Politics

No one need ask why the strict public health regime to manage Covid — masks, mandates, quarantines, and required inoculations — has begun to collapse. Between angry truckers, unfavorable polling for continued lockdowns, the perception of a Wuhan coverup, changing reports of vaccine effectiveness, and declining hospitalizations, even President Biden and blue state governors realize they have but two options: pretend to be leading a return to normalcy or face an unpredictable grassroots rebellion. The interesting question for Americans is not why the sudden prospect of a return to normalcy but what “returning to normalcy” really means.

The first report cards on democracy and economic freedom for 2021 are out and the results are not good. Economic Intelligence Unit, the sister company of The Economist magazine, found that last year’s Democracy Index had fallen by almost a tenth of a percent. That’s the biggest drop in the index’s 15-year history. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, meanwhile, saw a similar albeit larger decline of 1.6 points out of 100. Heritage looked at economic policies and conditions in 177 countries while the Democracy Index looked at 167 countries. Both reports blame government-enforced COVID restrictions for the declines.

How will Biden respond to Putin? “Invasion.” The Biden administration used that all-important I-word this morning to describe the actions of the Russian military in Eastern Ukraine after Vladimir Putin’s extraordinary rant justifying Russian recognition of the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics on Monday afternoon. “We think this is, yes, the beginning of an invasion, Russia’s latest invasion into Ukraine,” said deputy national security advisor Jon Finer on CNN this morning. The I-word matters because invasion has been the closest thing to a red line that the Biden administration has drawn during the crisis: the action that would trigger a harsh response from Washington.

At last, Canada has been freed from the menacing threat of bouncy castles. The bouncy castles first appeared in Ottawa earlier this month, brought in by the truckers who were peacefully protesting Covid restrictions and who Prime Minister Justin Trudeau later compared to Nazis. And you can understand why. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a McDonald’s PlayPlace and felt the dark night of fascism descending all around me. That people don’t bring bouncy castles to violent insurrections — that there were no bouncy castles at, for example, the Beer Hall Putsch — has apparently been lost on Trudeau, that witless king in the north, who last weekend saw in the Ottawa police to flush out the truckers like they were an occupying militia.

Joy Behar made a predictable announcement last week on ABC’s The View. While discussing how the CDC may ease mask guidance in the near future, she explained the depths of her neurosis to her co-hosts. "So if I go on the subway, if I go in a bus, if I go into the theater... a crowded place, I would wear a mask, and I might do that indefinitely," she added. "Why do I need the flu or a cold even? And so I'm listening to myself right now. I don't think it's 100 percent safe yet.” A few hours later, a photo emerged on Twitter of Behar sitting in a booth with two friends at a restaurant. She was sans mask. Worse yet, journalist Libby Emmons, who posted the photos, added, “I hear that she also walked out of the restaurant unmasked, though her companions dutifully donned theirs.

What happens when a government thinks it can distribute a consumer product more efficiently than normal retail channels? Boondoggle and failure come to mind. Two months ago, President Biden announced plans to buy 500 million at-home Covid test kits and mail them to anyone who wanted one. The Department of Defense put in orders for $1.275 billion of tests from iHealth, $340 million from Roche and $306 million from Abbott. How many tests those eye-popping figures bought from each company has never been disclosed, but Abbott, the largest test manufacturer, has a reported production capacity of 50 to 70 million tests. It is safe to assume that the quantities involved commanded an enormous portion of total manufacturing capacity.

Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every battle as if it’s the only one they will ever have to fight. And so, win or lose, they are unprepared for what happens next. If they lose, they forget how all-important the last battle was, learning no lessons from defeat, nor about what’s vital and what isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives were adamantly opposed to putting women in combat or admitting them to institutions like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel. In recent years, conservative Republicans have celebrated the aspirations to office of female fighter pilots like Arizona’s Martha McSally and female graduates from Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel.

Last spring, Yiatin Chu joined a series of protests against the spike in unprovoked assaults on Asian Americans in New York City. Prominent New York Democrats, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, were in attendance and spoke at the rallies. Senior party figures expressed their solidarity with the Asian community. They drew connections between the violence on New York’s streets and the xenophobic language of former president Donald Trump. And sometimes they blamed the violence on something less specific: white supremacy. After a while, Chu, a politically active Democrat, stopped going to the protests. “I was just really turned off by the messaging,” she tells me.

Six short years ago, J.D. Vance penned a piece in the Atlantic comparing Donald Trump to opioids. “Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein,” he wrote. “Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.” In the six years since writing those words, it’s Vance, not Trump’s voters, whose mind has changed. Since announcing his run for Senate, Vance has become what he used to chastise: the worst kind of whiny, angry, instinctively hostile, dismissive, dog-whistling troll. Vance first burst onto the scene as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir which told the story of an often-forgotten cross-section of the American public. I loved Hillbilly Elegy.