Why Progressives Can’t Quit Their Masks

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, February 13, 2022

 

While there has been a quietly energetic campaign to memory-hole the fact, some of you will remember that, in the run-up to the 2020 presidential campaign, vaccine skepticism was a Democratic thing, not a Republican thing. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Andrew Cuomo, and every third progressive nitwit on Twitter cast doubt on the safety and the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines that were being developed under Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s program to expedite a vaccine. It was childishly predictable: With Election Day looming, anything that might redound to the credit of the Trump administration had to be cast into doubt or held up for scorn. We are governed by people who have never mentally or morally progressed beyond the politics of the junior-high lunchroom.

 

After the election, the Democrats and the Republicans settled back into their familiar respective grooves. Republicans who had sympathized with the Trump administration’s early efforts to play down Covid-19 went back to pooh-poohing it, Democrats returned to their peculiar form of technocratic pietism. Democrats sacralized the vaccines, Republicans scorned them and talked up quack cures. And masks became the burqa of the Covid era, with the Subaru-mounted mutaween of suburbia zealously guarding the new public morality.

 

The ritual covering of the head or face is an ancient tradition, one that is found in so many fundamentally different religions spread across so many disparate cultures as to make it a nearly universal phenomenon: Christians with their mantillas, wimples, and zucchettos; Muslims with their hijabs, niqabs, and chadors; the Hindu ghoonghat; the Jewish kippah and tichel; the Sikh dastār and chunni; the Buddhist zukin — from Muslims to Mennonites, from Tibet to Texas, head coverings and face coverings have long been, and continue to be, points of religious, political, and social sensitivity. We have grown so accustomed to considering it bad manners for a man to wear a hat indoors or at the table or while the national anthem is being sung that we do not even remember why that is, having forgotten the reason long ago. Ask the etiquette experts about this and they will fail to give you a persuasive answer: Removing the hat is a sign of respect, says Emily Post. Yes, but why?

 

Given the weight that masking now has in our culture, it is amusing to consider the possibility put forward by some scholars that ritual head covering began as a sanitary measure — that hair first was covered in public as a prophylactic against infection by lice and other vermin. From thence, the theory goes, the covered head came to be a sign of physical cleanliness, and, by extension, moral purity.

 

Whatever else it does or does not do, the Covid-era mask has taken on that role. It may not do much of anything to stop the spread of the virus, but it says something — in some contexts, a great deal — about what kind of person you are. I think that if I could learn two things about a person — the situations in which he will wear a mask even if it is not strictly required and the situations in which he will refuse to comply with a mask requirement — I could probably tell you for whom he voted in 2020. In Tibet, the two main monastic sects differentiate themselves by the color of their hats, red for one and yellow for the other. Puritans wore capotains (“pilgrim hats,” as they are commonly called) to set themselves apart from other, less austere Christians. The turbans that Sikhs wear are meant to symbolize social equality among believers, but they also communicate another message: Us and Them.

 

So, too, with masks.

 

And that is what is making unmasking — and a more general return to normal — so difficult for so many of our progressive friends: It has become a cultural and social issue, and a quasi-religious one at that. For a certain kind of progressive, giving up masking feels like giving in. It doesn’t feel to them like the epidemic has been beaten — it feels to them like they have been beaten, and their cultural enemies (Joe Rogan, and that estranged uncle who is angry on Facebook) have won.

 

This is a near-guarantee of bitter social conflict. Consider the protests going on right now in Canada. Raquel Dancho, a Conservative MP, told the BBC that Canadians, normally an orderly people, have had enough: “We abide by all the rules. We stepped up, and we have 90 percent of Canadians vaccinated,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that Canadians have come to the ends of their ropes. We’ve done our part, and now Canadians are looking to their governments and saying, ‘That’s enough of this. We need to move forward. What’s the plan?’” The problem with figures such as Justin Trudeau is that they have defined themselves wholly in opposition to their critics. What is Justin Trudeau? That is a question that really can be answered only in the negative: He is not x. We are in much the same situation in the United States, where the core identity of each political party is simply that it is not the other political party. The mask scolds at your local grocery store cannot give up ritual face-covering for the same reason the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea cannot give up their mutual rivalry: Without it, they will not know themselves.

 

But there are a great many Americans who are not fanatics, who do not live in Idaho militia compounds — voters in California and Connecticut and New Jersey who, like our Canadian neighbors, suspect that we missed the off ramp a few exits back and are due for a course correction. What they are running up against — and what Joe Biden is running up against among his own base — is a species of religious fanaticism. Like the declarations of progressives who once swore off “Trump vaccines,” it is a matter of identity, not a matter of policy, much less one of science. That is why a big Republican showing in the midterms will produce a convulsion among progressives, one that looks like a political crisis but that is, at heart, a spiritual crisis.

 

The news on Covid is generally good these days. And I cannot remember another time in which generally good news has caused so much angst and misery.