By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
The backlash is coming.
It already seems clear that the first major political and
cultural eruption of the Biden years will be a roiling populist backlash
against the next round of COVID restrictions.
We saw this sentiment play out in sporadic anti-lockdown
demonstrations last spring, and it has driven ongoing resistance to masks, but
it is, in all likelihood, about to reach an entirely new level — fueled by
exhaustion with the virus, elite hypocrisy, and the shattered credibility of
the public-health establishment.
The ascension of Joe Biden will add force to the
reaction. It is an iron law of American politics that whichever party doesn’t
control the presidency will suspect the other of plotting to impose a tyranny,
so the fear and loathing of COVID restrictions, somewhat muted on the right
while Donald Trump was president, will deepen and intensify.
The Right’s populism and limited-government impulse,
which separated in the Trump years, will presumably be reunited in the push
against lockdowns in a way that they haven’t been since the Tea Party.
“Lockdowns. Mask police. Curfews. What about freedom?”
asked conservative Representative Jim Jordan in a recent tweet, forecasting
things to come.
It’d be much better if we could find a prudent middle
path through the next several months, as the pandemic enters its worst phase
and as new vaccines arrive that will soon start changing everything. But a
significant segment of the American public has lost its patience with a new
normal that has, at times, been arbitrary and poorly thought through.
When the new virus first hit our shores and we knew much
less about it, the case for lockdowns was strong to keep the health-care system
from getting overwhelmed and to play for time (and better treatments). In
retrospect, though, the nationwide lockdowns of the spring closed down some
states before they experienced their initial waves of the disease, imposing
economic, mental-health, and medical costs without much upside.
After that kind of sacrifice, it’s hard to double-dip and
ask people to do it again.
Especially when the latest advice runs against the grain
of one of the nation’s oldest traditions, namely Thanksgiving, and when
prominent pro-restriction officeholders discredit themselves with their own
behavior.
A week or so ago, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot told
residents of her city, “You must cancel the normal Thanksgiving plans.
Particularly if they include guests that do not live in your immediate
household.”
Yet just days earlier she happily joined a crowd celebrating
Joe Biden’s election victory. Afterwards she said that there are times when “we
actually do need to have relief and come together,” without explaining why this
wide-ranging justification wouldn’t apply to the Thanksgiving gatherings she
wanted to cancel.
During this moment, the political class should have been
especially sensitive to playing by its own rules, when those rules have been so
relatively easy to bear for the elite and so punishing for ordinary workers.
Still, the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom have flouted COVID strictures
rather than forgo a visit to a hair salon or world-class French restaurant.
The appeal of such politicians and the incoming Biden
administration is always to public-health experts, even though they, too, have
largely jettisoned any claim to public trust.
To simplify and generalize, at the start of this year,
they downplayed the virus for fear that it would stoke xenophobia. Then, they
lurched into five-alarm-fire mode.
They poured cold water on masks, before turning around
and insisting on them despite ambiguous evidence on the efficacy of cloth
masks.
They preached the gospel of social distancing until mass
Black Lives Matter protests erupted, blessing these huge, often unruly
gatherings because fighting racism is supposedly a paramount public-health
issue.
The upshot will be poisonous contention in the months
ahead before the advent of that most American solution — the clever
technological fix, in the form of transformative vaccines.
No comments:
Post a Comment