Thread by @aaronsibarium

I am sympathetic in principle to (certain) Covid restrictions, and to (certain) critiques of ossified Reaganism. But Covid poses a real problem for conservatives trying to define themselves in opposition to the Reaganite Right.

https://twitter.com/elliotkaufman6/status/1470092050922188802

Even if you like lockdowns, the FDA, NIH, and CDC have spent the last two years vindicating, over and over again, every imaginable warning about government incompetence and bureaucratic malevolence. It’s hard to look at Covid and think: “see, the government CAN do things.”

There are counterexamples, of course. Warp Speed was triumph (though private corporations did most of the leg work), and the US did some of the most aggressive economic stimulus in the world. But these exceptions seem to prove the Reaganite rule.

Another way of looking at it is that government COULD be much better if we just adopted the right set of reforms. But a) a lot of other Western countries did as badly as we did, and b) the would-be reformers are part of the same expert class that spectacularly screwed up Covid.

For all the Fauci worship in certain corners of the left, critiques of the US public health bureaucracy are increasingly bipartisan agreement. Just this week, a liberal friend of mine told me he no longer looked to the CDC for guidance on booster shots and immune evasion.

“I don’t trust the public health establishment at all” is not just an anti vax refrain. It’s become quite mainstream among normies and a growing number of center-left pundits.

And distrust of government, at least in the United States, is still more rightwing than leftwing.

Electorally, Republicans could probably prosper by marrying a libertarian skepticism of COVID maximalism with a basic recognition that it’s a serious virus and that vaccines are good.

Embracing the maximalism seems like a recipe for defeat.

I don’t care what the polls say. Revealed preference suggests that outside of deep blue enclaves—and increasingly, even within them—the average person is closer to DeSantis on Covid than to many of the epidemiologists quoted in the New York Times.