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At first, my instinct was that this wouldn& #39;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">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... view on this is starting to shift
My">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... view on this is starting to shift
I was generally pro-lockdown (with some gut reservations I& #39;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">https://twitter.com/Jacob__Si...
But I see in myself what I see with almost everyone I know who isn& #39;t on Twitter (almost all of whom are Democrats): a distrust around the rationales behind lockdowns and the seeming arbitrariness of reopening phases
I& #39;m not sure I& #39;d go quite this far, but I suspect it& #39;s at least partly correct: https://twitter.com/imyourmoderator/status/1265329869258256384">https://twitter.com/imyourmod...
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& #39;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& #39;s precisely why I *was* pro-lockdown. But if you& #39;re going to do them, you should do them well, and seriously, instead of half-measures that produce confusion. We didn& #39;t, or couldn& #39;t https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1260609513369022464">https://twitter.com/shadihami...
Enforcing lockdowns, particularly for Americans, requires considerable political will. If you& #39;re going to use up your political capital to argue for pseudo-lockdowns that inflict the costs of lockdown *without* the full benefit, it& #39;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& #39;t mean it doesn& #39;t matter. Any COVID strategy has to account for distinctive aspects of U.S. political culture https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1260607675743821824">https://twitter.com/shadihami...
So when people ask, "why can& #39;t we be more like Sweden, never mind, I mean South Korea," it& #39;s because political culture, history, size, and prior experience with a pandemic aren& #39;t variables you can just change overnight
