Quote (Goomshill @ 18 Jan 2022 12:32)
That's the part where the narrative goes off the rails though. Its like you say, there was a promise of return to normalcy, a reluctance to embrace the authoritarian measures during election season. But when the virus turned out to be a wet fart, it set the stage for them to put more slack in the leash and dial back the increasingly unpopular restrictions and sort out their supply chain crisis and return to normalcy like promised. But they didn't. That's the part where we plunged headlong into the draconian stage of authoritarianism and democrats started embracing the policies of the CCP at its worst. I don't see why losing their nerves on delta locked democrats into this death spiral, they could have reacted to the good news about Omicron ending in SA with almost zero deaths and spreading like mad in NYC with no death uptick and said oh, its time to capture the messaging and take a victory lap and reclaim the popular grounds we campaigned on.
I can't even see this as the self-interested actions of rational actors. This isn't good politics. Biden and the democrats are crashing and burning hard. A radical fringe of the country might embrace this message, but look at the big picture of those poll results- its scary how many fringe democrats support authoritarianism, but the vast majority of Americans don't, and the more radical it becomes, the more alienating it becomes. Once it starts becoming rhetoric of taking away your children and putting you into concentration camps, even the radical democrats start getting cold feet and questioning their fanaticism. There's no self-serving interest in pursuing this lunacy.
I think you're a bit too quick to jump to conclusions about the Democrats' medium-term stance on the issue. It has realistically only been 2 weeks or so since we could be somewhat sufficiently confident that Omicron would indeed not overburden hospitals in our much older and more vaccinated Western countries. Expecting Biden and national Democrats to immediately grasp the new info and immediately translate it into a policy u-turn is a bit much. Now, I'm not super tuned in to what's on the mundane everyday news in America, so if the rhetoric of national Dems has gotten more dramatic and authoritarian in this timeframe, then I apologize. But I doubt it's the case. Even their thought leaders in the liberal media, on WaPo/NYTimes or Atlantic/NYmag, are beginning to call for a more lax handling of covid.
You also have to take temporal coincidence into account. The Delta wave, for some strange reason that I couldn't figure out until now, took off in the Northern U.S. several weeks later than in Central and Eastern Europe. Basically only after Thanksgiving. This Delta surge did translate to a quite worrisome increase in hospitalizations, ICU patients and ultimately death, but with the usual delay of 1/2/3-5 weeks, respectively. When Omicron took over starting in mid-December, it actually stopped a Delta wave dead in its tracks which would have caused huge trouble, given your subpar vaccination rates. But during the early days of Omicron, the stats for the U.S. showed a surge in these metrics. That this hospitalization/ICU surge stemmed from the surge in Delta cases a few weeks prior was not trivial to see and the public health experts who could have known and warned the public to NOT panic were, in fact, in full-on panic mode themselves due to Omicron and basically wanted to send the entire country into hard lockdown anyway, so these numbers played into their hands. All of this contributed to a general sense of doom and gloom before Christmas and created the backdrop for calls for more assertive/authoritarian measures.
In political terms, there is also one upside for Democrats in sticking with the current level of restrictions and messaging about covid: signalling to their base that they take the virus seriously and err on the side of caution. By doing so, they also avoid implicitly admitting that Republicans like Trump or DeSantis were right. You of course have a point when you say that it makes no sense, politically speaking, to keep this up for much longer or to even increase the pressure. But again, I don't think that they will - it's only been 2 weeks.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jan 18 2022 08:11am