The recent fifth anniversary of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic put the difference between the contemporary right and left on stark display. Liberals have engaged in searching self-reflection—on school closings, the lab-leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs.
Recently, the New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci wrote a column criticizing scientific institutions for misleading the public over the possibility that COVID-19 had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote a gloating response, which generally typified the right-wing mood on this issue. It included this astonishing passage: “Five years later, the very people who misled us about the pandemic are starting to make embarrassing admissions.”
This sentence reveals less about its intended subject than it does about the pathological incuriosity that has come to define the American right.
To begin with, the notion that the mainstream media are “starting” to entertain the possibility that COVID came from a leak is completely false. New York magazine published a story supporting the lab-leak hypothesis in January 2021, and similar arguments followed within a few months in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. The Times itself has published many, many articles giving the lab-leak hypothesis serious consideration, starting in 2021 and persisting continuously since.
Conservatives, who generally assume that the mainstream media are as ideologically rigid as the conservative media, appear not to have noticed any of this until Tufekci’s most recent contribution to the genre, which produced an onslaught of football-spiking. (Tufekci herself was skeptical of public-health guidance throughout the pandemic. She wrote for this magazine about the absurdity of scolding people for going to the beach unmasked in 2020.) As the conservative journalist Mary Katherine Ham wrote on X: “Must be wild to be a NYT reader/NPR listener and just learn YESTERDAY that everyone lied to you on purpose about the lab leak theory and Collins and Fauci were helping.” But Times readers had been following this debate for years. It was conservatives who’d apparently just discovered its existence in the liberal media.
More astonishing, as the context of Dougherty’s column proceeds to make crystal clear, its reference to “the very people who misled us about the pandemic” exclusively describes liberals. Dougherty bemoans the effects of lockdowns, mask mandates, and so on.
Yet “people who misled us about the pandemic” very much includes conservatives. And far from admitting their failures, or even quietly edging away from them, conservatives have elevated the figures on the right who held the wrongest and nuttiest positions. Donald Trump, who insisted that COVID would “disappear” on its own without massive harm and who publicly contemplated injecting disinfectant to fight the virus, has not exactly faded into obscurity. Elon Musk, who five years ago was predicting that there would be no new COVID cases by the end of April 2020, is now influencing large swaths of domestic policy, including public health.
In contrast with the Democratic Party’s reckoning, the Republican Party is engaged in a kind of anti-reckoning. It is repudiating its sanest and most correct positions (such as Operation Warp Speed). The party is even attracting to its coalition new kooks with even wronger positions. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who used to be left-wing and anti-Trump, has joined the Trump administration specifically on the basis of his promotion of fake cures and hostility toward real ones.
The likely incoming head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Mehmet Oz, became famous for peddling quack remedies on television. The Republican Party is now accordingly slashing funding for medical and scientific research, with especially punitive consequences for mRNA research, which is (or, more pessimistically, was) one of the most fertile grounds for new treatments.
I don’t want to suggest that the political left always followed the science. The initial response to COVID, after an understandable bout of confusion in the face of fast-moving events, was afflicted with ideological rigidity. I was pounding the table over this at the time. Many scientists dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory, and if you poke around on Bluesky, there’s still a coterie of dead-enders who insist they were totally correct to describe the lab-leak hypothesis as an impossible conspiracy theory.
Yet in general, the information ecosystem in liberal America has proved itself to be, well, liberal. Allergy to dogma and an openness to reason are the very core of the creed. (Read John Stuart Mill.) Liberals got some things about the pandemic correct and other things wrong, and over time, many of them have disavowed or at least moved away from their wrong beliefs.
There is a certain kind of strength in refusing to concede error. In political terms, at least for now, the COVID experience has been transformed into a positive talking point for Republicans, a development nobody expected back when Americans were dying by the thousands and Trump was brainstorming weird medical ideas live from the White House. But solidifying their identity as the party of medical quackery has political risks, too, in addition to the horrifying consequences.
A liberal, the old joke goes, is a person too broad-minded to take his own side in a fight. In the short run, that makes winning harder. In the long run, it makes discovering the truth easier. On the whole, if you have to choose between the capacity to admit error and an allergy to questioning your dogma, the former still seems like the better option.
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