Social Darwinism Fails Once Again

President Biden’s approval rating went up to 49% in the most recent CNN poll, and 47% in the Fox poll. Outliers? A brief fluctuation? Who knows, from just one or two poll snapshots. But it is interesting that while the media has been emphasizing how badly Biden was doing in polling, there is very little coverage of this upward jump.

I would imagine that very few of us like this incessant polling, but we know that it creates its own narrative. So let’s hope that the numbers continue to go up. Is there any rationale for a six-point or so jump? Not really, but there was no legitimate reason for the numbers to keep going down, except for Afghanistan “optics.”

We just were shown a report from a House committee studying the Trump Administration’s handling of the pandemic, and it verifies everything we had intuited when it was gong on. Trump and his lackeys did everything they could to make it worse. Perhaps not intentionally, but it might as well have been. Their chief motivation was to try to win the election, and they thought that hiding the truth would help in that regard. So they blocked data, squelched the reports of medical professionals, and made up things. How many people died as a direct result of this all-out attempt to hide and twist reality? Maybe hundreds of thousands, but it would just be an estimate.

So Trump lied, and people died. And the effects are not over yet, with so many people having been told that they don’t need vaccines, and that your liberties are being taken away if there is a mask or vaccine mandate. And apart from anything else, this is why it makes so much difference as to who is in the White House. Even very obtuse people should be able to see that Biden is empathic, caring, and is following science. Trump, and the people he hired and appointed, are none of those things.

When there is a health crisis, you want a Democrat in charge. All the things that some people want to mock about Democrats, become major attributes in such times. Do you want Trump, or “Heck of a job, Brownie” George W. Bush running things? DeSantis or Abbott, who hid test results, fought to stop any mandates; and in the case of Abbott, did nothing to stop people from freezing when the power grid shut down?

Social darwinism might seem appealing to some people when things are going well enough. But it is not something that one turns off and on, it is a basic and fixed trait of those who believe in it. Far too many voters don’t understand this; or like the Arkansas fiddler of the famous song, they don’t worry about the leaking roof when the sun is shining,, and then when it is pouring rain, they are too overwhelmed to fix it. And then they, or the ones left behind, seem to forget again. Not all of them, of course, but enough to make things very difficult for everybody else. Because unlike in the song, there is more than one roof to deal with.

We still have the pandemic, and an expected surge. And the Republicans of course will somehow blame Biden for it, because they never fail to try to gain from a crisis. But the respected doctors I have seen, are fairly positive about things, if people get vaccinated and get the booster shot, and stay away from large indoor gatherings, and wear masks. We’ve got 72.3% of the population vaccinated, which is better, but too low. About 31% of people have gotten the booster shot, far too few.

Why it is so difficult to convince people to get these vaccinations, is beyond belief, except that they have been fed propaganda by Trump and by the insidious networks which have all their staff vaccinated, but try to convince everyone else not to be, because it helps them foster grievances, win elections, and gain more money and power for only themselves. War profiteers, but worse.

One would at least hope that more people will realize that America needs leaders who actually care about the welfare of citizens, and who will follow the best science to determine what is necessary to protect them. Having someone in charge who only cares about himself, is the worst thing possible, because he will always sell out everyone to feed his sociopathic needs.

I know that this is all obvious, but it does need to be emphasized, amid the fog of confusion and lies which the social darwinist Right sends out. Some presidents are of course better than others, but no one has ever been worse than Trump. And there are a bunch of acolytes of Trumpism, whose defining trait is sociopathy, who would be perhaps one iota less bad, but not enough to save millions of people from the next health or environmental crisis.

If Democrats ran on nothing else than that, it should be more than enough, if there were a rational electorate. I see that the people of Kentucky who saw or heard Biden when he toured the dreadful tornado damage, “put aside their political differences” for a few days, according to one headline writer. How generous of them, and how long will it last, before they are back to yelling about “socialism”?

And Rand Paul, who votes against every effort of Congress to give help to suffering communities, was pleading and demanding that Biden and Congress help his state. Paul is beyond sanity and saving, but perhaps his fellow citizens might actually want to think ahead, before they vote for another Republican

Social darwinism means that you just let the “strongest” (almost always meaning richest) survive, and try to tun your disinterest and contempt for everyone else, into some kind of law of the universe which you must follow. Eventually, one might think, people will be able to add this up, and figure out who wants to help them, and who just offers “thoughts and prayers,” or not even that.