It’s a bit interesting to consider why the liberals were wrong about their whole mega-surge of doom prognosticating. I don’t have time for penning an entire book, so I will keep it just below larger epistemological questions and more on the level of individual(ish) psychology.
Essentially, it’s because they framed the pandemic and its viral agent (just as the conservatives did) as a moral question and issue rather than what it actually is, which is an amoral mindless contagion that has nothing at all to do with any moral precepts or intuitions. It doesn’t care that you mask up in solidarity with India or don’t. It doesn’t care how you feel in the grocery store mixing with the possibly-unvaccinated. The virus does not give a damn that you thought that wearing a mask was racist until you didn’t. It just doesn’t give a fuck!
The libs were wrong therefore because they imagined the pandemic as a moral judgment on deciding not to wear a mask, or attempting to resume a more normal life, while the virus has no thoughts, no wishes, no desires, no morality at all. It’s just traveling from body to body, sometimes in the air, mindlessly replicating. And when something breaks that replication chain, the R0 decreases a bit, until it goes so low that exponential decay occurs.
The reason I was right and the libs were wrong is that in my own brain I modeled the virus as an unthinking and uncaring opportunistic agent that interacted with prior infections, seasonality, vaccines, and actual behavior as to what it would be able to do in the real world. The moment you bring morality into this you will inevitably veer badly off course.
That’s all that happened here.
