Ideologia, psicologia e a atitude face ao Covid-19

The Coronavirus and the Conservative Mind, por Ross Douthat (New York Times):

Both the crude and sophisticated efforts tended to agree, though, that the supposed conservative mind is more attuned to external threat and internal contamination, more inclined to support authority and hierarchy, and fear subversion and dissent. And so the political responses to the pandemic have put these psychological theories to a very interesting test.

In the coronavirus, America confronts a contaminating force (a deadly disease) that originated in our leading geopolitical rival (an external threat) and that plainly requires a strong, even authoritarian government response. If there was ever a crisis tailored to the conservative mind-set, surely it would be this one, with the main peril being that conservatives would wildly overreact to such a trigger (...).

From the Wuhan outbreak through somewhere in mid-February, the responses to the coronavirus did seem to correspond — very roughly — to theories of conservative and liberal psychology. Along with infectious-disease specialists, the people who seemed most alarmed by the virus included the inhabitants of Weird Right-Wing Twitter (a collection of mordant, mostly anonymous accounts interested in civilizational decline), various Silicon Valley eccentrics, plus original-MAGA figures like Mike Cernovich and Steve Bannon. (The radio host Michael Savage, often considered the most extreme of the right’s talkers, was also an early alarmist.)

Meanwhile, liberal officialdom and its media appendages were more likely to play down the threat, out of fear of giving aid and comfort to sinophobia or populism.(...)

But then, somewhere in February, the dynamic shifted. As the disease spread and the debate went mainstream, liberal opinion mostly abandoned its anti-quarantine posture and swung toward a reasonable panic, while conservative opinion divided, with a large portion of the right following the lead of Trump himself, who spent crucial weeks trying to wish the crisis away. Where figures like Bannon and Cernovich manifested a conservatism attuned to external perils, figures like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity manifested a conservatism of tribal denial, owning the libs by minimizing the coronavirus threat. (...)

But the right’s varying responses to the pandemic also illustrate two further points. The first point is that what we call “American conservatism” is probably more ideologically and psychologically heterogeneous than the conservative mind-set that social scientists aspire to measure and pin down. In particular, it includes an incredibly powerful streak of what you might call folk libertarianism — which comes in both highbrow and middlebrow forms, encompassing both famous legal scholars predicting minimal fatalities from their armchairs and “you can’t stop the American economy … for anything” tough guys attacking social distancing on Twitter.

This mentality, with its reflexive Ayn Randism and its Panglossian hyper-individualism, is definitely essential to understanding part of the American right. But it’s very much an American thing unto itself, and I’m doubtful that it corresponds to any universal set of psychological tendencies that we could reasonably call conservative.

The second point is that on the fringes of the right, among QAnon devotees and believers in the satanic depravity of liberalism, the only psychology that matters is paranoia, not conservatism. And their minimizing response to the coronavirus illustrates the unwillingness of the conspiratorial mind to ever take yes for an answer — meaning that even true events that seem to vindicate a somewhat paranoid worldview will be dismissed as not true enough, not the deepest truth, not the Grandest of All Grand Conspiracies that will someday (someday) be unraveled.

Mesmo em Portugal, parece-me ter havido uma evolução semelhantes: nos primeiros dias da epidemia, era o Chega a querer mudar a Constituição para permitir internamentos compulsivos, e depois, pelo menos no Facebook e no Twitter, era sobretudo os opinadores de direita que mais reclamavam que o governo não estava a fazer nada, que não fechava as escolas, etc. (inclusivament cheguei a assistir a uma discussão na página de Facebook de um "amigo" de direita em que alguém - já mais alinhado com os ventos vindos das Américas - se queixava que a direita portuguesa andava em "contra-ciclo", toda preocupada com o vírus em vez de desmascarar a fraude). Em compensação, era na esquerda que se via mais discursos de combater o alarmismo (um exemplo foi quando a Diretora-Geral da Saúde revelou que era possível que um milhão de pessoas fosse contaminada; parece-me que foi sobretudo da esquerda que surgiram as vozes contra o "alarmismo", uns a criticar a diretora, outros a criticar o jornal que destacou isso na notícia).

Entretanto, depois de uma espécie de quarentena entrar em vigor, a situação inverteu-se e agora é na direita que se ouvem as vozes a dizer que vai morrer mais gente do colapso económico do que da doença, que se deveria apostar na imunidade de grupo ou no isolamento vertical, que o número de mortes está a ser inflacionado, que se calhar já quase toda a gente apanhou a doença e já ficou imune, etc.