Why the Coronavirus Is Winning
A virus
doesn’t care about our ideological preconceptions.
By Ross Douthat
Opinion
Columnist
·
June 6, 2020
·
Protesters during the memorial
rally for George Floyd at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn on Thursday.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
“The only thing it wants is targets,” a
George Mason University Ph.D. candidate in computer science, Adam Elkus, wrote of the coronavirus in March.
“It does not think,” he went on, “it
does not feel, and it lies totally outside the elaborate social nuances humans
have carved out through patterns of communication, representation and
discourse. And this, above all else, makes it a lethal adversary for the West.
It has exposed how much of Western society … is permeated with influential
people who have deluded themselves into thinking that their ability to
manipulate words, images and sounds gives them the ability to control reality
itself.”
In each stage of the American response
to the coronavirus, this delusion has been at work. In the first stage it
was liberals and portions of the public health establishment (including,
fatefully, key decision-makers in New York City) who treated the virus as
something to “be spun or narrativized away,” trying to define the real
contagion as xenophobia or racism rather than the disease itself.
By
the time this effort at reality-denial collapsed, the baton of narrative
delusion had been passed to President Donald Trump, who spent crucial weeks
behaving as though the power of positive thinking could suffice to keep his
glorious economy afloat.
Eventually the plunging stock market
and the rising infection rate forced even Trump to adapt somewhat to reality.
But the next delusion belonged to some of his conservative supporters, who
embraced the idea that the economic carnage was just the result of misguided
government policy — even though many stay-at-home orders only happened
after steep drops in dining and shopping and travel, not
before — and that if the government simply spoke the right magic words of
reopening, something close to normal life would immediately resume.
Now finally, amid the wave of protests
against police brutality, the baton of words-against-reality has been passed
back to the public health establishment, many of whose leaders are tying
themselves in ideological knots arguing that it is not only acceptable but
essential, after months circumscribing every sort of basic liberty, to
encourage mass gatherings to support one particular just cause.
With this last turn, we’ve reached the
end of the progression, because it means the original theory behind a stern
public health response — that the danger to life and health justified
suspending even the most righteous pursuits, including not just normal economic
life but the practices and institutions that protect children, comfort the
dying, serve the poor — has been abandoned or subverted by every faction in our
national debate.
Yes, there are ongoing liberal attempts
(including from the ridiculous, disastrous Bill de Blasio) to
prop up a distinction between mass protests and other forms of non-distanced
human life. But these attempts will fall apart: There is no First Amendment
warrant to break up Hasidic funerals while blessing Black Lives Matters
protests, and there is no moral warrant to claim that only anti-racism, however
pressing its goals, deserves a sweeping exception from rules that have
forbidden so many morally important activities for the last few months.
For
the record, I still believe those rules were mostly right. The lockdowns lasted
too long and imposed too much in certain places, and the George Floyd protests
reflect pent-up energies that had to be released. But the rules bought time for
warmer weather and social adaptations and hopefully a slower spread, they
bought time for hospitals and masks and medical equipment, they brought us at
least some distance closer to a vaccine — and on the evidence of the stock market
and the jobs numbers, they did so without creating the total economic calamity
that many on the right were prophesying.
That the rules are now dissolving amid
ideological double talk from health authorities says something important about
the American capacity for political delusion. But it doesn’t prove that we were
wrong to implement them — not when there are thousands of people who are still
alive, and whose lives emphatically matter, because we sustained restrictions
for a time.
The progression I’ve described, though,
in which all sides have embraced delusions or found something to value more
than public health, does signal that there will be no further comprehensive
attempt to fight the virus. Trump and conservatism won’t support it, the public
health bureaucracy won’t be able to defend it, and we didn’t use the time the
lockdowns bought to build the infrastructure to sustain a campaign of actual
suppression.
So
in this sense we are back with Elkus’s original point. All the virus wants is
targets, and if it doesn’t ultimately find another hundred thousand victims, or
more than that in some autumn second wave, it will not be political decisions
or public health exhortations that save us. On the left and right we’ve
exhausted those possibilities, and like the earthlings unexpectedly preserved
from alien domination at the end of “The War of the Worlds,” now only some
inherent weakness in our enemy can save us from many, many deaths to come.
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