Another possibility is that we’re seeing the consequence of conservative intellectuals deciding to allow the culture war to swallow everything else in our public life. Conservatives have long believed that economics and politics are ultimately downstream from culture. But only now have they started to view every political or economic conflict as an expression of an underlying cultural clash that they believe they can win. Instead of getting their hands dirty with data, statistics, modeling, or wrestling with the difficult trade-offs involved in responding to dual epidemiological and economic crises, they prefer to tell ideologically satisfying stories that shoehorn the behavior of people, classes, politicians, and dreaded “elites” into pre-existing assumptions about the culture war.

Finally, there’s the antinomian (and very American) distrust of science and expertise, which has now combined with long-standing conservative respect for the metarational prudence or wisdom of statesmen, to produce an inverted form of deference to ill-informed hunches, instincts, and intuitions, provided they’re felt by ideological friends and political allies. So libertarian legal author Richard Epstein gets taken seriously across the right and in the White House when he defies the consensus of public-health experts on the basis of no concrete evidence at all to claim that the coronavirus will kill just 500 Americans. (He later raised his prediction to 5,000. The virus has thus far killed more than 63,000 with no immediate end in sight.) So R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things magazine, relies on his gut (and a willfully obtuse reading of the data) to denounce efforts to halt the spread of the virus, all but claiming the American economy and public life have been intentionally wrecked by a malicious hoax promulgated by demonic liberals.