Democrats’ Brazen Covid Revisionism

T he scholarship on the history of pandemics generally leads their chroniclers to conclude that the people who live through them don’t like reflecting on the sacrifices endured to make it to the other side. That was as true for the 1918 Spanish Flu as it is for the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The brain creates these event boundaries when important things happen and so there may be some natural forgetting,” Duke University psychologist Kevin LaBar told ABC News last year. Indeed, a “very common response” to trauma is to “avoid anything that reminds us of what happened,” Washington University School of Medicine clinical case manager Jennifer Holzhauer agreed. “In fact, most of us want to not have the memories, we call them intrusive thoughts.” In short, it’s normal to avoid retrospectives on a pandemic, much as we might benefit from them. In that sense, the Democratic National Convention’s first night was anything but conventional. Its speakers and attendees seemed to not only welcome reflections on that terrible time in American public life, but revel in them.

The party’s nostalgic look back at the pandemic began early in the night with a video montage that featured Donald Trump issuing what proved to be overly optimistic forecasts about the virus’s trajectory and speculating about the experimental medications that might alleviate symptoms. Despite the paucity of moments in which Harris played a large role in 2020, the vice president was presented as a savior who delivered the nation from its despair. The video ended by suggesting that when Americans resumed the social and economic lifestyles they had left behind during the pandemic, they did so with gratitude in their hearts for the Democrats who made it possible.

Such brazen revisionist history didn’t end there. “He took the COVID crisis and turned it into a catastrophe,” said Representative Lauren Underwood (D., Ill.). Minnesota lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan mourned the death of her brother as a result of infection — a trauma compounded by the fact that she couldn’t visit him or hold a memorial service for him after his passing. “Millions of American families went through the same thing,” she noted, implicitly attributing her torment to the Republican governor of Tennessee. “While schools closed and dead bodies filled morgues, Donald Trump downplayed the virus,” declared Representative Robert Garcia (D., Calif.). “He told us to inject bleach into our bodies, he peddled conspiracy theories across the country.”

That last rhetorical flourish is a brazen lie, albeit one that Democratic partisans have thoroughly internalized. It was so egregious it even earned a few fact-checks. But the overall sentiment reflected in the Democrats’ Covid programming is no less mendacious.

The party in power abandoned any sense of propriety in its romanticized remembrance of the pandemic because, in its members’ minds, it is a story of Democrats’ spectacular managerial competence. The party faithful convinced themselves that the global pestilence would have been better contained and its outcomes less agonizing if the Oval Office had been occupied by a more technocratic figure. But the preponderance of evidence indicates that the non-pharmaceutical interventions to which Democrats were partial — social distancing, masking mandates, and the like — did little to prevent the spread of infection while creating a host of other social maladies, the effects of which persist to this day.

“Too many kids were forced to go online class in McDonald’s parking lots,” mourned Communications Workers of America union president Claude Cummings Jr. That’s true, and it was a tragedy. But who were its authors? It wasn’t Donald Trump who insisted on keeping schools closed. Indeed, he spent the latter part of 2020 lobbying for in-person education. No, it was Democratic politicians and their allies in unions — the teachers’ unions, specifically — who morally blackmailed America with the prospect of a mass die-off among educators if they exposed themselves to the ambulatory disease vectors we call children. America’s kids are still trying to recover the ground they lost.

The massive job losses that were incurred in 2020 as a result of state-level “lockdowns” have led the Democratic Party’s more shameless hacks to claim that Joe Biden created “millions of jobs” when state economies reopened. But who was doing the reopening? Leading the pack were Republican governors, and they were accused by their Democratic counterparts of conducting the modern equivalent of ritual human sacrifice for their efforts. Democratic states were the last to let go of their restrictions on essential interpersonal interaction. Democratic politicians, Biden included, outsourced their judgment to the public-health bureaucracy, which in turn did its utmost to transform the pandemic’s contingencies into a new American way of life.

The threat that masking mandates may one day make a comeback still looms, if only because rank-and-file Democrats still express their support for superfluous and theatrical measures anytime an element of uncertainty is introduced into the national discourse. America was slower than some of its European counterparts to slough off failed pandemic-era experiments because the Democratic establishment changed its priorities. The vaccine was effective at mitigating individual risk of severe Covid infection, but it was not effective at preventing transmission — and transmission rates, not outcomes, became the metric on which Democratic lawmakers relied to gauge relative risk. As even Dr. Anthony Fauci sheepishly confessed, he was simply making up the threshold at which the number of Americans with acquired or received immunity would render the virus a manageable hazard.

The data didn’t matter because public health under Joe Biden was no science. It was an art, and art is the conduit through which emotion and sentiment are expressed. That is how Democrats managed the pandemic — by feeling their way through it.

Senator Raphael Warnock crystalized the pathology that has led Democrats to look back fondly on one of the ugliest periods in recent memory. In his speech, he prophesied a future in which Americans summon the collective will to “heal the wounds that divide us,” “sick bodies,” and “the land,” because “the pandemic taught us how.”

“A contagious airborne disease means that I have a personal stake in the health of my neighbor,” Warnock said. “If she’s sick, I may get sick also. Her health care is good for my health. I’m just trying to tell you that we are as close in our humanity as a cough.” The Georgia senator seems to see in Covid the case for American socialism, but the pandemic was not a time defined by communitarianism despite the unity of purpose around defeating the virus. It was a lonely time, a psychologically devastating period of atomization and disaggregation. The mental-health maladies that plague us today were exacerbated by enforced social isolation, which was hailed as virtuous and imposed on Americans from the top down. It must never be repeated.

There is something scandalizing in the Democratic faithful’s revisionist history of the pandemic. They see that era not as a catastrophe through which the nation muddled amid a variety of shambolic and improvisatory mitigation efforts. They see it as some rare species of triumph. Maybe they hope that you won’t call them out on their self-delusion. After all, no one with a healthy relationship to our shared reality wants to remember the pandemic. Oddly enough, Democrats do.