Progressives Must Reckon With the School-Closing Catastrophe.

BELIEVE SCIENCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111

While the Spanish flu was especially deadly for children, COVID-19 is just the opposite. By the tail end of spring 2020, it was becoming reasonably clear both that remote education was failing badly and that schools could be reopened safely.

What happened next was truly disturbing: The left by and large rejected this evidence. Progressives were instead carried along by two predominant impulses. One was a zero-COVID policy that refused to weigh the trade-off of any measure that could even plausibly claim to suppress the pandemic. The other was deference to teachers unions, who were organizing to keep schools closed. Those strands combined into a refusal to acknowledge the scale or importance of losing in-person learning with a moralistic insistence that anybody who disagreed was callous about death or motivated by greed.

This, more than anything, is going to be responsible for losing elections for the Dems in 2022 and 2024. Millions of (mostly) women are going to vote for whoever vows to keep schools open and vote against those who kept them shuttered. Or they will just not vote at all. And they’d not be wrong to do that.

What an own goal and a preventable tragedy. Zero Covid was plain fucking stupid and the moralizing over it was even worse.