Click on image for a larger display

 

The global pandemic hit the US hard. Given the wide-spread belief that Trump badly mishandled the crisis, we thought it wise to explore the movement’s attitudes toward Covid-19. The Wave 1 of the PSMM includes an extensive battery of questions in which we gauge beliefs about Covid-19. However, for the sake of brevity, we present only a handful here. For our present purposes, we examine four items: (1) whether or not state and local governments should ease up on Covid-related restrictions; (2) whether or not Trump was honest about seriousness of the pandemic; (3) whether or not Covid-19 is a bioweapon manufactured by China; and (4) the prospect that society is overreacting to the pandemic. Results associated with the first three questions are unequivocal: at least 90 percent of respondents believe that authorities should relax restrictions, believe Trump was honest about the extent to which Covid-19 would affect the country, and agree that Covid-19 is a bioweapon, manufactured by China. The sole item on which it appears there is relative doubt is whether or not people are overreacting. But even here, roughly 70 percent of the MAGA movement agrees.

If the responses to the pandemic appear at variance with conventional wisdom on public health and common sense, it’s because they’re a product of a broader paranoid belief system. As one of us has written elsewhere, reactionary movements have a hard time coming to grips with social and cultural change. They fear that it threatens their way of life. As such, to them, most everything seems a threat, a disposition that encourages conspiratorial thinking. To examine this proposition among our respondents in the MAGA movement, we developed a number of questions designed to gauge predispositions to conspiratorial thinking (full question text is available on request): (1) Real Americans are losing [their] freedoms; (2) Our lives are controlled by secret plots; (3) The American way of life is disappearing; (4) Unknown actors make the big decisions; and (5) Forces are changing our society for the worse. On all save one, at least 90 percent of the MAGA movement agree with the sentiments described in these questions. The only one that fails to rise to 90 percent agreement is the first questions, “Real Americans are losing [their] freedoms.” However, even here, roughly 88 percent of respondents agree.