The COVID reckoning that's never coming

Accepting the fact that everyone else has kind of accepted it

Last night’s midterms appear to have been considerably less red than everyone was anticipating, myself included. There will be a great deal of post-game analysis to that effect in the coming days and weeks, particularly concerning Pennsylvania, where voters elected to the U.S. Senate a man who, we have to be brutally honest here, appears unable to really speak.

One thing bears briefly emphasizing is this: Whatever else the midterms were about, a long-predicted “reckoning” on COVID-19 policies was never going to be one of them. This was a not-inconsiderable theme throughout a good bit of conservative and even mainstream media throughout most of 2022, the idea that voters were going to slap down Democrats who forced onerous COVID restrictions on them, that Tuesday was going to constitute what the New Yorker last month called a “pandemic-backlash election.”

That was not ever going to be the case, mainly for two reasons. First of all, COVID policies were a broadly bipartisan affair. Mask mandates, bizarre school closures and restrictions, onerous vaccine restrictions, countless other measures—these policies were broadly distributed across the political spectrum, or at least too broadly to constitute a sort of unipartisan fulcrum on which to assess this election.

Perhaps more importantly, it seems as if people just don’t care all that much about it. The historically destructive, burdensome, miserable COVID policies constitute some of the worst things ever done to Americans by public officials in our history…and yet it just doesn’t seem to matter to most people. They’ve moved on. Yes, we’re teetering on the edge of a very bad recession because our governments shut down the economy over a virus with a 99.98% survival rate; yes, they forced our kids to wear hot, damp, miserable face diapers for eight hours a day, for months and months, for absolutely no good reason at all; yes, they forced millions and millions of people to get injected with an experimental pharmaceutical drug that doesn’t actually do the stuff they said it would; yes, they abrogated our rights and our dignity in a million more indefensible ways. Does anyone really care all that much? I really don’t see it if they do. (Even the one election that everyone seems to agree was most about the COVID lockdowns, that of Ron DeSantis in Florida, had just as much if not more to do with the fact that DeSantis is just an absolute crackerjack governor, a hyper-capable dynamite executive who is never not on message.)

The midterms were never going to be about this. I suspect that particular train has left the station and there’s never really going to be any sort of reckoning to that effect, even with a looming lockdown-generated downturn on the horizon. And that is a shame, because what happened in early 2020 was inexcusable, and its implications were and are existentially injurious to our way of life. I am not quite sure how to get people to understand that; I suppose it would have to happen again, a possibility which I worry is all-but-assured given the apathy at play here. Such is life.