The Covid lockdowns, which began six years ago this month, ended not with a bang, but a whimper. It had long been clear that there was to be no Churchill-Roosevelt triumph for the politicians who had set themselves up as the lockdowns’ figureheads. Citizens who had once rallied around the project of Saving Lives had mostly long grown weary of it. The vaccines, which were supposed to justify the whole thing, were too mediocre, if not too dangerous, to become a glorious next chapter in the heavily mythologized Book of Vaccination, within the Bible of modern medicine. The internal logic of the project indicated that we should have yet more lockdowns, more booster shots, for many years to come. There were still Lives to be Saved. But the political impetus was gone, and so, by summer 2021, political leaders and public health officials began a slow, sheepish climb-down.
By summer 2021, political leaders and public health officials began a slow, sheepish climb-down.
There was thus no victory for the architects of lockdown-till-vaccine. But neither was there any victory for its opponents. Lockdowns did not end with any widespread public admission that those opponents had been right all along, and it is not even clear that their work did much to shorten the agony. Indeed the confusion, conspiracism and opportunism that were woven into the entire anti-lockdown movement probably did as much to legitimize lockdowns as they did to help curtail them. The useful idiots outnumbered, or at least out-shouted, any acute and canny critics.
In short, nobody won, except such private victories as could be gained by surviving those terrible years with some integrity and sanity. If, despite its vast scale, the Covid episode now dwells only on the fringes of public memory, it is because it is a story whose end gives very little satisfaction or glory to anyone.
Covid is a story whose end gives very little satisfaction or glory to anyone
Still, if we don’t talk much about Covid or think much about Covid any more, we are still sailing in its wake. Lockdowns left both the centrist, institutional forces that instigated them, and the chaotic, peripheral ones that opposed them, as reeling, wounded beasts, and that is what they remain. General disgust at lockdowns, while it emerged slowly and inarticulately, was still, in the end, deep enough that the Covid years have sapped authority from the center, which it has no idea how to regain. Yet, as the fumblings of MAGA-in-power illustrate, the anti-establishment forces elevated partly by that disgust remain as chaotic and compromised as ever, lacking the discipline and coherence to reconfigure the institutions whose levers they now (partly?) control. A worldview nurtured in the self-congratulatory funk of podcast studios does not easily translate into effective and durable political programs.
Covid haunts our politics because it was a failure to which no one will own up, a crime for which no will take responsibility. Its political and social architects will not admit what they did was wrong, probably in most cases not even to themselves. Its opponents will not admit that their opposition failed, and failed because of faults that they have done nothing to purge. Politics has offered no good channels into which the anguish, distrust and resentment which lockdowns caused could flow. Nor has it offered much by way of remedies to the damage they did, or reforms that could impede their repetition. Lockdowns were a monster that politics created, but which it has no idea how to slay.
