(Don't worry, this is not about statues.)
The idea of a "died of a theory" seems especially relevant now as we see the renewed surge in Covid-19 cases. As many doctors have said, this isn't a second wave, because the first one never ebbed. If anything, it's like a powerful tsunami that crests and rolls and rolls and rolls and crushes everything in front of it. It's not a huge mystery as to why we have dramatically underperformed the closest comparison we have - the EU. This graph tells the story perfectly:
You can see the Italian and then French and Spanish outbreaks roughly preceding the NYC outbreak over the course of March. You can see Europe shutting down and putting into place tough masking and rigorous testing policies. The EU will - most likely - see a second wave in the fall. What the US is seeing is more a series of outbreaks that shows no sign of abating. In fact, NY looks a lot like the EU.
What recent research has found is that consuming right wing media - especially Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson - created resistance to public health steps. I'm currently in rural Georgia, and mask wearing is very sporadic. (Ironically, the local Walmart has pretty decent mask coverage for this year, maybe 66%, whereas the upscale grocery store is closer to 25%. It will be interesting to see if that changes soon.)
Basically, by the time election day 2020 rolls around, I don't think it's out of the question that 300,000 Americans will have died of Covid-19, the country will be in a depression, and racism will not have been addressed at all by the Republican Senate, much less Hair Furor.
The complete collapse of America's ability to govern itself is directly tied to the theory that underpins the modern GOP. In order to keep winning elections, the GOP had to move further and further to the right and drag their voters there with them, using Right Wing Media has a megaphone to create a segment of the electorate that is anti-science, antt-education and generally anti-government.
The GOP has become a party of extremists, because their theory kept moving them in a direction that made them incapable of meeting any important needs of governance.
Take the economy. We will need a massive stimulus and aid package directed at those who have been made unemployed by the pandemic. Otherwise, people will be evicted from their homes, go hungry and struggle to make any ends meet. The Senate is not currently considering doing anything to extend aid packages to states (probably because they know the next aid package will include mail-in voting demands from Democrats). The GOP simply doesn't think the government should help people who -through no fault of their own - have lost their job.
Modern conservatism has its roots in Goldwater's extremism and Nixon's racial politics of grievance, but they found their apotheosis in Reagan's ability to sell a noxious stew of racism and class warfare under a smiling cowboy hat. "Government is not the solution to your problem, it is the problem." is a fantastic throw-away line in a debate, but it became the single most important animating principle behind the GOP.
Since 1988, the Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote exactly once, when they ran an incumbent Dubya Bush in the middle of a war. He won 50.7% of the vote. (Compare that to Obama's 52.9% four years later.) The GOP has never been broadly popular since Reagan's days, they have simply distributed themselves better to win elections by narrow margins (and gerrymandered and suppressed votes).
As Rahm Emanuel notes (ugh), if suburban women join with People of Color and young people into an enduring Democratic coalition that can routinely win urban and suburban congressional districts and move Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and even Texas into the Democratic column, then the GOP can have etched on IT'S tombstone: died of a theory.
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