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Other options. It isn't interested in whether you believe in it -- or subscribe to the best scientific guidelines about how to slow its spread. It will infect you if you believe in it or not. Or whether you voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden or someone else. A single death -- like those of the men listed above -- is a blow because it was almost certainly avoidable in each of these cases.
The story of Wallace, who leaves behind a wife and three children with a fourth on the way in a month or so -- is particularly devastating.
That is a crushing loss. As are the deaths of Bernier, Farrel and Valentine. That they spread their anti-science views on masking and vaccinations only to die from the very virus they scoffed at makes their lives and deaths a tragedy of significant proportions.
Valentine and Farrel changed their views on vaccines and masks as they grew sicker. As The Washington Post wrote of Farrel :. Valentine, in a statement released by his radio station, said this after he had gotten the virus :. Two other key cabinet ministers, from less grand backgrounds — the education secretary Michael Gove and the secretary of state for work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith — had long been close to American conservatives, and shared their growing impatience with the detail and incrementalism of orthodox government.
It worked electorally for a time — Cameron was re-elected in , with a majority — in part because the Conservative disregard for facts was shared by much of the rightwing press, and by the wider public and media these newspapers influenced. The logical conclusion of this politics of minimal facts and maximum conviction was the Brexit referendum. Cameron called it, and expected, with characteristic overconfidence, to win it for remain, as if the decades of Eurosceptic journalism had never happened.
Gove and Duncan Smith were both prominent in the leave campaign, which bent statistics out of all recognition. And when Trump also won after a campaign even more based on magical thinking, it seemed that conservatism — or at least a populist mutation of it — still had prospects. O ne way for conservatism to hang on to power is to play clever electoral games. In elections and in government, conservatives have also shrewdly — often shamelessly — appealed to their core supporters.
With that core vote mobilised, with its electoral impact maximised thanks to a US voting system that disproportionately represents small towns and the countryside, with the Democratic vote minimised thanks to gerrymandering and voter suppression, and with the conservative media grinding away, the American right will continue to eke out election wins.
A similar dynamic may keep the Tories winning general elections in Britain. For many conservatives, such outcomes are reasons not to worry too much about the future. Some conservatives also cite the long history of doomy forecasts about their movement. Kesler points out that one of the best-known books to argue that US social trends are undermining the movement, The Emerging Democratic Majority by John B Judis and Ruy Teixeira, was published almost 20 years ago. In , Gray published The Undoing of Conservatism, a thick, gloomy pamphlet for the centre-right thinktank the Social Market Foundation.
In Britain and the US, the big political story of the last quarter century, in many ways, has been how, with so little in the way of ideas, talent, administrative competence and electoral support, conservatives have been able to change society so much. In office, they often have a willingness — which liberals and the left often lack — to use to the maximum whatever power they have, as supporters of American abortion rights are currently discovering to their cost.
Y et this era of conservative bluffing and bodging is coming to an end. The climate emergency, the collapse of confidence in capitalism, the rise of inequality to explosive levels, the revival of the radical left: many conservatives may deny these are happening, but soon their movement is going to have to address them. Kesler thinks the dark, sometimes apocalyptic conservatism promoted by Bannon and other rightwing populists is too negative, and lacks practical proposals.
Kesler argues that these signal a return to the more nationalistic, socially inclusive Republicanism of the early 20th century.
Gray still believes a new conservatism is possible — but sees no sign, so far, of anyone coming up with the right formula. Modern conservatism, in many ways, began in California, where Reagan was governor from to For decades, the state was a laboratory for low taxes, government cutbacks and rightwing activism.
Breitbart News, the far-right website formerly run by Bannon, is based in Los Angeles. The left is used to that feeling. At a time of unprecedented uncertainty, that mission is more important than ever — and we remain committed to fulfilling it.
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