A few days later, we were in a state of emergency. My mom and I were still talking about using the credit for our canceled tickets to Berlin to go to London at the end of April; there were some London Symphony Orchestra concerts we wanted to attend, as well as an acclaimed new production of Uncle Vanya, and surely by then this coronavirus thing would have blown over.
By the end of April, we were debating whether it was safe to go to Trader Joe’s.
***
Almost from the very beginning, responses to COVID-19 in the United States were (like everything else these days) polarized along political lines. Being Team Blue meant that you saw COVID as a very serious threat and supported drastic measures to contain and mitigate its spread. Being Team Red meant that you thought COVID wasn’t that big a deal and that its danger was being overhyped by safety freaks, people who wanted to give the government extraordinary powers, and Democrats who wanted to weaponize the pandemic to bring down Donald Trump. Obviously, not everyone fell neatly into those categories; but the tendency was undeniable. Here at The Bulwark in April 2020, Gabriel Schoenfeld documented the sorry record of people on the right—not just Fox News carnival barkers like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, but such soi-disant intellectuals as Roger Kimball and Heather Mac Donald—minimizing the pandemic and mocking those who took it seriously. Kimball performed a particularly spectacular self-beclowning in a March 14, 2020 American Greatness column in which he mocked the idea of an emergency and sneered that “a total of 60 people—60!—have died from the scourge of the Wuhan virus. . . . This really is a pandemic akin to the Black Death.” He confidently predicted that, while widespread testing might uncover more cases, “What won’t go up much is the number of fatalities.”
Chronicling Team Red covidiocy could easily fill a book: The estimate from Hoover Institution senior fellow Richard Epstein, a law professor, that just 500 Americans would die of COVID—followed by his comically desperate attempts to say he had really meant 5,000. The claims by talk-radio king Rush Limbaugh that COVID was just “the common cold” and was being overhyped by the media as part of “an effort to bring down Trump.” Trump’s rant at a rally about the Democrats’ “new hoax” and about the flu being far worse. (Yes, if you pick apart his word salad, he technically didn’t call the disease a hoax, only claims that he was mishandling it; but it’s ridiculous to deny that such talk boosted the “COVID hoax” narratives.) The #PlanDemic and #DemPanic hashtags (which still exist, but don’t look if you want to avoid brain damage). The war cries to “liberate” locked-down states. The obsessions with alleged miracle drugs, especially hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. The Anthony Fauci Derangement Syndrome. The anti-vaccine propaganda and scare tactics peddled by the likes of Tucker Carlson.
This is not to say that Team Blue has been entirely faultless. Some accusations leveled at the Trump administration were baseless or exaggerated. For instance, it’s not true that (as Joe Biden charged, along with a number of media outlets) the Trump administration rejected COVID-19 test kits offered by the World Health Organization. It’s also far from certain that, as many Trump critics suggested, the situation was made worse by the 2018 shutdown of the National Security Council’s office for global health security, instituted two years earlier under Barack Obama; as Factcheck.org has pointed out, its functions (and members) were mostly shifted to other units. More broadly, the idea that the COVID death toll in the United States equals blood on Trump’s hands seems overdramatic considering how many countries not led by Trump also fared badly—and how effectively the Trump administration facilitated the rapid development and production of vaccines. Did Trump’s feckless rhetoric and lack of leadership encourage irresponsible behavior with regard to social distancing and vaccination and thus cost lives? Most likely; but counterfactuals are always iffy, and it’s difficult to say with any confidence how different the outcomes would have been under a different president.
It is also true that political polarization caused many people to circle the wagons around COVID mitigation strategies that needed to be questioned—such as widespread school closures. (Ironically, the effects of these measures should have been of particular concern to progressives concerned with equity: Distance learning seems to have had particularly negative outcomes for low-income kids with few resources at home, disproportionately racial minorities, and school closures have also pushed many mothers out of the workforce.) And there is some truth to the charge that members of the “cognitive elite” who could easily do their jobs from home enthusiastically supported lockdown measures without giving much thought to their effects on the livelihood of many less privileged men and women.
But this really isn’t a “both sides” issue. Yes, the “COVID hawks” made their share of errors and missteps. No, none of it was comparable to the indecency of encouraging people to disregard the risk of COVID infection, flout safety measures, and avoid vaccination, or the insanity of conspiracy theories about the pandemic as a plan by a globalist cabal to shut down the economy, seize power, and tamper with people’s DNA through vaccination.
***
Proponents of limited government and individual liberty have had valid reasons to worry about the vast expansion of government power and the drastic curbs imposed on people’s personal freedoms for the sake of combating the pandemic. The belief that politicians and bureaucrats don’t like to relinquish powers that are meant to be temporary has been often vindicated in the past. Critical voices questioning the usefulness or the ethics of various mandates and prohibitions are never more essential than in the kinds of crises that create a strong temptation to trade freedom for safety.
This is especially true given that some progressives did, by their own admission, want to use the pandemic as an opportunity for a permanent shift away from what they saw as excessive individualism. As Canada went into lockdown in March 2020, Toronto Star columnist Shree Paradkar pointed to drastic measures taken in the public and private sectors as examples of how “radical change” can happen quickly with proper motivation. Paradkar exultantly announced that Canada had “discovered collectivism” and that feminists, anti-racism activists, and “equity leaders” were “getting an unexpected glimpse into what an actual enforcement of their demands would look like.” You don’t need to be particularly right-wing to find such rhetoric disturbing.
More recently, in a New York magazine essay discussing New York Times writer David Leonhardt, a strong proponent of the view that vaccination should enable a transition from mitigation strategies to normalization, left-wing journalist Sam Adler-Bell acknowledged that many progressives dislike Leonhardt’s argument because they had hoped for a COVID-driven shift toward a different social and political order better grounded on communal values. Instead, writes Adler-Bell, normalization means a return to “the individualized logic of the American moral imagination” in which people are responsible for the consequences of their own choices.
This is where center-right commentators—libertarian, conservative, or moderate—can make the counterargument that it would be perverse to build our social order around a once-in-a-century pandemic and to apply the logic of emergencies to everyday life. While “individualized” morality certainly allows for obligations to others, government action that broadly and drastically curbs citizens’ personal freedom for the benefit of those who either forgo vaccination or are at unusually high risk for deadly infections (pandemic-related or not) is a troubling form of supposedly benevolent authoritarianism. It also means, as Leonhardt points out, inflicting pain on some to spare others.
But making such a case requires an honest assessment of facts and tradeoffs, rather than crying “fascism!” over social distancing and masking mandates at the height at the pandemic—when COVID mortality rates were alarmingly high, no vaccine was on the horizon, effective treatments were nonexistent, and the nature and consequences of the disease were only beginning to be understood. By now the COVID-hawkish states have dropped virtually all COVID restrictions. And some of the more dramatic claims of a COVID-paved road to serfdom were always based on hysteria and misinformation. In April 2020, for example, the rumor went around that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had banned all sales of seeds and gardening supplies. Some on right-wing Twitter saw an insidious tyrannical plot: “Whitmer has taken actions to prohibit people from being self sufficient on their own land,” wrote one self-identified “post-conservative anti-Communist.” In fact, the new regulations required cordoning off nonessential sections of large stores (over 50,000 square feet), including garden centers and plant nurseries, in order to limit indoor contacts. There was no ban on buying seeds, bulbs, or gardening supplies online or in smaller stores. One could debate whether the policy made sense, but a dastardly attack on the self-sufficiency of Michiganders it was not.
How well lockdowns, mask mandates, and other pre-vaccination COVID-19 mitigation strategies worked in reducing the spread of the virus and the resulting deaths is a massively complicated question. In January, a research review and analysis published under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise concluded that lockdowns had a minimal effect on saving lives; the paper sparked intense polemics, and the authors were accused of political bias, especially since their conclusions often differed from those of the researchers whose work they reviewed. But leaving aside questions of bias and complicated disagreements about methodology and data-crunching, the paper is far more nuanced than one would know from the gleeful “lockdowns are useless!” reports and reactions on the right. For one thing, the authors found that, while stay-at-home orders and school closures did not reduce COVID-19 mortality, nonessential business closures apparently did—and so did masking mandates, though this last result was based on a very limited sample of studies.
The paper stressed that one reason to be skeptical of the benefits of lockdowns is that the effects of government orders can be difficult to disentangle from those of voluntary behavior modifications, such as avoiding social gatherings and close contact with others. This is hardly the same as proposals to just get on with normal life and defy the virus while shielding the elderly and those with high-risk medical conditions—hardly a tenable strategy considering how many people in those groups live in the same households as the young and the healthy.
***
The COVID culture wars have not abated in the spring of 2022, despite being pushed into the background by Russia’s war in Ukraine—and made far less urgent by the fact that COVID-19 has become (at least for now) far less scary, due to the milder Omicron strain and to the availability of vaccines and treatments.
Yes, some people, generally more on the progressive side, are still in “masks forever” mode, either out of an ingrained habit of caution or because they still feel the need to display proof of “taking COVID seriously” as a badge of progressive identity.
But if they’re still stuck in the spring of 2020, what is there to say of those on the right who are still hellbent on proving that the pandemic was always a lot of hype? We get, for instance, brilliant takes like this:
