The growing insistence in conservative media on on "reopen the economy now" is really revealing. Some quick thoughts: https://twitter.com/TomiLahren/status/1248666012632915968

So much of what emotionally animates their movement is opposition to public safety measures. Things that require short term, acute costs or inconvenience for long term or society-wide benefits. Anti-pollution, public health, gun safety regulations etc.

They know they can trigger resentment by saying these goody-goody nanny staters are asking you to inconvenience yourself for something that supposedly will happen years or decades from now or - even worse - to someone else! How dare they!

Liberals have more or less won the war on smoking in American society, but denying the link between cigarettes and lung disease was a *huge* conservative issue in the 1990s.

They've trained themselves over the years to understand what a winner this is for them

The problem is that this isn't remotely like this! The negative consequence isn't like lung disease or climate change where it won't be felt for decades, outbreaks happen in a couple of weeks!

Having huge mass-casualty outbreaks of a deadly pandemic won't help the economy, especially not the sectors like airlines or cruises or hotels that are currently in the most trouble. It's an absurd argument

The only way through is to actually beat the virus either through containment via lockdowns and testing or through development of a working vaccine. It's not a problem they can just ignore and until the bill comes due decades later

I think the fact that, like air pollution, the impacts seem to fall hardest on poorer and minority citizens has made this more appealing to conservatives, who tend to like the existence of problems that heighten class advantage even if they also somewhat impact the rich as well

But it's fundamentally just conservative media running an old playbook out about long term gain vs short term pain. An ideology for three year olds who refuse to understand cause and effect beyond what happens to them in the next five minutes.