If you’re responding to the ghoulish, click-baiting headline with outrage that the left would celebrate a man’s death, I am not here to make a liberal or leftist argument against Herman Cain. I am here to make a conservative one.
See, back in March—before cases had peaked!—the Lt. Governor of Texas Dan Patrick said, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
This was part of a wider pattern of suggesting retirees were less valuable citizens*. Given the “pro-life” stance of many proponents of this gruesome arithmetic when the question is a brain-dead car-crash victim, a non-viable fetus, or a hypothetical retiree before a “death panel”, it is quite hard to square this position with the wider conservative philosophy. But now that Cain is dead I’m seeing calls for civility around his death.
Conservatives know that Cain’s death wasn’t heroic and they know it did not improve the economy. If anything, he has betrayed the movement by showing his fragility before the virus. He has shown the cost of shoring up the President’s bravado and denialism can be death and that others who do the same might die. (CC: Representative Gohmert.) His website does not, of course, couch it in terms of betrayal, but it recognizes that Cain was not expendable: “We’re heartbroken, and the world is poorer: Herman Cain has gone to be with the Lord”.
It is, perhaps, in bad taste to celebrate his death from the lens that he was a political opponent and deserved to die. But I will not hear criticism of those celebrations from politicians and pundits who have for months downplayed the gravity of people his age dying. I’m told the young will be fine and we don’t need to worry about deaths among the old.
If the deaths of the elderly don’t matter, then don’t me the celebrations of those deaths do.
*The worst part is I don’t hate this calculus in theory. When deciding how to allocate scarce resources, some priority ought to be given to addressing, for instance, childhood cancer over geriatric cancer because years of life saved matter. But many retires have more than a decade of life left and that clearly outweighs the economic activity of non-essential businesses during COVID-19 spikes.
Proof of Burden 