Masks: the new battleground in America’s culture war
In the 1960s, protesters were said to have burned bras, said Ryan Lizza and Daniel Lippman on Politico. In 2020, it looks like they’ll soon be burning face masks. These cloth coverings have become a symbol of “tribal affiliation” as responses to the coronavirus crisis have grown more polarised. For progressives, wearing a mask shows that “you take the pandemic seriously and are willing to make personal sacrifices to save lives”. Some conservatives, by contrast, refuse to wear masks on principle, seeing them as a “symbol of a purported overreaction” to the virus. President Trump has dismissed the idea of wearing one, even going without one during a visit to a mask factory last week. In the city of Stillwater, Oklahoma, a measure requiring masks in public recently had to be withdrawn after store workers attempting to enforce it were met with threats of violence.
The liberal media have painted the protesters as “virus deniers”, said Betsy McCaughey in the New York Post, but that’s not the case. These people are just fed up. They were willing to sacrifice their liberties and livelihoods for the sake of a temporary lockdown designed to buy time for hospitals to increase capacity.
But they’re not willing to sign those things away on an open-ended basis. This is about freedom, agreed Dan Fagan in The Advocate (Baton Rouge). At first, we were told what we couldn’t do: no more work, no more church. Now they’re telling us what we must do. Legislators have started “mask-shaming” colleagues who don’t cover up. The mayor of New Orleans is to make business owners note down the contact details of every customer who passes through their door. “How much further are they going to go?”
Come off it, said Rod Dreher in The American Conservative. The country is hardly turning into a police state. It is, of course, reasonable to want an easing of the lockdown restrictions that are crippling the economy. It’s also reasonable to doubt whether face masks make any real difference. But it’s absurd to reject these facial coverings on the basis that they’re a symbol of “social control”. At worst, they’re an ineffective inconvenience that will, by encouraging more people to go out about their business, help get the country moving again. We should leave such hysterical ideological thinking to the snowflakes of the Left. “This is not the kind of conservatism I signed up for.”