Read on Twitter
At first, my instinct was that this wouldn't be great for right-wing populists, which I touched in my @TheAtlantic essay from March: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-killed-revolution/608680/
My view on this is starting to shift
My view on this is starting to shift
I was generally pro-lockdown (with some gut reservations I've worked to suppress) but the U.S. ended up with the worst of both worlds: a response that "combined dramatic overreach with utter toothlessness," to quote @jacob_siegel https://twitter.com/Jacob__Siegel/status/1263937964167618562
But I see in myself what I see with almost everyone I know who isn't on Twitter (almost all of whom are Democrats): a distrust around the rationales behind lockdowns and the seeming arbitrariness of reopening phases
I'm not sure I'd go quite this far, but I suspect it's at least partly correct: https://twitter.com/imyourmoderator/status/1265329869258256384
First, we were told lockdowns were about flattening the curve to avoid overwhelming hospital capacity, but then the goalposts kept shifting. And there was endless COVID-shaming about anyone who had doubts about what was quickly becoming an insular and quite ideological orthodoxy
Over and over, mainstream commentators and experts got basic things wrong about COVID: on masks, on how Florida and Georgia were killing themselves, on how Cuomo was some sort of hero (despite a slow, tepid response in the crucial early days), and on outdoor transmission
But it's not just COVID. "Elites" have been wrong about a lot of the big questions of the past 4 years, including around American democracy supposedly "dying" and Russia collusion. Before that, there was the disaster of Syria and the mishandling of the 2015 refugee crisis
I felt that lockdowns should be done for limited periods of time—that's precisely why I *was* pro-lockdown. But if you're going to do them, you should do them well, and seriously, instead of half-measures that produce confusion. We didn't, or couldn't https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1260609513369022464
Enforcing lockdowns, particularly for Americans, requires considerable political will. If you're going to use up your political capital to argue for pseudo-lockdowns that inflict the costs of lockdown *without* the full benefit, it's little surprise folks will lose faith
"Culture" is a bad word for much of the center-left and left, and understandably so. It tends to lead in problematic directions. But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Any COVID strategy has to account for distinctive aspects of U.S. political culture https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1260607675743821824
So when people ask, "why can't we be more like Sweden, never mind, I mean South Korea," it's because political culture, history, size, and prior experience with a pandemic aren't variables you can just change overnight
If you think culture is merely something to be shaped by politics and that it shouldn't be accounted for when making policy, then there's little point in arguing. It means our starting assumptions about human nature are completely different. And no set of "facts" can change that
In a raucous, pluralistic democracy, the goal of argumentation shouldn't necessarily be to convince the other person you're right. The goal should be to exchange ideas and, in the process, understand how our priors shape our conclusions
