I’ve been thinking recently about how politics changed in the era of COVID-19. In doing so, my mind drifted right away to two emerging movements. I’m talking about right-wing death cults and leftish doom cults. But we’ll get there in a bit.
Before that, I want to issue a call for compassion. The last year+ fucked people up in lots of ways. 600,000 Americans died (so far). Millions lost family or friends. Millions got COVID themselves, and they spent weeks – even months – recovering from it. Let’s say it hasn’t been a great time for mental health.
Back, then, to the topic at hand.
Right-Wing Death Cults
The situation on the political right is far uglier. The short version? Some right-wingers leaned in to the pandemic. How so? A few denied it exists, and thereby helped its spread. Others denied its seriousness and pushed for lots of policies and activities that increased danger.
I’ll note that this all tracks a certain distinction between conservatives, on the one hand, and far-right Trumpists, on the other. Many conservatives rightly feel embarrassed by the ‘death cult’ crowd. However, the ‘death cult’ crowd turned out larger than we might have expected. The big reason? Right-wing Christians, for the most part, sorted into the Trumpist camp rather than the conservative camp. They also came out as Trumpists on the issue of fake ‘election fraud’ last year.
In leaning in to the pandemic, Trumpists revealed more about the next steps of right-wing identitarianism. They showed, in short, more of its nihilistic leanings. Not only do they have no real policy ideas, some of them now embrace pointless deaths in service to ‘the economy.’
Notably, it failed even to protect the ‘economy.’ As we find in the data, areas that took precautions against COVID did better economically than areas that didn’t.
Left-Wing Doom Cults
We’ve also seen lots of COVID-era developments on the political ‘left’ (defined broadly to include liberals and progressives, in addition to leftists). Some of these are obnoxious but not very harmful. Consider, for example, liberals who grandstand about wearing masks in situations where they never needed to (e.g., on outdoor nature walks). This might annoy us, but it won’t harm anyone.
Others are both obnoxious and potentially harmful. Consider, for example, Bleeding Heartland’s misguided stance to wait for vaccination until vulnerable people get one. And yet still others are positive. Consider, for example, the work of the Iowa Freedom Riders and prison abolitionists.
I mention these things because I’m setting them aside. That’s not what I’m talking about here. Here I mean to address the despair and hopelessness I find in much of the political left. Some leftists used the pandemic as an excuse to try to push through political ideas (e.g., UBI, rent strikes, teacher strikes) without doing the organizing work needed. This won’t (and didn’t) work, and it’s never going to work.
Even more concerning, others just lost themselves to the despair. They fretted about the pandemic never going away. They thought it would never be safe to enjoy life again. And they constantly denied, blocked, or otherwise discarded any good news. These are the ‘doom cults’ I refer to in the headline. The doom cult actively blocks progress and organizing.
Class, Death Cults, and Doom Cults
I’ll end with a related point. Death cults and doom cults seem to track class standing.
Death cult folks tend to also fall into Trumpism. In both cases, we have people who didn’t graduate from college but nevertheless found economic success. In some ways, that’s not very interesting. Anyone paying attention would’ve been surprised to find anything else.
The ‘doom cult’ people might teach us something more important. The people who became super-cautious, quarantined, and excessive mask users are probably the kinds of well-educated white liberals and progressives you’d imagine.
But then we have the people who have fallen to despair or advocate galaxy-brain policy ideas. There, I think we find leftists stuck in low-wage work. Some of them workers in the precariat. For the left, the challenge there, as always, has been directing the very real energy – and very real pain and needs – toward something more productive. Simply putting together the right groups of people isn’t enough. We also find need for support and education.
