Am I the only one who sees the irony in promoting policies specifically contributing to the death of your party’s core supporters?
Look no further than the nutcase faction of the GOP for proof of this concept. Let’s dismiss climate change, gas stoves, packing heat, and refusing vaccinations for the moment.
The latest “ha! ha! We owned the libs” episode on Fox News is all the evidence anybody should need to understand the freedom = death mantra currently in vogue.
Smoking is on the list of things the party seeks to make great again.
Yes! Smoke filled rooms are back! A certain subset of the McCarthyist part of the party has even taken to “hotboxing” cigars—a term borrowed from Cheech and Chong’s vocabulary— in committee rooms by deliberately puffing extra on their stogies to make sure everybody can share in their bad choices.
The siren for all calls to reactionary virtue is Fox News Tucker Carlson. He celebrated this moment by inviting Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) to spread the word.
Toward the end of the interview, Nehls pulled a cigar from his pocket and appeared to light up (although no smoke immediately rose).
Carlson was giddy with excitement and praised Nehls for “striking a blow for freedom.”
“That is the smell of freedom,” Carlson added. “We appreciate your coming on tonight and standing up for Americanness.”
As Amanda Marcotte –who wrote a book on right wing trolling– says in a Salon piece, even she underestimated how far the Freedom Caucus types were willing to go.
But in fairness, this isn't just about trolling. It's also about a close cousin to trolling, in the constellation of motivations that make right-wingers such baffling and exhausting people: Toxic masculinity. For about as long as supporters of basic public health have argued for restrictions on tobacco use, conservatives have acted as if any regulations whatsoever on their foul-smelling phallic symbols literally amounts to prying the penises off their bodies. Before Rush Limbaugh died of lung cancer, the right-wing radio host who coined the term "feminazi" often portrayed smoking as a wholesome, manly activity that liberals wanted to take away from men purely to emasculate them.
"It's true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots," Limbaugh said.
This is just the latest front in the far right’s war on public health, which became more obvious during the COVID pandemic. There are still wide swathes of the public who were sufficiently confused by a toxic mix of misinformation and scientific recalculations that see an infectious virus afflicting two thirds of a billion people (and killing 10% of those) as some sort of nefarious plot.
Now the mindset has spread to vaccinating children for measles (a disease once considered eradicated in the US) and young women for HPV (more than 80% decrease in cancer).
Nearly every high profile death or illness is now followed by an army of true believers who claim without evidence the victims were killed by the COVID vaccine. Twitter, under Elon Musk, no longer feels the need to suppress or even flag such dangerous malarkey.
The point of all this contrarianism is to undermine public trust in institutions standing in the way of the libertarian road to their idea of utopia. Of course, many of those joining in this journey will fall along the way, but it’s considered a price worth paying for uber-selfishness.
Midway through 2022, Scientific American published the results of a study showing a growing mortality gap between Republican and Democratic areas of the US.
The new study, conducted by researchers in Texas, Missouri, Massachusetts and Pakistan, covers the years 2001 through 2019 and examines age-adjusted mortality rates—the number of deaths per 100,000 people each year—from the top 10 leading causes of death, as recorded in 2019. These include heart disease, cancer, lung disease, unintentional injuries and suicide.
The researchers then analyzed county-level results in each of the five presidential elections that took place during their study period, identifying counties as Republican or Democratic for the subsequent four years. They found the gap in mortality rates between Republican and Democratic counties increased for nine out of 10 causes of death. (The gap for cerebrovascular disease, which includes stroke and aneurysms, remained but narrowed.) Political environment, the authors suggest in the paper, is a “core determinant of health.”
This differentiation extended to fatalities related to the pandemic:
By February 2022 the COVID death rate in all counties Donald Trump won in the 2020 presidential election was substantially higher than in counties that Joe Biden won—326 deaths per 100,000 people versus 258. “COVID was probably the most dramatic example I’ve seen in my career of the influence of policy choices on health outcomes,” Woolf says.
Now let’s examine a local manifestation of this death wish nihilism.
Let’s visit SANDAG, the place where elected officials are supposed to hash out projects with regional importance.
Andrew Bowen’s description in a KPBS account is short and to the point about the agency’s responsibilities.
SANDAG is responsible for planning and building transportation infrastructure, and for implementing California's goal of achieving "net zero" greenhouse gas emissions by 2045, largely by reducing car dependence. Its governing board includes one elected official from all 18 cities in the county, plus two county supervisors and a second elected official from the city of San Diego.
The agency was in the news last week as nine Republicans representing smaller cities walked out of a meeting in protest over the election of a second vice chair through a “weighted vote.”
After years of SANDAG serving a bulwark against bigger city proposals to curb greenhouse gasses and suburban sprawl, then-Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez pushed through legislation making the agency’s voting process weighted by population in certain instances.
KUSI went ballistic, offering up the usual mishmash of inaccuracies (SANDAG is a planning agency, not a governing agency), misrepresentations (should Del Mar’s 4000 taxpayers hold sway over Chula Vista’s 280,000?) and angrytainment adjectives (Is following hte legal process corruption?).
Needless to say, this voting process hasn’t sat well with right wingers, whose idea of environment progress could be characterized as a desire for more freeway lanes and mcmansions. Democrat Councilwoman Terry Gaasterland from Del Mar, who apparently shares the viewpoint that more highways are what’s needed, was the right’s defeated candidate for vice chair.
From the Union-Tribune:
Gaasterland used Friday’s meeting to voice longstanding grievances over SANDAG’s efforts to spend heavily on public transit and conform with state mandates to limit car travel.
“Private vehicles need to be included and considered part of the solution, not set aside and discouraged through increased congestion,” she said.
At the heart of these differences is climate change. There is no pathway to effectively reducing greenhouse gas emissions soon enough to make a difference without a reduction in the use of internal combustion engines.
We have a conflict between personal choice and the health of the planet. Changing people's habits isn’t easy, but it doesn’t happen with encouragement. These days it’s not uncommon –outside of the Freedom Caucus types– to hear acknowledgement from the right about the existence of climate change, followed by a litany of excuses for why this or that proposal won’t work. Pressed for an alternative, something outside the realm of reality gets presented, which is ultimately just another form of climate change denial.
Climate change is driving extremes in weather events, and our survival as a species exists within a relatively narrow set of atmospheric and temperature conditions.
I’m not saying there’s only one road to redemption in this crisis. Frankly, I think it’s about utilizing all the options. Quickly. Not everything will succeed, but repeating the things that got us here will end up being deadly.
So when I see people who conveniently ignore past failures (widening Interstate 405 is exhibit A) and act to defer or delay prophylactic environmental alternatives, I don’t see much difference between them and the “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” caucus in the House of Representatives.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com