The Right to Be Wrong

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, December 02, 2020

 

Who really determines our pandemic response? Is it public-health institutions and experts, or the public that they advise? Who is allowed to get major questions on the pandemic “wrong”? Just public-health officials, or the public at large, too? Who has freedom of opinion and the ability to express and deliberate in the modern public forums?

 

The question is about to become more acute, as we enter what Joe Biden called a “dark winter” during a nationwide peak of hospitalizations for COVID-19, but with hope of effective vaccines coming in the spring. Many conservatives have tried to tamp down the anger at Silicon Valley felt by more populist elements of the Right.

 

Our mainstream media outlets are starting to wind down their sense of alarm about the White House. For them, politics is going back to normal. Democrats will be in charge of the executive branch, but ones who are perfectly fine with big business calling most of the shots.

 

Reportorial passion and energy will be inclined toward a short hibernation in the lame-duck period, before it is aroused again and refocuses on the subversive and deviant lives of conservatives, religious people, and non-conformists out in the sticks somewhere. I’m sure somebody is listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast, or getting the wrong idea about gender relations or ethnicity from some young-adult fantasy novel that made it past the censors. The media will be there to frighten you about it.

 

But I don’t think they’ll have to look far for outrage and dissent.

 

Popular anger at pandemic restrictions on public life is growing. That anger is being heightened and given a conspiratorial edge by the fact that many governors, mayors, and county executives have been caught defying and breaking their own rules on COVID-19. These include California governor Gavin Newsom and California’s health-care lobbyists, San Francisco mayor London Breed, Denver mayor Michael Hancock, and Los Angeles County’s Sheila Kuehl. Other famous COVID scolds include Governor Andrew Cuomo, who discouraged travel but planned to eat with his octogenarian grandmother. Or his CNN-host brother, Chris Cuomo, who preaches masks on air but whose apartment building warned him that he was violating the own mask rules in common spaces. Or there’s Pennsylvania health secretary Rachel Levine, who withdrew her mother from a care home days before telling the public the care homes were safe. Leaders who apparently don’t believe in the danger themselves are still willing to shut down Thanksgiving or threaten livelihoods based on the danger.

 

The idea of “listening to the science” repels many people after experiencing the past several months, since the science in public health seems so unstable. Dr. Fauci once pooh-poohed mask wearing, based on a study. Now he says that we might be wearing masks after the vaccine. The World Health Organization was against travel restrictions, but it turned out this was entirely based on politics, not epidemiology. The most prestigious medical journal in the world published a hoax study on hydroxychloroquine, simply to own Trump.

 

The feeling that the restrictions are imposed without real conviction, that the science is a mess, and that the whole enterprise is corrupted by political fear of the masses, exacerbates already widespread distrust in the forthcoming vaccines. Anti-vaxxers can point to the many instances of groupthink or seeming contradictions in public attitudes. In the same moment that Governor Andrew Cuomo was warning people about the danger of a vaccine that was developed during the Trump administration, his own government in Albany was soliciting legal advice on making a COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for all New Yorkers, with no religious or health exemptions, because Cuomo aspires to be the first political leader to achieve universal immunity.

 

It’s easy and frightful to imagine polarization around the vaccine that turns into a Mexican standoff. The vaccine skeptics will be able to point to the low mortality rates of COVID sufferers and improving treatments, as well as especially low transmission rates in schools, to justify their reluctance to take a vaccine that they can justly say is novel, because it uses an mRNA mechanism. Political leaders who invested the most in restrictions will be inclined to require the most for full reopening. Some states and many corporations are effectively debating whether COVID vaccination becomes a kind of “passport” back to possessing full civil rights and participation in civil society.

 

And if this polarization comes about, Silicon Valley is going to be called in by the establishment authorities to referee and effectively end the debate, just as the social-media giants have been called in to adjudicate conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Not that they always get everything right.

 

 

Social-media networks have no special expertise in determining what is misinformation or in fact-checking public discourse. The dispiriting truth of it all is that social-media companies have been doing their banning and labeling on an ad-hoc basis in an attempt to appease their workforces, who themselves are trying to appease the would-be censors who work as journalists in the Anglophone world. The tech companies duplicate the same exact prejudices found at the New York Times. The latter institution had an internal revolt over an op-ed written by a conservative Republican senator, Tom Cotton, about ending riots, but allowed Chinese authorities to use the Times — just as they use major social-media networks — to brag about their violent crackdown and oppressive measures that ended the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

 

There is no doubt about where the major social-media networks will stand in the debates and dissent about vaccination. Old-line conservatives are correct to point out that, legally speaking, Twitter and Facebook would simply be exercising their own rights to free speech and free association if they heavily policed debates on these matters. But populists on the right will also see the real political implication, that some people simply aren’t allowed to deliberate in public, to be wrong in public, or to organize their political passions in public, in the same way as figures who have the blessing of the establishment. They will correctly perceive social-media companies to be not an independent part of the Fourth Estate but a cat’s-paw of an incompetent, hypocritical, and technocratic government that is trying to immunize itself against the dangers inherent in a democracy.