By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
Some of us, it seems, are positively going to miss the
Covid-19 epidemic.
If there is a sense of impending post-pandemic
lamentation from some of our progressive friends, it is because they believe
that, contrary to the advice of bottom-feeding Chicago demagogue Rahm Emanuel,
they have let a good crisis go to waste.
The other Emanuel brother prominent in our public life,
former Obama administration adviser Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of
Pennsylvania, seems ready to let the Covid crisis go. In a conversation hosted
by the Journal of the American Medical Association in January,
he argued that while there remained work to be done in reducing Covid incidence
and transmission, the emergency is coming to a close. “Covid should begin
looking like a flu,” he said. “You get it, and you stay home so you don’t
infect other people. When you’re feeling better, you can go into work, probably
wearing a mask for a few days to reduce the chance of infection. We’re simply
going to get back to the life that we’ve known, with some modifications.”
Congressional Republicans have called on the Biden
administration to declare an end to the official designation of Covid-19 as a
public-health emergency, and, while the Republican argument is not entirely
correct in every jot and tittle, the statement spearheaded by Republican
Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Brett Guthrie (Ky.), and Morgan
Griffith (Va.) is in its general thrust both true and useful: The emergency is
over, but the Biden administration is hesitant to give up its emergency powers.
Some Democratic governors and mayors also are looking for a return to normalcy (not
“normality”) and would like to see an end to crisis measures and crisis
rhetoric.
Joe Biden is in a political pickle. As I argued on Sunday, masking and other anti-Covid
measures have for a certain kind of American progressive become a matter of
culture and identity, with the mask — they prefer them to be mandatory —
playing for many Democrats the same role that ritual face coverings and head
coverings have played in other religions across millennia. Those of you who are
nerdy enough to personalize the emojis on your smartphones may have noticed
that you have the option of adding a facemask to your image, e.g.:
 |
(via Kevin
Williamson) |
Why do you imagine that is? Somebody went to some
considerable trouble to make that possible.
We have all seen some way-out-there ridiculousness when
it comes to masking: Some people wear masks while walking by themselves on
Colorado hiking trails — and grow enraged when they see someone who hikes
barefaced — and some people wear them by themselves inside their cars. But
surely putting one on a digital image of yourself takes that
particular cake. Whatever this is about, it is not about stopping the transmission
of a coronavirus.
But even as President Biden has to consider one
quasi-religious aspect of Covid culture, if we may call it that, there is
another, generally incompatible quasi-religious aspect of Covid culture that
torments him. As a candidate, Joe Biden acted in accordance with the
superstitious belief, very common among Democrats, that Covid-19 is a matter of
corporate sin, that it was a kind of divine judgment on Donald Trump and his
administration and would persist as long as that administration remained in
place. If you do not believe that our progressive friends believe Covid to be a
question of moral failing, consider how gleeful they can be when anti-vaxxers die of Covid, or the
fact that Twitter at one point felt obliged to come up with a policy on users
sharing their hopes that Trump would die of Covid.
The belief that plagues are a judgment upon impious kings
and sinful chieftains is a truly ancient strain of religious thought,
stretching all the way back into the darkness of prehistory. It figures very
prominently in Judeo-Christian mythology, which made Biden a kind of Moses to
Donald Trump’s pharaoh. But Moses never made it to the Promised Land, and
neither has Joe Biden. Biden as a candidate promised to “shut down the virus”
if elected president, and millions of Americans believed that he would. But
Biden did not have very many policy proposals that were both specific and
dramatically different from what the Trump administration already was doing,
and, indeed, the most important work — developing the vaccines — mostly had
been done by the time Biden assumed the office.
The generally (though not always) unspoken proposition
was that if the country were freed from the moral burden of having Donald Trump
in the White House, then the epidemic would subside. But the viruses that cause
respiratory infections are not, as it turns out, morally sensitive. Rather than
succeeding in his promise to “shut down the virus,” President Biden had to
endure waves of new infections and new variants, and stood by helplessly as the
body count ticked upward and upward until the number of deaths on his watch
exceeded those on Trump’s. Of course that is a dumb metric from a rationalistic
point of view, but what matters in politics is not epidemiology but mythology.
We live by the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
The most powerful force in American life today is not the
Covid-19 epidemic. It is neither populism nor globalization nor white supremacy
nor capitalism nor critical race theory nor technology nor any of the other
forces we point to as explanations for our unhappiness. The most powerful force
in American life today is the ravenous, unsatisfied hunger for community. The
frustrated desire for community is what has made social media and other related
technologies such a titanic and baleful force in our public life, what drives
identity politics and neo-racism, what causes people to seek personal meaning
in cults, conspiracy theories, and mobs. Black masks vs. red caps, this chant
vs. that chant, this meaningless jargon vs. that meaningless jargon — the fight
for community is often vicious.
There was a sense among some Americans that the Covid-19
epidemic would be this generation’s Great Depression and its World War II —
trauma transfigured by triumph. Communities founded in shared trauma are some
of the most intimate and most enduring ones, which is one reason that Americans
living in this age of peace and plenty expend so much effort inventing fanciful
new traumas for themselves. Masks are for some Americans a sign of community,
an exterior marker of shared values. And they will hold on to those — at the
grocery store, in their emojis, in their hearts — because they do not have
anything else to hold on to. For President Biden, the political dilemma is the
choice between satisfying the relatively apathetic majority that is ready to
move on from the emergency mentality and responding to the highly motivated
minority that wishes to cling to this moment in the belief that it still has
some mojo, that there remains alive some hope, however faint, for
transfiguration.
But the kind of wounds we have as Americans are not the
kind that can be healed by shared trauma or shared grief, or by political
factionalism based on these. Covid-19 did not make us one and whole any more
than 9/11 did 20 years before. War with the Russians or the Chinese is not
going to do it, either. Our Republican–Democrat split is no more about
political policies than Northern Ireland’s Catholic–Protestant troubles were
about theology, and, as such, there is no political solution possible. Partisan
rage gushing through digital channels creates a momentary feeling of community,
but not the real thing. Shared hatred is not enough.
When faced with a national emergency, Americans often
speak in hopeful terms about the possibility of achieving “unity.” We believe
that we will find contentedness in unity, that if there is unity of national
purpose then our many disagreements and divisions will be able to be set aside,
along with any unpleasant or inconvenient necessity for compromise or reconciliation.
But it is not unity we are after — it is domination, the “unity”
that comes after our enemies and rivals have submitted to us. Politicians from
Franklin Roosevelt to Indira Gandhi have invoked the rhetoric of unity while
relying on emergency powers to crush their opponents and attempt to impose
their will on the whole of society. That is what is meant by, “Never let a good
crisis go to waste.”
And that is why it is always so difficult to get a politician to relinquish emergency powers, and so necessary that we force the issue.
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