The debate over coronavirus policy has drifted very far from the original understanding that we needed extreme measures to prevent hospitals from being overloaded, causing patients to die from a lack of urgently needed medical care.
The coronavirus debate offers one of the fastest examples of an Overton window moving that we've ever seen. If you say today what everyone in authority said about the virus and lockdowns in March, you're now a witless anti-lockdown extremist who wants people to die.
The crucial data points about hospitalizations and deaths have been lost in a surging ocean of static about positive test rates. Absolutely no one would ever have agreed to the lockdowns if told they couldn't be lifted until no one was testing positive any more.
Likewise, no one would have agreed if told this miserable lockdown or semi-lockdown culture would last until a vaccine was discovered - something that might not ever actually happen. People would have considered that argument irrational and unworkable in March or April.
But as the old, biologically dubious but metaphorically perfect adage has it, you can boil a frog by turning up the heat a few degrees at a time. You move that Overton window by changing facts on the ground quickly and then dragging public perception along in their wake.
Opinion tends to swirl around enforced reality, like iron shavings dancing around strong magnets. Ironically, the movement leftward exploits the fundamentally conservative nature of the populace: they grow accustomed to the New Normal very quickly.
The speed at which the New Normal can be accepted, and the window of possibility shifted accordingly, has never been demonstrated as profoundly as with the coronavirus. The atmosphere of panic and the underlying fault lines of unrest in our society threw it into fast forward.
Imagine telling parents in March that their children might not be allowed to go back to school in September. They would have rebelled from coast to coast. But now that's a "mainstream" position that is under serious debate.
Of course everything is hyper-politicized, which adds to the sense of confusion and weary resignation, the feeling that our fate is out of our hands. The enforced cognitive dissonance of "BLM protests don't spread the Rona but going to work does" is maddening and demoralizing.
There are already clusters of opinion forming to protect the New Normal of lockdowns, including people who really LIKE the lockdown lifestyle but don't want to admit it, so they mask their true opinion with a form of political-religious fanaticism. Guilt juices their fervor.
That same sense of inherent conservatism, that feeling of an opinion window shifting permanently, causes the arguments of yesterday to be forgotten with remarkable speed and thoroughness despite our Information Age resources.
It's hard for anyone to remember clearly what was being said only a few months ago - the doomsday projections, the promises about "15 days to flatten the curve," what various parties were saying about masks, etc. The past is forgotten even though it's not even half a year old.
One of the big differences between Left and Right is that the Left knows the window of opinion can be shifted by force. Impose the program, pass the law, trust media to hold the line for a few months, and the public will submit to the new reality that has been created by fiat.
The Right sees itself fighting constant, endless battles to preserve everything it does, as if every law could be instantly repealed in a referendum at any moment, so it doesn't do things it can't imagine itself successfully defending every day for years to come.
Consider the hyper-speed example of the coronavirus, and how quickly the mixture of panic and power changed everything in a matter of weeks, creating a new America so distant from the old that remembering last year has become incredibly difficult for most of the public. /end
