There are over 10 million cases of Covid-19 worldwide.
More than a quarter of those are in the United States.
Why?
Because of the GOP’s unrelenting war on science, evidence, rigor, and truth.
The GOP has for decades sought to undermine the legitimacy of science and of fact. Some of that was driven by Christian fundamentalism. The science of evolution demonstrated clearly that a literal reading of Scripture was incompatible with the evidence. Rather than rethink their relation to their Book, fundamentalists denied the evidence and misrepresented the arguments. (A stunning example of this sort of thing is the “Creation & Earth History Museum” in Southern California, which has exhibits that purport to show that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.) (The catalog of fallacious, misleading, or downright dishonest attacks on evolutionary science is enormous.) They marshaled sophisticated but intellectually dishonest arguments (“intelligent design,” for instance), or played semantic games to confound and mislead. And they pushed–and continue to push–a relentless attack on evolutionary science.
Add to this the attacks on science from all manner of big business. Tobacco companies for years argued that their drug was not harmful, even though their own internal evidence showed it was, and then argued that tobacco was a matter of personal choice–despite the mountains of evidence showing that it was extremely addictive. And they relentlessly attacked public health officials and sought to sow doubt about science to shield their profits.
Fossil fuel companies have done the same. Although companies like Exxon knew about climate change forty years ago, they did everything they could to undermine climate science. Why? Because they wanted to continue to make obscene profits.
In its ruthless quest for power, the GOP embraced both fundamentalism and big business. Attacks on science played well to the fundamentalist crowd, and the coalition between cynical GOP leaders and self-aggrandizing fundamentalist preachers was a spectacularly successful political marriage, even if the GOP leaders and their propagandists – Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and, most bizarrely, Donald Trump – could hardly be said to be paragons of Christian virtue.
The assault on science was, as it turns out, only one part of a larger attack on the very notion of evidence. If a study showed that tobacco caused cancer, Big Tobacco was there to churn out reams of documents purporting to show the opposite. If climate scientists demonstrated that CO2 emissions were causing climate change, Big Oil and Big Coal were there to sponsor reams of studies that purported to show the opposite. Churn out enough garbage, fund enough programs, buy enough airtime, and it becomes difficult or well-nigh-impossible to make sense of the real evidence.
To make this even better, the GOP attacked public education for decades, and pushed to use public funds to support private (read Christian) education through vouchers and other programs. Not content to suck funds out of public schools, and because it was beholden to its Bible-thumping fundamentalist wing, the sought to eliminate real science from public-school classrooms and replace it with garbage science.
The attack on science, on education, and on evidence found its apotheosis in the attack on news. The Trumpist war cry of “Fake News” is not merely a propaganda ploy – it is the nihilist culmination of the decay of the thought and rationality in the GOP. By means of Fox News, OANN, and other hard-right “news” outlets, the GOP has trained a generation of television viewers to reject evidence, denounce research, and reject any views that are not consonant with their own.
So the rejection of masks by a significant chunk of the American population isn’t an accident; it wasn’t inevitable; it’s not about freedom. It’s about the GOP’s Faustian bargain: reject truth and gain power.
Wearing a mask isn’t and shouldn’t be a political statement. Yet when a political party insists that science is bad and that evidence is all subjective, adopting a scientific stance is indeed the most important political statement one could make.
Wear a mask!
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