Many people see the initial COVID lockdown as the starting gun for the country’s descent into a new kind of madness. But the fight over when and how to reopen, I think, was truly what etched the new battle lines into our collective national consciousness, what planted the fissures that would then spread and grow in our country’s social fabric. And I’m worried we’re already starting to forget just how bad what happened was.
Six years ago, in early May 2020, America faced an inflection point: a month and a half after the announcement of “15 days to slow the spread” to combat the virus, some states wanted to open back up and return to a very altered “normal life” after mandated lockdown. Others insisted that too much was still unknown about the novel coronavirus from China, that too many people remained at risk, that we weren’t ready yet to enter a new stage of life.
COVID really became a society-shattering event when America started to open back up. Here was where the genius of American federalism, representative democracy, and individual freedom should have allowed the nation to thrive. Individual states could – based on the expressed desires of their voters – take action as they saw fit after the national social distancing guidelines from the Trump White House expired at the end of April 2020. Businesses could make decisions based on state rules; governors who didn’t act as their voters wanted could be petitioned and eventually punished at the ballot box. What system could be better built to mitigate such divisions?
That’s admittedly an optimistic view on how lockdowns could have ended. What happened instead – I think, in no small part because of the “experts” and The Science and their legacy-media messengers – was that we launched into one big, national crack up.
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