The lockdown protests: virus deniers or freedom fighters?
For a moment, it felt as if Americans were “all on the same team” against Covid-19, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. It didn’t take long, though, for old divisions to reassert themselves. Over recent weeks, protests against social-distancing restrictions have been held in a series of state capitals. To law-abiding citizens who accept the need for such rules, these demonstrations look “reckless in the extreme”. But President Trump, typically, has taken the side of the flag-waving protesters, flouting his own administration’s guidelines. “LIBERATE
MICHIGAN!” he tweeted. “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!”
Critics have called the protesters “virus deniers” and accused them of wanting people to die, said Glenn Harlan Reynolds in USA Today. Nonsense. This is about working-class Americans rebelling against bossy rules that in many cases make no sense. It’s ridiculous, for instance, that the governor of Michigan has closed down garden and DIY parts of stores that are open for other purposes; and has banned powerboating, but not sailing. People hate the hypocrisy of leaders such as Chicago’s mayor, who justified an illicit haircut on the grounds that she is in the public eye. A clear divide is evident in society today, between members of the smug “political/managerial class” who are still getting their government pay cheques or corporate salaries, and those who are unemployed, or seeing their small businesses destroyed. “And the America still getting paid is, so far, not showing a whole lot of sympathy for the America that isn’t.”
Some governors may have been a little heavy-handed, said Jonah Goldberg in the National Review, but the idea that these protesters are freedom fighters – one of Trump’s advisers even called them “the modern-day Rosa Parks” – is absurd. Unfortunately, we live in a time when all hardships “must be turned into acts of deliberate villainy by our political opponents or nefarious overlords”. These protests are a deliberate attempt to gin up another Tea Party, said Laura McGann on Vox – a new version of the angry conservative movement that emerged in the wake of the 2008 crash and shaped US politics for a decade. The good news, though, is that the protests are gaining no traction: 60%-80% of citizens support social distancing, which is remarkable in such a divided country. This is “not about politics. And most Americans don’t want it to be”.