a recession, which will result in a great deal of misery for tens of millions of people. Again, balancing lives against money sounds harsh, but everyone does so — and must do so — whether he is conscious of the fact or not. Not to mention, a recession also means higher poverty rates, which lead to higher mortality rates. More is at stake than lives and money: namely freedom. Even for those of us who are by no means libertarian, the increasingly draconian measures put in place across the nation, especially in California, to isolate people and prevent them from moving at will are raising serious questions about whether Americans are in a dress rehearsal for tyranny.

I’m telling you, by the weekend, screw-it-everybody-dies-sometimes will be Republican gospel. We’ll all be spring breakers on South Padre Island. Thuycidides knew. He wrote about a plague that overcame the Athenian army during the First Peloponnesian War. Soldiers turned away from the gods and ran riot. "Already a far heavier sentence...was hanging over a man's head,” he writes. "Before that fell, why should he not take a little pleasure?” People have idly called the Republican Party a “death cult” ever since the 2016 election. I’m wondering now whether or not they were right all along.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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