In the space of half a year, a new class division was ripped through American society: those who can live normally through pandemic lockdowns and restrictions versus those who can't. The two sides have a great deal of difficulty communicating across that chasm.
Of course, media and political elites are, at worst, inconvenienced by lockdowns, so news coverage is heavily slanted against the people who are really suffering from these policies. They're already as forgotten as the designated losers of globalist trade policy.
Spend a day watching mainstream media pandemic coverage, then spend the evening with people whose livelihoods have been utterly ruined by pandemic restrictions. It's like traveling from the Earth to Mars. Completely different worlds, totally different outlooks.
It's exactly like the divide between "free trade" winners and losers, people living in comfortable financial and media bubbles vs. people living in hollowed-out ghost towns with skyrocketing mortality rates. The Wuhan virus gave us a new, even bigger class of Designated Losers.
The new class divide cracked open along some economic and social fault lines that were already present and deepening, such as the growing number of people who preferred minimizing human contact while socializing online. It really is the social schism of the new century.
How much differently would we have reacted to this pandemic 20 or 30 years ago, before the social media era and the broadband revolution, when it wouldn't have been so easy for so many office workers to begin working from home?
Social media is the greatest transmission system ever devised for spreading hysteria. The Internet also helped to reduce the overall societal cost of indulging in hysteria, insulating many from its effects by allowing them to work from home.
The sheltered class increasingly looks at the people who are really suffering from lockdowns and restrictions - many of them small business owners and their employees - as stubborn, selfish idiots. Those who pay little of the cost are not good at cost/benefit analysis.
What a revolution the pandemic has brought in thinking about small business owners! Once upon a time, both parties at least paid lip service to them as the engine of American economic growth and employment. Now they're just irrelevant collateral damage as megacorps flourish.
The pandemic also hit the fault line between families and the childless upwardly mobile young professional class. Schools are an absolute horror show right now, but the portion of influential people directly affected by the education catastrophe is smaller than ever before.
The education and socialization of an entire generation of children is being destroyed... but what does that matter to social-media-addicted young professionals who can easily work from home and weren't planning on having kids for another decade or two?
In so many ways, the pandemic is destroying prosperity for what media used to call the "working class," and blowing up the ramps that once led from poverty into middle-class life: Small business, education, jobs that can't be worked from home or with extreme social distancing.
It's completely reversed the social transformation that was under way during Trump's years of growth and high employment. It's the exact opposite of what a nation facing unsustainable government debt and fierce global competition from ruthless predator nations needed.
The new class divide will be the death of us. We need to heal this social breach in addition to developing vaccines for the virus. In half a year, America went from soaring employment and rising wages across the board to becoming a divided nation of Eloi and Morlocks. /end
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