The Pandemic Response Was the Turning Point

Post-publication note: this piece was written before President Biden used his uncensored access to his X account to post a note that he will not seek reelection, thus throwing the race into further upheaval and further discrediting the political establishment that had hoped to use this figurehead as cover for another four years. Collapse comes slowly and then all at once.

The Republican convention made for great television, both entertaining and exciting, and infused with incredible energy after Trump’s miraculous survival of the assassination attempt. In the backdrop has been the astounding upheaval among Democrats: the drive to push Biden aside and get the top of the ticket replaced sooner rather than later, for fear of electoral loss in November. 

All of this makes for wonderful drama, perfect for maximum views, public engagement, and the great American sport of politics. 

It’s probably too much to ask for blunt truth in such contexts but there was and is one subject missing from the entire situation, and it provides the context for the rest. Whether it is the meltdown of trust, the inflation eating away purchasing power, the hard hit to household finances, the ill-health, the battle between the new media and old, and practically every other symptom you can name; they all trace to the same turning point. 

That turning point was of course March 2020, about which one heard next to nothing (so far as I know) at the convention. That is for an obvious reason. The turning occurred under the first Trump term, and the policies continued and intensified in the Biden term. 

That makes it impossible for the Republicans to credibly claim an outstanding record from the first term. Perhaps they can make a case for 2019 to 2021 but the entire model blew up in 2020 and the Trump administration never recovered. 

In Don Jr.’s speech, he spoke about all the ways in which the establishment has attempted to thwart his father’s political fortunes. The litany is familiar and true: the Russia hoax, the Ukraine phone call, the Hunter Biden laptop, the lawfare and unjust persecutions, the relentless media attacks, and so on. 

But his list completely left out the biggest issue of all, namely the Covid response. At some point, the exclusion of this topic moved from puzzling to creepy, as if we were all supposed to forget. 

Trump himself mentioned the Covid response obliquely in passing, once again saying that he doesn’t get enough credit for what he did. But he now knows better than in the past not to mention the shot, of which he was once very proud but the very mention of it now elicits boos, which he knows. So he excludes it from his stump speech. 

Otherwise, he has never spoken in any detail about the precise conditions that led him to approve the lockdowns, flipping from having opposed them on March 9, 2020, to approving them two days later. 

We still do not know how or why this happened, much less precisely who or what was involved. We have a sense but we do not know for certain. The common belief in the Republican Party and beyond is that Trump was roiled by his bureaucracy, convinced to go along with policies and ideas that wrecked the country and arguably lost him the presidency. 

After all, it was his own CDC that issued the call for mail-in ballots on March 12, 2020, about which Trump complained in his speech. If this was his own CDC from even before the declaration of emergency (March 13) and the lockdown press conference (March 16), what does that say about what was happening behind the scenes to undermine the administration? 

According to all autobiographical accounts of the main players – all of which could of course be fake – Trump was only confronted with the supposed need to lock down the country over the weekend of March 14 and 15. Why would the CDC have intervened with an urge for mail-in voting liberalization, a dramatic upending of all US election protocols, without Trump’s permission? 

Why is no one asking this question? And that’s only one of a million questions that we and so many others have about what unfolded in those days. It is not as if this doesn’t matter. The Bill of Rights was effectively deleted. As Justice Gorsuch has written: 

Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.

They shuttered businesses and schools public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too.

They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

Federal executive officials entered the act too. Not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide. They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.

That was just the beginning. The event kicked off the most incredible federal government spending binge since World War II. No one likes to talk about this either, though in the annals of fiscal policy, it goes down in history. 

Again, in contemporary America, plenty of partisan truths become sayable and enjoy vast public attention. But if both parties and two administrations have their handprints all over the worst series of policy decisions in modern history, the subject is made to disappear. 

This is even more true because only a handful of nations in the entire world did not follow this path entirely. These decisions have set off a global economic stagnation and arguably led to war and a migration crisis, not to mention the breakdown of international trade. 

Under such conditions, it somehow becomes easier just to sweep the whole thing under the rug, which is precisely what is happening. Remember too that all major media participated in ginning up global frenzy for lockdowns while digital corporations and all major social media platforms engaged in vast censorship of the opposition. 

Indeed, this period set up the model that most tech platforms now follow: censor now before anything unapproved is allowed to float around and enter the public mind. All litigation aside, censorship is now the norm. 

The demographics reinforce the point. Lifespans are falling faster than before. The substance abuse problems are still pandemic-level. The birth rate has fallen. There are other more hidden crises: church attendance is at historic lows, museums are only half-full, and major arts venues still experience financial hardship while many are closing up. All of this is true regardless of strong evidence of wholly unnecessary vaccine injury and death. 

One might suppose there would be some mechanism operating in the world that would drive public culture toward an awareness of cause and effect, accountability for actions, and knowledge of the how and why of major and even epic changes in the course of our lives and civilization itself. One might hope. 

Now we know there are conditions under which that is not the case. If too many people screwed up, everyone’s hands are on the actions, all official institutions cooperated, and plenty of the most influential players in economics and public culture came out financially and politically ahead, the whole subject can be made to go away. 

This does not need to be the result of conspiracy. It is merely a tacit agreement, an extension of individual and institutional self-interest. 

Where does this leave us? It means that accountability is highly unlikely. Whatever changes happen to pandemic protocols, even if they do happen, will be made quietly and without debate. The institutions that have experienced a loss of trust will be gradually diminished in public importance, replaced by new ones, at some point but the timing remains unclear. 

Yes, this is enormously frustrating. Readers of Brownstone are aware. Brownstone Journal is widely cited in literature, including legal cases. The institution garners millions of readers. Breaking through to the public mind is another question. Reaching official culture and changing it is yet another layer. 

This takes us to the subject of social change. Why, how, and when does it happen? Thomas Kuhn’s magisterial treatise The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) reconstructs the history of science. In contrast to the Whig theory of history, which posits a smooth trajectory of intellectual advancement, Kuhn describes scientific knowledge as moving episodically from orthodoxy to crisis to paradigm shift to pre-paradigmatic to the coalescing around a new orthodoxy. 

Crucial to his story is the unwillingness of the guardians of the collapsed orthodoxy ever to admit error. Kuhn’s outlook is oddly demographically determinative. The old generation has to die out and a new one born, comes of age, and works on a replacement. To be sure, his outlook pertains to scientific postulates. He made no attempt to expand his model more broadly to other disciplines, much less to the whole of society. 

And yet here we are, in the midst of a gut-wrenching and mind-blowing cranking of the machinery of control in all levels of society and culture the world over. Centralized, mechanized, systematized, compulsory systems of public control, over all aspects of our lives, seem to have reached some kind of preposterous pinnacle: six feet apart, control of domestic capacity, shutting of business, the abolition of public worship, not to mention hundreds of utterly crazy nostrums of disease mitigation, none of which actually worked. 

What does this do? It discredits everything and everyone involved, even if they never admit it. Will this bring about change? We shall see. It looks more and more like this will happen. The machine that wrecked the world has also wrecked itself.