Older Americans are key drivers of the country’s faltering economy — and more at risk of dying from the coronavirus.
Forget “15 days to slow the spread.” A growing chorus of conservatives have started arguing that older adults should voluntarily return to work to save the country from financial ruin.
Call it “economic patriotism.”
The proposal has taken root in some conservative circles, filtering up from far-right websites to radio pundits to a few prominent politicians to, finally, Fox News. To its proponents, the approach is merely the cold reality that the country needs to avoid another Great Depression. To its detractors, it’s like a battlefield cry to offer up your own life for the sake of the gross domestic product. To health professionals, it’s a recipe for extending the coronavirus pandemic.
Though it’s by no means the overwhelming opinion of Republicans or conservatives at large, the argument seems to have arisen from one strain of the wartime mentality that has emerged during the coronavirus crisis. And as President Donald Trump nears the end of his 15-day call for social distancing, it’s a philosophy that could influence the decision-making within the White House. Trump is known to take cues from a number of conservative pundits who are off the mainstream radar.
“The way that people are talking sounds a lot like the populist nationalism that made up the wave that Trump rode first to the Republican nomination and then to the White House, because it’s phrased in ways that talk about the common good — except ‘the common good’ is really ‘the country’s bottom line succeeds,’” said Seth Mandel, executive editor of the conservative Washington Examiner, in an interview.
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Smaller, more traditionally conservative sites like The Federalist have started running articles suggesting the economic downfall of social distancing could ruin people’s lives to the point that “[p]robably almost everyone would be willing to live a somewhat shorter normal life rather than a somewhat longer life under current conditions.” The site even advocated solutions such as hosting “chickenpox parties” to expose children to the novel coronavirus to build herd immunity — an article Twitter swiftly suspended for promoting scientific misinformation.
It’s not an argument being made solely by stringent nationalist conservatives.
R.R. Robin, editor at the religious journal First Things, suggested that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s declaration that he would do anything to save lives was “demonic” in nature.
“Satan prefers sentimental humanists,” he wrote, and called the mass shutdown of New York City a sign that political and religious leaders had “signal[ed] by their actions that they, too, accept death’s dominion.”
Variations of that sentiment have found adherents in more popular conservative pundits and even a few prominent politicians. Radio host Glenn Beck, the onetime Fox News star, declared this week that he “would rather die” than kill the economy.
“I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working, even if we all get sick,” he said during his Tuesday radio panel. “I would rather die than kill the country, because it’s not the economy that’s dying, it’s the country.”
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Fox News anchor Brit Hume later called the theory “an entirely reasonable viewpoint.”
Matt Lewis, a conservative opinion columnist at the Daily Beast, was unsurprised that his peers had made this suggestion, though he cautioned the view was not shared by the vast majority of right-leaning Americans, commentators and politicians.
“I suspect most conservatives simply think that the coronavirus worries are over-hyped, and that it might be possible to find a middle ground where we save our economy and also protect lives,” he said.
But this new argument, he said, played into a common Republican stereotype: “There has long been a sense that we care more about money and that we believe in a sort of ‘survival of the fittest.’”
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- Discussion
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A growing chorus of conservatives have started arguing that older adults should voluntarily return to work to save the country from financial ruin https://t.co/xBsnNx9F5e
— POLITICO (@politico) March 27, 2020
One of the frustrating aspects of the current debate is watching parts of the pro-life right lapse into the false choice between life and prosperity, and choosing the illusion of prosperity. If we don't flatten the curve, we get neither: https://t.co/zqqwH7J85j
— David French (@DavidAFrench) March 27, 2020
I have some choice words for those who think this is a good idea, but I will refrain.
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