Political Darwinism

 

For the past five years or so, I have felt like I was living in the Twilight Zone.  With all of the science denying and ‘alternative facts’ which are pure fabrications and falsehoods, it seems like a large portion of our nation’s population has lost all sense of reality. Now, we face a resurgence of Covid 19 hospitalizations and deaths due to gross misinformation about the efficacy of the corona vaccines. This situation would be bad enough if it was merely the result of deceptive websites.  But ultra conservative news sources and elected government officials are contributing to the low immunization rates in our nation by echoing the nonsense.  We might as well just send the doses overseas to countries that would welcome them.

I have been fully vaccinated since April and feel personally protected from serious health consequences regarding the pandemic. Nevertheless, I am deeply concerned about the rest of our countrymen.  We have already matched the total number of deaths from the Spanish flu of 1918.  I wonder how many more deaths it will take for our citizens and political leaders to come to their senses.

As I was considering the situation recently, I had a revelation.  At this point, 99 percent of the people who are dying are those who are unvaccinated.  This is particularly critical in states with high numbers of politically conservative citizens.  The impact of this on the voting results in the fall elections of 2022 and beyond may be quite interesting.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the efforts of conservative talk show hosts and legislators to promote the antivaccine movement actually reduce the Republican voting base and usher in sweeping wins for Democrat candidates in state and federal elections? Of course, death is not the only result of Covid infections.  Many Victims are left with long lasting health issues that are extremely debilitating.  It is possible that the voting restrictions being pushed through Republican controlled state legislatures may further reduce Republican voter participation due to hardships associated with mail in ballots.

Many white citizens are concerned about the shifting ethnic demographics in our nation.  It will be interesting to see if the reluctance to obtain vaccines results in a higher death rate among whites and an acceleration of the demographic transition to a greater non-white population. If so, conservative whites will have facilitated the very thing that they fear.

President Biden is receiving a great deal of criticism over the government’s door-to-door effort to promote vaccinations.  I wonder if it wouldn’t be prudent to restrict these efforts to communities where access to healthcare is limited and withdraw from those communities where there is active resistance to vaccination. It would be a shame to waste federal dollars on those who are opposed to this extraordinary effort by the government to save their lives.

Consider what is going on in the media.  Ultra-conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are encouraging the vaccination doubters and helping to perpetuate the death of more than 200 people daily.  If the Democratic Party had execution squads in the streets killing 200 Republican voters daily, law enforcement would be frantically attempting to end the slaughter and right-wing citizens would be demanding federal intervention.  However, media celebrities are accomplishing the same results with no apparent uproar from their conservative audience.

In recent days, some conservative political leaders have begun encouraging citizens to be vaccinated.  The speculation is that they do not want their political party to be associated with the alarming rise in infections, hospitalizations and deaths from Covid 19.  Is it possible that they have also recognized the potential impact on the size of their voting base?

There appears to be a profound evolutionary process at work.  Those who respect the scientific approach are taking advantage of the protection from the Corona virus that science offers. Meanwhile, the science doubters are leaving themselves vulnerable to this increasingly contagious and deadly virus.  It is almost as though nature is in the process of purging our species of those who are irrational.