POLITICS: Democrats still won’t face the toll of their COVID hysteria

When I first came across Jonathan Chait’s new Atlantic piece, “Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided,” I assumed the answer would be that Democrats had been the ones relentlessly and tragically wrong about virtually everything during the pandemic.

No such luck.

In Chait’s telling, the left remains uncannily open-minded, always striving for truth, while the dogmatic right remains hopelessly bogged down in “pathological incuriosity.”

Even when conservatives are right, they’re right in the wrong way.

These days, people on the left, Chait contends, “have engaged in searching self-reflection — on school closings, the lab leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs.”

Now, you and I may believe dunking on libs who accused you of committing mass murder for going to church is perfectly normal behavior. Chait, though, is irked by all the “gloating” and “football-spiking.”

Especially because a handful of left-wing outlets have published columns (five years late) begrudgingly admitting that lockdowns were a failure.

Sure, in a “bout of confusion in the face of fast-moving events,” mistakes were made, he says, but Democrats merely engaged in a good-faith debate.

Which is why, I guess, Chait wrote a COVID-era piece headlined “American Death Cult,” accusing Republicans of deliberately murdering their own citizens. 

Nothing says “self-reflection” like accusing your political opponents of being psychopathic nihilists.

It should also be mentioned that very few “reckoning” pieces genuinely wrestle with the left’s policy mistakes during COVID. The idea that a widespread reconsideration of pandemic-era policy is underway is a myth.

Not one Senate Democrat voted for former Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya to be director of the National Institutes of Health, despite his history of being correct on COVID policy.

So, how much reflection has there really been?

Then again, Chait can’t even admit that COVID-era media coverage was skewed. 

New York Times readers, he contends, have been “following this debate for years.” The problem is that conservatives are under the mistaken impression that “mainstream” media are as “ideologically rigid” as their own outlets.

To corroborate this claim, Chait leans hard into an anecdotal fallacy, ignoring the preponderance of coverage to focus on a smattering of skeptical columns.

Anyone who was alive in 2020-2022 can tell you that the lab leak “debate” consisted of one side theorizing that the virus may have been man-made, and the other accusing them of being slack-jawed conspiratorial bigots.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Times noted in October 2021, “has been the target of conspiracy theorists who promote the idea that the novel coronavirus was made in a lab.”

When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) brought up the lab leak hypothesis, the Times accused him of repeating an “unsubstantiated,” “fringe” “conspiracy theory.”

So, rather than conceding reality, Chait tries to both-sides the pandemic response by pointing to bad predictions by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Hey, there’s no doubt Republicans said plenty of crazy things.

But conceiving cures or being unduly optimistic about the end of the pandemic isn’t nearly as pernicious, immoral or authoritarian as shuttering churches, cordoning off playgrounds, destroying businesses, censoring dissent, forcing thousands of Americans to miss the funerals of loved ones or undermining the future of millions of schoolchildren.

It’s admirable to admit mistakes, but not if you confess to a lesser transgression to obscure the real one.

The other day, for example, NPR CEO Katherine Maher was testifying before Congress and conceded that her network, which, for unknown reasons, is still funded by taxpayers, was “mistaken” and “should have covered the Hunter Biden [laptop] story more aggressively.”

The problem wasn’t that NPR covered the Hunter Biden story or the Wuhan Institute with insufficient vigor.

It was that it joined every other censorious journalist in the “mainstream” media, and most tech companies, to suppress it.

This is like admitting to pickpocketing when you’ve just committed armed robbery.

Chait ends his revisionist tale with perhaps his most gob-smacking assertion. Liberal America, he says, has an “allergy to dogma and an openness to reason,” which “are the very core of the creed. (Read John Stuart Mill.)”

I’ve read Mill, and I don’t detect much “liberalism” within most of the contemporary left.

The fearmongering, statism and enthusiasm for quack social science adopted by progressives have little to do with classical liberalism.

Indeed, the doctrinairism and hysteria they apply to virtually every issue these days are big reasons Democrats are now in a weaker position than they’ve been in for many decades.

And the COVID regime was a tragic manifestation of that illiberal mindset, a series of devastating mistakes for which the left has yet to take responsibility.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at the Washington Examiner.