Politics After Covid

The pandemic has accelerated the increasingly reactionary turn of American liberalism

Covid-19 will soon be endemic. For whatever bizarre reason, that fact has become cause for some measure of angst and consternation to a certain demographic. But that won’t change the trajectory we’re on: soon, Omicron will plow through so much of the population that we’ll achieve herd immunity. New strains will emerge, but they’re likely to be as mild or milder than Omicron, and we’ll have better treatments for them, to boot. In America, at least, the pandemic is gradually coming to an end.

It’s a good time to start thinking about what the post-Covid-19 world will look like. I think it’s safe to assume that the worst fantasies of how the pandemic might transform America — checkpoints, quarantine camps, the beginning of a Chinese-style digital social credit system — are not on the horizon. But more subtle changes have unquestionably taken place, and they point in a very bad direction.

Covid has turbo-charged the concentration of wealth worldwide. Between March 2020 and March 2021, a new billionaire was minted every 17 hours, even as global poverty increased significantly for the first time in two decades due to the lockdowns and the worldwide economic contraction they spurred. In the U.S., that wealth transfer occurred both organically and by government design. The total surrender of non-essential workers’ analogue lives to virtual space turned the economic and cultural power of tech titans who already walked as giants upon the earth into that of veritable gods. At the same time, while the first CARES Act provided a life raft to regular Americans in the form of stimulus checks, seven-and-a-half times the amount paid out to the public was funneled into corporate bailouts.

Source: Forbes

And as the ultra-rich got stratospherically ultra-richer, class divisions became starker closer to earth, as well. Over the course of the pandemic the social distance between the professional middle class and the working class became nearly as literal as the upstairs/downstairs divide of a nineteenth century English country manor. In every restaurant in blue state America, masked servants cater to unmasked dining guests; in every residential neighborhood, gig economy workers deliver groceries and meals to the doorsteps of the laptop class. Post-Covid America has become an even more visibly stratified place than the one that generated the populist anger that fueled the rise of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. And our politics have conformed to that stratification.

Even before the pandemic, the Democratic Party had long been hemorrhaging its working class voters — and not just the white ones. Trump’s base, famously, was dominated by white workers, who had been shifting to the Republicans for decades. But in 2016, Trump performed better than Mitt Romney did in 2012 among black and Latino voters as well, and he would do better still with those voters in 2020. Meanwhile, the Obama coalition of educated professionals and urban working class minorities persisted as the base of the Democratic Party, but tilted ever more toward the former at the expense of the latter.

The 2020 election returns made it clearer than ever: the Democratic Party is now the party of the educated elite. More than race, class, gender, or any other factor, it’s education that now shapes America’s partisan divide. This new alignment has fundamentally changed the character of the Democratic Party. Liberal four-year college graduates are now the Democrats’ most enthusiastic partisans, its most reliable donors, and its most influential cultural ambassadors. They dominate the ranks of the party’s staffers, volunteers and activists. Their values and priorities shape the increasingly ideological, minoritarian and non-materialist policies the party embraces. The Democratic brand reflects them, and has come to embody their prejudices.

The Democratic habitus

Before the pandemic began, that ascendant faction of the Democratic Party had already been galvanized into a feverish partisan rage by the Trump presidency. The non-college-educated rural and exurban voters who had brought Donald Trump to power had, in the minds of educated liberals, betrayed the nation. They were incorrigible racists and brainwashed fools, each of them a willing storm trooper in their cult leader’s fascist regime. They were beyond persuasion, and could only be subdued by brute force, electoral or otherwise.

To the Democratic brahmins, the pandemic proved that given the opportunity, these people would not only destroy our democracy, but jeopardize our very lives by refusing a simple vaccination, whether out of either wild-eyed ignorance or sheer spite. Through their votes for Trump and now through their refusal to vaccinate, they had already shown themselves incapable of decency or reason, so what was the point of turning to persuasion or understanding to win them over? “Our patience,” as President Biden intoned, “is wearing thin.” These people could only be compelled through force.

The Democratic Party of ten or twenty years ago may have modulated its vaccine message to sever some of these voters from the Republicans — offering more carrot, perhaps, and less stick. But the Democrats of today are in no mood to accommodate. To them, the vaccine mandates are not only good policy; they’re just desserts. These are people, after all, who do not respect the authority of the educationally credentialed. They listen to the crazed rantings of demagogues instead of the sober counsel of experts. They had rejected the most qualified presidential candidate in American history for a bigoted, low-rent millionaire poseur celebrity game show host. And now they dismissed the very legitimacy of Science Itself in favor of their paranoid conspiratorial delusions.

If they lacked the humility to defer to the authority of the experts, then they would be made to comply by force. Threaten their jobs, extort them with their kids’ education, cut them off from accessing any semblance of a normal public life. Sooner or later they’d bend the knee and respect the cultural hierarchy. They’d learn the hard way that there are those who have earned the credentials to make the big executive decisions of our social order, and there are those who are expected to obey them.

But that’s only a short term solution. Even graver than their non-compliance with the vaccine protocol is their indifference and even contempt for the official channels of communication. These were people who had shouted profanities at reporters at Trump rallies, who had made WWF memes that incited cartoon violence against the press. They sneered at CNN and NPR and The New York Times, deferring instead to demagogues on podcasts and YouTube videos, disseminating their propaganda on Facebook and Twitter.

This rogue information network had to be dismantled. If the tech CEOs couldn’t be relied on to act as responsible stewards of the discourse then the government needed to step in and force them to do their jobs. The tech titans had amassed great power, and now had to exercise the responsibility incumbent upon them as the new masters of the social order. The platforms had to show these people they couldn’t just go around saying whatever they wanted. If they were too arrogant to conform to the official narrative then they had to be silenced.

And so the policy regime of the day is discipline. You will take the shot. You will heed the experts. You will not think for yourselves, and you will listen to those to whom we tell you to listen. If you speak off-message, we’ll cut your mic. We you will respect our credentials; you will abide the status order.

With respect to the actual epidemiology of the pandemic, Omicron has changed everything. The vaccines help keep you out of the hospital, but they don’t stop transmission. And if they don’t stop transmission, then the main argument for mandates is annihilated. And yet, the zeal for mandates and for censorship of “disinformation” is stronger than ever. Why, at a time when SARS CoV-2 is becoming milder, when immunity is spreading fastest, and when it’s been shown that the natural immunity of millions of unvaccinated people has long been far more robust than vaccine immunity, have the demands for compliance not diminished? Why are we still in the throes of the culture wars over this shit?

The reason is because fundamentally, none of this was really ever about public health to begin with. It was about power and subordination. And that won’t go away as the pandemic fades from view. That battle will rage on, shaping everything the future brings.