Pandemic made worse the hypocrisies of each party

The pandemic is a sort of funhouse mirror, a distorted reflection of ourselves that too often magnifies our worst features. Fearful or foolhardy, stubborn or impetuous, self-righteous or self-serving – we not only become more of whatever we already were, but we can hardly help seeing it, at least if we allow ourselves to look. This syndrome is, of course, most obvious in America’s political elites, who already magnified and reflected our collective flaws before Covid-19 arrived.

For example, how many Democratic politicians, medical experts and media figures advocated for stringent restrictions, only to relax their demands for protests that served the right causes? How many, for that matter, decided it was all right to break quarantine, attend political victory parties, enjoy restaurant dinners, get haircuts, spend Thanksgiving with family or eschew masks in public places?

The guilty might defend themselves by saying that if they are hypocrites, at least hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue; Republicans have flouted pandemic precautions much more openly and encouraged their constituents to do the same. And they have a point. Consistency is a dubious virtue if you are consistently wrong.

Nonetheless, the technocratic left has its own consistent failures, and these episodes illustrate the worst of them: a steady tendency to draft ostensibly neutral rules that systematically advantage the rulemakers.

Take California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, who not only attended a large group dinner in a fancy restaurant but also has his kids in a private school that remained open while public schools across the state were shuttered. It’s reminiscent of how Democratic education policy often looked before Covid-19: The public figures who opposed school choice and weakened charters sent their own children to private schools or moved to affluent school districts.

And that is a proxy for an edifice of privilege that has increasingly walled itself off from the rest of the country, while presuming to shout orders from behind the battlements. It’s not surprising that conservatives resent the demands for aristocratic deference from people who refuse to shoulder the tiresome burdens of noblesse oblige. For that matter, even their copartisans have come to view their edicts with a skeptical eye, which helps explain why blue states aren’t controlling Covid-19 that much better than their red counterparts.

But conservative elites too often turn this valid but limited critique into a blanket excuse; they complain that experts are untrustworthy while ignoring the evidence before their own eyes – or at least pretending to.

The worst recent example is the Republican politicians who signed on to election fraud allegations that they must have known were both baseless and hopeless, and which complicated the party’s campaigning for the Georgia Senate runoffs in January. But the most vivid and obvious example is the Trumpists getting special access to aggressive early treatment for their Covid-19, including medicines so scarce that they are rationed, even as these same people continued to falsely insist the disease is no worse than the flu.

This week we learned that the White House would be vaccinating staffers — even though few of them are front-line healthcare workers, and none, except arguably the president himself, are elderly residents of nursing homes. Apparently this was too shameless even for President Trump, who eventually walked it back. Yet if Covid-19 really isn’t scary enough for normal people to alter their routines, then why did the White House even consider diverting scarce vaccines from vulnerable old people to themselves?

You know, and I know: They know. All the assurances that Covid-19 was a minor illness that only cowards worried about were for show. The audience may have believed it was real, but the actors sure don’t.

As with the Democrats, the audience they betrayed was mostly composed of the people who trusted them most: their own base. And as with Democrats, the performance was ultimately just a magnified view of what the party’s politics had already become before Covid-19. In the case of Republicans, that was an almost content-free display of grievance, parasitic upon the very people it denounced, since the party had little independent agenda beyond negating whatever the left said or did — obstruction if possible, denunciation if not, no matter what norms had to be broken and to hell with what this did to our institutions.

But if these trends were already evident, the pandemic has made them worse. And regardless of which sort of hypocrisy strikes you as more pressing, neither is compatible with the kind of healthy democratic society that we’d like to live in when the pandemic is over.