“ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” demands Donald Trump in one of his recent social-media posts. Well, funny he should ask.
Four years ago, we were at the beginning of a horrendous pandemic that Trump was brutally mismanaging. Precisely four years ago, Trump was in the midst of a rapid pivot from insisting the pandemic was totally under control to insisting it was a dire threat caused by China. He would eventually toggle back and forth between denial and outrage, and also between lavishly praising China’s pandemic response and insinuating the country had deliberately spread the virus. At all times, his entire focus was on avoiding political blame, with extremely short time horizons and almost no concern for long-term outcomes.
There are many lessons from this period. The most obvious is “Having Donald Trump serve as president of the United States is a terrible idea.” But there are other lessons from the COVID pandemic as well, some of which could even be applied by people who still support Trump.
Yesterday, the New York Times published a retrospective on school closures during COVID. The piece notes what is now conventional wisdom: closing schools had very little benefit in terms of reducing the spread of the virus, but brought enormous costs in learning loss.
For a period of time, this issue was bitterly contested among Democrats. Schools were an early target for closures because public-health authorities drew on the lessons from the 1918 Spanish flu, when school closings proved effective. But the Spanish flu was different — it disproportionately killed the young, whereas COVID-19 mostly killed the elderly.
Soon, evidence began emerging that school closings did little to stop the spread of the 2020 pandemic. But many progressives, acting out of attachments to both stern mitigation practices and teachers unions, resisted this evidence. Emily Oster became a hate target for her early research demonstrating what is now conventional wisdom. Not everybody on the left was wrong, but almost everybody who was wrong about this was on the left. I started writing about the issue in early February 2021. Over time, pointing out the error of school closings generated less and less blowback, and it has finally become a widely accepted position.
A similar process has taken place around another source of progressive error: the lab-leak hypothesis. The notion that COVID might have emerged from a lab was initially politicized, and many progressives took the position that it was a conspiracy theory, even racist. That belief was egged on by ideological apparatchiks, many of them based on social media, who relentlessly attack any challenge to progressive shibboleths. And yet on this matter, too, the left’s orthodoxy has retreated. The Biden administration is officially neutral on the origins of COVID.
The Democratic Party is not immune to the temptations of ideological groupthink, and is not without its hacks who are eager to enforce it. But there remain enough healthy antibodies in the party to give reason a chance.
The Republican Party is so far gone to its own hacks that reason will always lose to orthodoxy. There are a million issues that prove this — the triumph of Trump’s election lies being the most flagrant — but the aftermath of COVID-19 demonstrates the problem perfectly well.
There has been no grappling with, or acknowledgment of, Trump’s stream of absurd spin for months, ranging from how the virus would go away on its own to how people might kill it with an internal light or swallowing disinfectant. The most depressing spectacle has been the Republican Party’s embrace of vaccine skepticism.
The growth of right-wing vaccine skepticism is a bizarre phenomenon because Trump was not anti-vaccine as president. To the contrary, he supported a sped-up process that produced a highly effective vaccine in record time. But Trump’s insistence on denying the severity of the pandemic itself led to conservatives questioning the vaccine. Eventually, that skepticism overtook Trump’s own desire to claim credit. It is now, amazingly enough, a subject Trump is afraid to mention. A man who has taken the art of boasting to absurd lengths is literally afraid to mention his actual greatest accomplishment.
The ramifications of this failure are very much still with us. Before vaccines were available, there was little correlation between partisanship and mortality rate from COVID. Since then, people in Republican areas have been dying at higher rates, due to the pervasive skepticism of the vaccine that Trump developed but which was distributed by an administration they view with pathological distrust.
There is no clearer sign of an irredeemably diseased internal culture than a party that stumbles onto a sound position and is forced by its own fanaticism to abandon it. Are we better off than we were four years ago? Um, yes. But Trump’s party has gotten even crazier.
