COVID-19's Role In Killing Our Democracy

How The Only Remaining Defenders Of Free Society Undermined Themselves in 2020

Last month, I read Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee's book In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, which explores the political failure of managing the COVID-19 Pandemic.

I have my criticisms of the book. It leaned too heavily into libertarian tropes and read more like an academic paper. Still, it is a thorough examination of the political side of the pandemic, something many are afraid to examine. I’ve come ot the unpopular conclusion that the pandemic was a political failure, especially for liberals, and wiped out an advantage American liberals and the Democratic Party had on issues like civil liberties, health, and education. Liberals refuse to examine the political side of the pandemic response because doing so could mean uncovering some realities that render the 2024 argument against the threat of Trump’s authoritarianism unpersuasive. This is a colossal mistake and continues to be a drag on the party and liberalism in general.

I was always somewhat critical of our COVID-19 response. Something about the speed at which we moved to institute unprecedented restrictions on society and the sudden certainty experts had about their efficiency made me skeptical. In February 2020, we were told masks don’t work, and then suddenly, a month later, they worked - and then we were told we were only told masks don’t work so that people wouldn’t hoard them. The pre-pandemic playbook, which did not call for lockdowns or mass restrictions, was suddenly tossed out the window, and the only evidence we had to go on supporting the new efforts was from China, a notoriously untrustworthy nation, where the virus originated in still-unknown circumstances. I was skeptical that COVID-19 did not originate in a lab - a skepticism that ended up being warranted - and wary of the certainty that Hydroxychloroquine wouldn’t be effective against the virus - a skepticism that was not justified.

While happy to do my part – I did not leave my house for 52 days, and I refused to join my family for a trip to our vacation house in Maine in October 2020 – I worried the level of sacrifice placed on society would not feel warranted because everyone would get infected anyway. That was what we were told in early March 2020 before any restrictions were implemented. I fully believed that when all was said and done, and we looked back on that era, many would ask, “What did we even achieve?” and would not be persuaded by arguments that we “saved lives” when millions died anyway. Meanwhile, liberals would continue to feed their delusions that these ideas worked – or would’ve worked, but were failed by a self-serving public that did not want to engage in collective action and sacrifice. This gives them a permission structure to never reflect on any potential mistakes.

Further, as Macedo and Lee’s book explains, the fact that it was all done by executive fiat and not through a legislative or democratic process sat wrong with many people. I think Democrats paid for that electorally.

While it’s true that Donald Trump was president in 2020 when the pandemic hit, and he endorsed and pushed for strict COVID-19 restrictions at the onset, he was one of the first to demand they end—calling for a “great reopening” as early as Easter 2020. This allowed Trump to absolve himself of any accountability or blame for any backlash to COVID-19 restrictions.

It was Democrats who kept the restrictions going into 2021. It was Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, who triggered a backlash when reintroducing restrictions in late 2020. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom supported mask and social distancing mandates well into 2021. It was Virginia’s Terry McAullife, the 2021 Democratic nominee for governor, who supported restrictions in Virginia schools when he ran that year, even admonishing parents for questioning educational policy. He lost the election.

When the 2024 election campaign became so focused on “saving democracy,” Republicans were ready. They pointed to COVID-19.

Republicans did not have to change anyone’s opinions; they just had to neuter the Democrats’ argument. Voters may not trust Trump to protect democratic norms, but did Democrats protect them during COVID-19? Even if people generally agreed with the restrictions at the time, the argument that Trump was dangerous because he might smash democratic norms coming from people who, even if justifiably, broke them in 2020 and 2021 would never make an impact.

It’s hard for liberals to argue that freedom and democracy are essential when so much of what happened during the COVID-19 Pandemic felt authoritarian. From mask mandates to business and school closures to vaccine passports, almost every American felt the full force of government on them for the first time, interfering in parts of their lives they never thought the government could interfere. The restrictions we lived through fundamentally changed how people viewed a free society.

As the book points out, there were no legislative debates over instituting these restrictions; they were done unilaterally by the federal, state, and local government executive branches. Many Americans never believed the government could do what it did based on an emergency declared by the president or governors or mayors, and that was a learning experience for them – that our government always had the power to curtail freedoms and rights on a whim if it deemed the emergency terrible enough to warrant it. How, then, were Democrats supposed to credibly scare the public into thinking Trump would destroy democracy by doing what he and every other American leader already had the power to do?

It’s fair to suggest Americans were generally okay with the restrictions in March 2020. For most people, the pandemic was a terrifying, unprecedented event. It felt almost apocalyptic, like a dystopian movie. In those moments, people often trust leaders and experts, having faith that they are doing the right thing and know what they’re doing.

Years later, it isn’t clear that’s what happened.

Macedo and Lee’s book details some of the more controversial postmortems about COVID restrictions, including that many public health experts and officials who pushed policies like mask mandates and lockdowns did not believe in their efficacy before China instituted them in the winter of 2020. They provide evidence that the pandemic responses’ most visible leaders, like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization’s president, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, did not believe mass shutdowns, school closures, or mask mandates would make a difference with the pandemic. The authors explain that the motivations behind pushing those policies were multifaceted. Experts were more or less forced to endorse them because of China’s use of them early in the pandemic and fears that criticizing China’s strict response – they, at one point, were welding apartment doors shut – would hurt the country’s cooperation in battling the pandemic and unearthing the cause. The most consequential reason was that they believed expressing certainty and confidence in these policies would sell the public on it and bring about unanimous adherence to these policies for as long as needed until they could learn enough about the virus to fight it. They also feared Trump, an unstable leader with tremendous power facing a tough reelection, would retaliate against China in destructive ways if they didn’t speak highly of their response. Some liberals believed schools should reopen at any cost in Fall 2020 and then backtracked when Trump endorsed the idea and teacher unions fought against it, hoping to leverage the shutdown to get better labor agreements they’ve longed sought. Public health experts endorsed it. Yet, while public health experts considered events like funerals and birthdays unessential gatherings during the pandemic, they supported the mass protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020. Liberals joined them in dismissing these milestone events as frivolous, which angered millions of people who saw weddings, birthdays, and funerals as far more essential than protests.

In other words, they were fooling everyone. Experts pushed restrictions they weren’t sure would actually work, leading to politicians instituting draconian mandates on the public that were previously unseen in democratic societies in anyone’s lifetimes. Then, they endorsed arbitrary loopholes that seemed to favor liberals. Is it any wonder liberals and progressives became the boy who cried wolf when it came to democracy? Swing voters did not see them as having any credibility.