Glenn Beck in West Palm Beach, Florida, on 19 December 2019. Beck said: ‘I would rather die than kill the country.’
Photograph: SMG/Rex/Shutterstock
As Donald Trump
has pushed his shock policy reversal to try to soon get many Americans
to go back to work, despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, he has
been supported by a wide array of rightwing figures, business groups and
conservative politicians.
Some of those conservatives have taken the president’s concerns over
the dire health of the US economy a step further – suggesting that the
inevitable deaths of many people to the virus might be an acceptable
cost of doing business in the face of a shocking economic collapse that
saw more than 3 million new people register for unemployment.
“My message: let’s get back to work, let’s get back to living, let’s
be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of
ourselves,” Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor, said last week on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.
“Don’t sacrifice the country,” Patrick continued.
Patrick even suggested many older Americans would happily risk their lives for the sake of the economy.
“No one reached out to me and said: ‘As a senior citizen, are you
willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the
America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’”
Patrick also said. “And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in. That doesn’t
make me noble or brave or anything like that, I just think there are
lots of grandparents out there in this country like me.”
The extreme rightwing media figure Glenn Beck shared the sentiment.
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“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, I
would rather die than kill the country. ’Cause it’s not the economy
that’s dying, it’s the country,” Beck said on an episode of his program
on Blaze TV.
The Republican Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson also questioned
whether the economic impact of physical distancing was worth it,
appearing to rate the coronavirus threat as less than fatal car
accidents.
“We don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people
die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about. We
don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die
from the common flu.”
Johnson also said “getting coronavirus is not a death
sentence except for maybe no more than 3.4% of our population, [and] I
think probably far less”.
The rightwing Federalist magazine has also run stories urging Trump
to get the economy going again and attacked Democrats – not the US
president – for their reactions to the crisis. One article peddled the
idea that “a handful of Democratic activists created alarming, but bogus
data sets to scare local and state officials into making rash,
economy-killing mandates”.
Elsewhere business lobbying groups are also lobbying against economic shutdowns. The Tampa Bay Times reported
that the Florida chamber of commerce has lobbied the Republican state
governor, urging him not to take drastic measures that might shut down
the state’s economy.
“I don’t think the data says we need to do a statewide shutdown,” Mark Wilson, the chamber’s CEO, told the paper.
It is true that conservatives are not alone in their desire to stimulate the languishing economy.
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, a longtime Trump foe, echoed the White House’s desire to relaunch business.
“I take total responsibility for shutting off the economy in terms of
essential workers but we also have to start to plan the pivot back to
economic functionality,” he told journalists in the state capital, Albany. “You can’t stop the economy forever.”
But, Cuomo said on Tuesday that economic rebound should not be accompanied by death.
“If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest,” he said.
“No American is going to say, accelerate the economy at the cost of
human life, because no American is going to say how much a life is
worth.”
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