https://archive.is/YXQVg
NY Tmes
The Extremely Weird Politics of Covid
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These friends were wrong. And as someone who thought of my Covid-hawkish position as the more right-wing one, I’ve found it remarkable that through all those hundreds of thousands of deaths — deaths that many doves didn’t think would happen — the American right’s libertarian stance has mostly stuck.
But as someone who can see lots of specific issues on which the doves and libertarians have a point, I’m equally fascinated by how dramatically liberals have swung against any acknowledgment of what until very recently seemed like a core left perspective — that stringent public health responses are inherently authoritarian and inevitably ratify various forms of inequality and social control.
As Justin E.H. Smith, an American-born academic in Paris, noted in a recent essay, a left that just a little while ago seemed committed to Foucauldian critiques of biopolitics and fears of what governments do with emergency powers now is “dug in so deeply on the side of anti-anti-vaxx signaling” that it can’t “acknowledge anything worrisome about the new high-tech hygiene regime, about how hard it might be to dismantle it once it has outlived its purpose, about how it might sprout new purposes that are inimical to human thriving.”
What’s especially striking is how smoothly and absolutely these shifts happened — how quickly, and without embarrassment or backward looks, much of the right started talking like Michel Foucault and his disciples and much of the left starting embracing the mind-set of the Florentine Sanità, as though those had been their natural and inevitable positions all along.
I keep writing about this subject, to the point of tedium — though I promise this will be my last such column for a while — because I think this right-left flip, this sudden-seeming role reversal, offers some sort of key to the derangements of our time.
Maybe the key is the absolute power of partisanship and polarization, in which once Donald Trump chose Covid-minimizing rhetoric, everybody else just rushed into their places.
Maybe the key lies in the left’s increasing sense of itself as occupying the seat of power and the right’s sense of its marginalization — which naturally changes the way each side reacts to the use of authority in a crisis and the interest with which each side reads Foucault.
Or maybe the key, as I suggested last week, is all about interests and in-groups and the way the Covid lockdowns affected right-leaning and left-leaning demographics differently — which is why the right briefly favored restrictions when they seemed likely to fall mainly on foreigners and the left briefly suspended its zeal for restrictions when the transgressors were left-wing protesters instead of anti-mask Republicans.
Or maybe Covid has just stripped away all the ideological scaffolding built atop our warring factions and returned us to some sort of Puritans-versus-Jacksonians dynamic from our country’s distant past.
Whatever the explanation, in the short run I think the bare acknowledgment that this weird flip took place might help a little with our polarization — tempering the liberal sense that the right is just a pro-Covid death cult and the right’s sense that the left wants us all to mask up and eat Soylent in our disease-free habitats forever.
In less than two years, we’ve gone from a world where it was normal for a left-leaning publication to run an essay gently celebrating the defiance of public health rules during a brutal outbreak of the plague, to a world where the defiance of public health rules during a less lethal pandemic is coded as incredibly right wing.
I don’t know exactly why or exactly what it means. I just want people to acknowledge that it has happened and it’s really, really weird.