Why do Republicans want to end the corona virus restrictions?

Great Debates
1

The decision whether or not to have a lockdown should be a simple (or maybe not so simple) cost/benefit analysis; what are the factors that are leading Republicans to end lockdowns and stop social distancing? Help me understand their calculus.

Over the last week or so we have been seeing a lot of protests nationwide to reopen the economy and stop lockdowns combating the spread of the CoViD-19. These prostests have been organized and supported by right-wing organizations and individuals including the president and right wing pundits.

The CDC has done calculations showing that the R0 value, the contagiousness, for the corona virus may be as high as 5.7. The mortality rate data for the disease is still a little nebulous, but it looks like it is somewhere around 0.5-1% if it is properly treated (i.e. medical resources are not strained), but can be as high as 4% if medical care is not available or adequate (i.e. there are no ventilators available). These mortality rates are weighted against those with pre-existing conditions and the elderly. According to some numbers I have read, the average person younger than 40 has less than a 0.2% chance of dying while those older than 70 have roughly a 15% chance (I believe these numbers were assuming good health care). People suffering from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and asthma have a much higher chance of dying. Again, the mortality numbers are still a bit uncertain, but these correlations are pretty clear.

Given this my friends and I were having a virtual happy hour and talking about how unhappy the right is with the current lockdowns. We just can’t understand it; with an R0 this high, it is likely that >50% of the population will catch the disease in less than 3 months if we do not take active steps to reduce the spread. If 50% of the population gets the disease in a short time frame, it seems completely possible that 2 million or more people could easily die of this disease before the fall. Why would they want to risk that? (Note: 1% of 50% of the US population is 1.64 million)

One of my cynical friends pointed out that allowing this to happen would probably greatly reduce the Social Security and Medicare entitlements. Another said this is only true if everybody dies fast (“exactly!” exclaimed my friend). Another cynical friend pointed out that this disease preferentially kills off the Republican base (the elderly). Another said this was not totally true, as the corona virus is mostly a city disease and the Republican party gets most of its support from rural areas to which others said this was only true in the short term as the virus would spread.

We all agree that having lockdowns could lead to a serious recession, though it is unclear if it will be a U shaped recovery or a V shaped recovery. This event is so unprecedented that I don’t think anybody can predict what the long term effects of a 2-3 month shutdown of our economy would be. Several of us argued that even if we kept the economy open, having a million people dying of a disease that put
another 10 million in the hospital would probably cause a recession that was just as bad and in some ways worse (we argued a lot about the this and how the different recessions would look in the long term - we were probably 2 drinks in at this point so I will spare you the details).

We also argued about universal basic income, with one of us thinking that a potential reason that Republicans want to end CoViD-19 restrictions is that as this goes on, business will find a way and automation will only grow and that some of the job losses will become permanent. When this happens, the US will have to increase the welfare state something that is anathema to the right. To which I thought maybe they just don’t want people to have permanent job losses - something which I don’t believe would happen; the economy always makes jobs.

Anyway, I know this is a rambling OP and much of it is probably garbage, but I do want to understand the calculus of those on the right around ending the lockdowns. How do they think this is going to benefit the US?

2

I’ll jump in. Here’s my quick and dirty, not well-thought out, gut response: they don’t trust experts. Or science.

“Statisticians and scientists don’t understand business. They just want to take over and tell us what to do. If they’re so smart, how come I’M the one who’s rich? R0? WTF kind of number is that and what does it have to do with my bank account and/or bottom line? THOSE are the numbers I know about and care about!”

I’m sure some smarter people will check in soon.

3

I don’t know if the following is more cynical or less cynical than what they’re figuring, but my cynical guess is this: Trump says, of the states, that, hey, it’s their call, but he’d sure urge them to reopen and save the economy…

…so when a state presumably keeps tight restrictions in place, he gets to shake his head sadly and say he would’ve made a different call, would’ve made the right call, knows how to get the economy motoring along but, dangit, a hothouse flower with all the wrong impulses cracks down on liberty for the citizenry while looking out for illegal aliens in sanctuary cities and suddenly he’s on to yet another topic…

…though if a state relaxes the restrictions and things get crazy-bad there, welp, Trump left it up to the Governor to make the right call, and she made the wrong call, she’s clearly an idiot and unfit to hold office; he’s up there expressing a preference about the country in general, sure, granted; but the buck stopped there when she proved too dumb to get it right for one state in particular, and, by the way, she seems to also consistently get it wrong about the Second Amendment, just like it’s now time to change the subject once again…

…so, yeah; just broadly go on about how What They’re Doing Is Wrong, to then see which way to go with the Magician’s Force reply; would that explain it?

4

Oh, I get the calculus for the rich. If I could stay home for the next 6-9 months without penalty, I can totally see how getting this to work through the population as quickly as possible is advantageous. Hell, my family can work from home and shelter in place at least until the school year starts in August without too much difficulty and there is a tiny little part of me that can see why this is attractive. The larger part of me is terrified the economy would collapse in this case due to everybody being too ill to work.

But most of the protesters and the Republican rank and file are not in this boat and can’t stay home for 6 months. Right?

5

My thoughts: Trump’s been crowing so long about the economy, and the assumption is that presidents win or lose re-election based on the strength of the economy, so Trump, his supporters and Republican politicians are eager to get the economy humming again, and if pockets of people get sick and die, so be it.

That being said, your rank-and-file Republican voters aren’t as eager to lift restrictions as Trump and his stooges are.

6

Their masters and their constituents want things to re-open. Their masters are the rich and influential people who will lose the most money in this crisis, but don’t think their own lives are at risk. Their constituents are often anti-science, anti-government, anti-liberal, anti-anything that they don’t want, so they’ll risk their own lives and the lives of others just to prove we ain’t the boss of them. The politicians themselves don’t believe in anything except serving those two groups and their reasoning is that people will be better off with a stronger economy even if a lot of people will die as a result. It’s not like that reasoning hasn’t won out time and again when it comes to war and pollution.

7

Because the freedom to rape, destroy, and plunder is a bedrock value to them. They say it differently, but that’s what is at the bottom. They hate science for being about facts when what they care about is emotions, like guns make me feel safe, brown skinned people make me feel afraid, nobody is sick that I know, and that’s all I have an interest in knowing about. Newspapers are fake news, the CDC is part of an international global conspiracy to take away our freedoms, see sentence #1.

Simpler: they are evil idiots, the blight of planet earth. That’s the rational, reasonable answer.

8

It’s a case of Appeal to Consequences. “The coronavirus is causing severe restrictions that are damaging the economy and everyone’s livelihood. This damage is unacceptably severe; ergo, we must lift the restrictions.” The fallacy lies in that they don’t consider the consequences of re-opening, only the consequences of remaining closed.

9

I’m with you on this one. They (figureheaded by the President) want to have it both ways. Say they have a plan to get things going again safely and quickly, and then if it doesn’t happen for one reason or the other or it even fails and backfires, say it’s the fault of the responsible decisionmakers that you are still suffering/sufferign worse.

As to why they want that, see TriPolar’s post. The top plutocrats feel they are pretty well insulated personally but stand to lose a lot, and the grasroots Useful Fools at the protest marches are buying into a call to be “…anti-anything that they don’t want, so they’ll risk their own lives and the lives of others just to prove we ain’t the boss of them.”

10

And the ironic part of this is, if the situation is dealt with succesfully, then the *only *thing a lot of the country will have felt directly in their lives will have been the economic disruption. They’ll be propagandized to the effect of, it was never going to be that bad, the eggheads made your shop go bankrupt and your retirement fund fall by half for nothing.

(As to the hotspots… well, what would you expect from filthy overcrowded corrupt places where of course things would go bad, you know how dirty and irresponsible Those People are and what inept leaders they elect.)

11

There isn’t any one answer to this; Republicans have a number of different constituencies.

On the top, the major Republican players like Trump, his immediate minions, governors and incumbent Senators mostly just want the stock market to recover and rudimentary economic figures to bounce back. That accomplishes two things; it means their portfolios will improve, and it improves their chances of re-election. They know people will die but don’t care.

Below them, you have a very wide array of Trumpist and QAnon conspiracy theorists, Fox news junkies, and Christian fanatics. Decades of anti-intellectualism and science denial have made them reflexively distrust truth and educated people, so when faced with the stress of the lockdown versus safety, they just assume whatever doctors and scientists say must be a liberal lie.

In between you have the Trumpist media, like Fox News, conservative talk radio, and OAN and crap like that. They get viewers, clicks and support by playing to both the top’s greed and bottom’s fear and hatred.

12

I don’t think anyone in the Republican party consciously planned this out (I think it’s far more likely that Trump is pushing for reopening everything because he doesn’t want to be a recession president and doesn’t have a very good grasp of the tradeoffs and probable consequences, and everybody else just followed along), but I wonder if they’ve stumbled into a weirdly, diabolically, brilliant strategy from a purely politics-and-messaging perspective.

Sooner or later, ending restrictions will be the right thing to do. At some point, possibly before it’s the right thing to do and possibly concurrently, it will become a more-popular-than-not thing to do. There will be dissenters. There will be people who are calling for stricter restrictions than are possible in practice or are warranted by evidence (heck, this is the case right now).

From a Republican point of view, if you maneuver the political discourse so that “we need more and stricter lockdowns that go on longer” becomes the default left-wing position and “open everything up right now” becomes the default right-wing position … you won’t have been right all along, but you are going to be right last. And “last” is what people will remember, particularly if there’s an extended period of time before things open up when people are really sick of following the rules and desperate for it all to end.

(From a Democratic point of view, the way to defeat this strategy is to make your default position not “we need more and stricter lockdowns that go on longer” but “listen to the people who have been researching and studying this, and do what they recommend,” but I’m starting to see some worrying signs on social media that we’re drifting toward the former, particularly among risk-averse, upper-middle-class professionals who can work from home more or less indefinitely.)

13

Or, you know, people are losing their jobs and businesses, have no savings, are struggljng to feed themselves and their kids, and in large parts of the country they live in places where they aren’t seeing much impact from the virus.

I know Orange Man Bad, but this is a global phenomenon. Governments around the world are facing immense pressure to ease restrictions, because these restrictions are incredibly hard on a lot of people.

Of course, in the U.S. you have the unique problem that evil Republicans are involved, and they like eating babies and enslaving everyone in their sweatshops while bathing in their tears. At least, that’s the impression I get reading this thread.

14

This

And the fact that, to date, most of the casualties have been people in urban areas. The big news story last week was that minorities are disproportionately affected. This story had an unintended consequence.

They don’t really care if the people in the groups being infected live or die and they are outraged that they are expected to take an economic hit in order to protect THOSE people.

And the President is deliberately sabotaging the messaging of his own Task Force. Don’t you think that by now that his followers know to ignore anything he says in that sing-song monotone reading from the teleprompter with a gun to his head voice? He’s assiduously refused to endorse or lend any encouragement to his own Stop The Spread guidelines all along, and now he’s moved into encouraging his followers to ignore them.

15

You should read the posts in a thread before responding. Nobody is saying the Republicans eat babies or enslave people. They’re saying the Republicans are generally the party that’s calling for an end to lockdown policies.

If you want to dispute that position, go ahead. If you want to defend that position, go ahead. But don’t bring your strawmen into the argument.

16

Hi Sam, thanks for joining the thread!

I know you are Canadian and do not have the evil Republicans like we do here ;), but maybe you can give us some more insight.

First let me say I do not believe for a second that Republicans are evil. I understand a lot of their motivations and believe they are coming from a place where they believe they are doing good. I don’t think the “Orange Man” is very competent (with CoVid or anything else), I believe he and his policies are damaging to the US in a way that we have never seen before, and I don’t understand why the Republican party supports him as I don’t really think he is all that conservative. But this is a topic for another thread; what I hope we talk about now is the reasoning of a large fraction of Republicans believing that the steps we have taken to slow down the spread of CoViD-19 should not have been taken.

You seem to imply in your first paragraph that it is rational self interest combined with what I view as shortsightedness. They are struggling, the shut down is hurting them economically, and they see no evidence the virus is harming them or their neighbors. Does this mean that they don’t believe the doctors and scientists at the CDC and WHO? Or do they believe the numbers but just think that having 1 to 2 out of every 50 of us dying is preferable to accepting a little socialism for a couple of months? Or do they maybe believe that it won’t effect them because it hasn’t spread to Flyover, USA yet? Or is there something else?

17

Yes, this is pure election strategy. Bidens most effective ads is slamming trump for his errors and lies.

And of course, a good economy means the incumbent will usually get re-elected.

18

I think the problem is simpler than this. I think some Republicans, including Trump, have just become too locked into the principle of arguing. They can’t stop even when it’s an issue where they should be agreeing.

When the terrorists attacked on 9/11, everyone was in agreement that it was a bad thing and we should fight the terrorists. It was a universal opinion held by Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals. And Bush was smart enough to see this and just take the leadership of the consensus.

But Trump and his loyalists don’t have the ability to do this. They see everything as “I’m right and you’re wrong” - so they feel compelled to argue against the Democrats even when the Democrats are saying something that’s undeniably sensible.

19

You’re right, and those reasons are valid. Even Cuomo’s one-size-fits-all-counties lockdown exhibits the fact the impact of the virus is inconsequential in certain areas of NY. There’s also the feeling by some that stand in place orders for the entire “non-essential” population is unlawful or unnecessary. It’ll be interesting to see how Sweden’s unique / anti-authoritarian ‘gamble at your own risk’ approach turns out.

20

I think the calculation is fairly simple to want to reopen the economy. About 20% of the population is currently unemployed, at worst about 20% of the population would be hospitalized with COVID. This lockdown is going to have to go for 12-18 months so is being unemployed for a year as bad as being in the hospital for a couple of weeks?

I know several people that have decided that getting COVID isn’t as bad as being unemployed and have gotten jobs at the grocery stores. They hate their new job and would much rather be bartenders and waiters so they would prefer the economy be reopened. I’m gainfully employed at home so its easy for me to opine but most of the people I know who are worried about paying their rent next month would rather be working and they aren’t all republicans.