TOTALLY NOT A DEATH CULT:

The Covid-19 pandemic amplifies political feelings around healthcare, race, and class that have been growing on the right over the last decade. Recall the Tea Party's origins during the Great Recession. The movement emerged and quickly grew first in response to the election of a black president and then that president's proposed healthcare plan, as protesters mobbed townhalls across the summer of 2009, loudly declaiming against any form of socialized medical coverage. Those two animating features of the movement--antiblack racism and opposition to the Affordable Care Act--defined a movement that in essence chose investments in whiteness over the assurance of at least some semblance of healthcare.

This was followed in the 2016 election by a Republican candidate who surged among voters who had high levels of racial resentment, strong feelings of political powerlessness, and growing economic anxiety (regardless of income level). Donald Trump, who titled his campaign memoir Crippled America, reveled in such terms as "disgust," "weakness," "losing," and "pathetic" to describe the country. He poked at the vulnerability of whites like a finger in a wound all while demonizing Latinos, immigrants, Muslims, black protesters, and foreign rivals. All of this set the stage for how the right would come to respond to the current pandemic.

The rhetorical oppositions of work to welfare, self-reliance to dependence, individual to the state, citizen to foreigner--oppositions animated by race, gender, and class--run deep in American political culture. All are reflected in the politics of the pandemic right now, making for a grim political vision of American freedom.

In a basic way, this vision of freedom is conveyed by the defiance of guidelines to stop the spread of the virus. It isn't just the protesters. The dozen or so Republicans in the House of Representatives refusing to wear masks when called to vote on the latest coronavirus relief bill performed precisely that kind of political theater for their constituents. It is meant as a tough-guy taunt, to show their own robustness and the weakness of their opponents. But it also reveals something more pathological. The risky behavior demonstrates vitality precisely because it tempts fate, suggestive of Freud's death drive, which he described as a force "whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death."

There is now a well-documented relationship between whiteness, status, and morbidity. As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have demonstrated in their research over the last few years, there have been long-term increases in "deaths of despair"--overdoses, suicides, alcohol-related fatalities--among middle-aged whites without college degrees. There is much yet to be understood about reasons for this phenomenon, but a sense of the declining status of whiteness appears tightly connected to collective self-harm. It is difficult not to think about this while watching mostly middle-aged white protesters demand the right to sacrifice their lives instead of joining others to demand greater protections for frontline workers, increased payments to keep workers at home, rent and mortgage moratoria, debt cancellation, federal money for states and municipalities, and more.

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