In an op-ed for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer this Tuesday, Eric Levitz writes that as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spiral out of control, the Republican Party is silently admitting one thing: that its theory of governance is a “lie.”

According to Levitz, the three principles of GOP governance is the assumption that undocumented immigrants are a scourge on society; the gutting of federal agencies will make government run more efficiently, and the super rich are solely to be credited for their exorbitant incomes.

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Levitz writes that Trump was making a “halfway convincing show of governing” that those claims are rooted in some sort of reality — but that’s was before the coronavirus hit.

“But conservative orthodoxy has always been too detached from reality to command strict adherence,” Levitz writes. “A theory of government assembled out of the self-affirming delusions of the reactionary rich — and seething, amnesia-laden nostalgia of white cultural traditionalists — is bound to be a poor compass for guiding the ship of state.”

Read Levitz’s full op-ed over at Intelligencer.