I think this is so far the best diagnosis of the truly sick pathology of the liberals regarding Covid and how they are bitterly reacting to their utter rout in their failed effort to remake society using Covid as a pretext.

There’s a reason the argument for an indefinite emergency footing has taken on an increasingly desperate tone in recent weeks, even as the objective pandemic conditions have rapidly improved: The better arguments for temporary continuation of mitigation policies are falling away, and the ones that remain are less convincing. And for all the claims that the public wants transformative change or persistent emergency (or even wants a significantly longer continuation of the tighter rules that were imposed as the Omicron wave hit) there’s no sign the politicians taking the back-to-normal approach are paying any political penalty. That, not anything Leonhardt has written, is why Democratic governors are stampeding to copy them.

So Yong has resorted to arguing people trying to do self-interested cost-benefit analysis are doing it wrong; that they’re underestimating how likely they are to benefit in the future from a society that imposes a lot more restriction in the name of a newly protective regime for the immunocompromised. For all the wishing that COVID could have been a turning point in our social values, his argument still accepts the premise that we will make individualistic policy decisions rather than communitarian ones. He’s also wrong because he (like so many progressive commentators on COVID over the last two years) undersells how disruptive all the disruption has been to the disrupted.

That’s it exactly. “Progressives” thought they were winning when they were losing — and the exact moment they went down in defeat is when they started telling people utter balderdash like “it’s good for you you that you haven’t been able to see your parents in two years” or “there are no drawbacks to masking” or “even though you are fully vaccinated, nothing has changed, and you must still cower inside with no end in sight.”

And people are still advocating for absurd restrictions, though there’s no chance of those returning. They are pretending to care about the immunocompromised but most don’t give a shit about them. Not really. What the libs are reacting to is that they thought they had the chance to morph society into some other, better shape and they failed in laughable ways. That’s all that’s going on here.