Commenter “Leland” writes:
I’m no longer in the camp that if Biden/progressives win, Covid will be dropped. No, Covid has become the best vehicle for bypassing checks and balances on government overreach. The Covid statistics will be every bit as useful to politicos and useless to everybody else as pre-election poll numbers. If you liked practicing the religion of your choice, speaking your mind freely, and enjoying assembly with family and like minds; you can just forget about doing these unhealthy things in the future.
Much like Leland, I had originally thought that a Biden win would cause the Democrats to relax COVID rules even with rising cases, as long as hospitalizations and deaths were not spiking everywhere too. But no. They’re ramping up, even with the holidays coming. Maybe especially with the holidays coming.
Now, maybe the change-up is just delayed until the election furor dies down and Biden actually takes office, at which time the magical transformation and taming of COVID will be said to have occurred at his capable hands. But maybe not. Maybe, indeed, they just like to control people.
Actually, there’s no “maybe” about that last sentence. The left very much does like to control people. But I would have thought – and actually I did think – that now that they’ve learned how easy it is to accomplish in today’s America, they would hold it somewhat in abeyance as a tool to be used in certain times. I thought that COVID might have served its political purposes already – to elect Biden. That is true, by the way, whether Biden won as a result of fraud or in the absence of major fraud, because COVID restrictions both enabled voting fraud in terms of the possibilities presented by enormous increases in mail-in voting while simultaneously increasing Biden’s actual support because of COVID-fear and blaming COVID deaths on Trump.
So, what’s going on now? It indeed may be just as Leland says. But making people unhappy is a double-edged sword. I think it was at least partly responsible for the Democrats’ poor showing in Congress and in state legislatures this year.
But in addition, I think there’s a psychological phenomenon involved as well, in which the leaders who promulgate their Draconian rules have become addicted to ordering people around whether it’s politically expedient or not at the moment. An example of that type of person would be Governor Whitmer of Michigan.
I also think that most people don’t understand public health and statistics, and in fact the experts are divided on the benefit of lockdowns and the like. This particular pandemic has been covered more minutely than any predecessor, with the generation of reams of statistics that can be easily accessed online. What to make of these statistics – for example, what rising caseloads actually signify if they’re not accompanied by much of a rise in very serious illness and death – is genuinely confusing to most people. I include epidemiologists and other public health officials, and I certainly include governors.
I think there’s a certain amount of real fear that COVID will get out of control if something isn’t done, and to a governor/carpenter with a hammer – lockdowns – everything looks like a nail. Not everyone has the courage of a Kristi Noem or Sweden’s Prime Minister Lofven. It’s always possible to point to some neighboring state or country that locked down more dramatically and had lower death rates, although it’s also possible to point to those with higher rates. The numbers can be used in a wide variety of ways.
I’ve been surprised at how easy it’s been to frighten the American public into submission, however – or at least, elements of the American public. It’s not that the whole thing is a hype, either, because COVID is frightening to certain age groups (of which I’m part). But that problem could have been handled in so many different ways, with so much less damage to society and the economy, that I can’t help but think the damage was part of the goal for some of the Democratic governors, and that goal may extend beyond this election.
