It seems apparent that wherever vaccine requireds, mask requireds, and lockdowns have actually been imposed in reaction to covid-19, progressive political and media elites have actually been the driving forces behind them. This is clear to those people alive today, but it is worth thinking about whether future history books will try to remove progressives’ fault for the disasters their covid policies have caused. The argument that follows is speculative, however bad ideologies should be held to the fires of their own making, and it seems to be in the nature of progressivism to try to escape the historical reckoning it is due.
Not long ago, it seemed most likely that the progressive elites would eventually simply declare covid-19 to be over and herald themselves as humankind’s heros. But as the pandemic has endured, the cracks in the covid disinformation regime have expanded for all to see. The failures and destructiveness of their policies are now beyond deniability to affordable individuals, and so long as it is popular that progressivism was the driving force behind those policies, this episode will stain its track record and its core dogma that technocratic social coordinators holding “proper” ethical beliefs will conserve mankind from itself.
For that reason, it now seems likely the progressive elites who engineered and proselytized these disastrous public health policies will begin to distance themselves from those actions and eventually effort to paint a new history discharging their ideology from today’s failures. Approach teacher Alex Rosenberg argues in How History Gets Things Wrong that narrative histories often get the “why” of history wrong due to the fact that the narratives we spin about history, particularly popular histories, are normally motivated by our own moral causes. If true, perhaps even the “what” of history can be misshaped for the same factors.
As Murray Rothbard demonstrated in The Progressive Period, American progressivism was born of just this type of inspired ethical cause:
Progressivism was, to a terrific extent, the culmination of the pietist Protestant political impulse, the desire to regulate every element of American life, economic and moral– even the most intimate and crucial aspects of family life. But it was likewise a curious alliance of a technocratic drive for government guideline, the expected expression of “value-free science,” and the pietist religious impulse to conserve America– and the world– by state coercion … Their values, the extremely support and education of their children, were to be determined by their betters. The spiritual, biological, political, intellectual, and ethical elite would govern, through state power, the character and quality of American domesticity.
If today’s progressives are the inheritors of this combined sense of moral and intellectual supremacy, then it stands to factor that going forward they will bitterly withstand association of their ideology with the present ethical and intellectual failures that their covid policies represent. They will be morally inspired to recast their ideology as having been on the “right side of history” and to reword the history that will become taught to those too young to have endured the occasions themselves.
Those who would oppose this rewording of history should for that reason watch for methods it might performed over the next few generations.
Initially, business media outlets and the interactions departments of public health agencies may progressively distance themselves from their own bad policies. This has actually currently begun. They may try to cover their retreat by saying the “science has actually changed” or that the current viral variant warrants a lighter federal government response.
Despite what they have stated over the previous two years, and how vehemently and censoriously they have said it, ultimately all significant media and public health companies will be on record as having opposed further lockdowns and vaccine or mask requireds. If absolutely nothing else, they will still supervise when covid hysteria finally does end for excellent, and ending those policies will be their main last word. If they are able to choose their legacy, it will not be that of the preceding 2 years, in which they championed those policies, but that of their last act of ending them.
Second, for a number of years after covid, while individuals still clearly remember who pushed these policies, we can think of progressive commentators referring to those policies not as things they supported, but as things that were done by “America” or by “society.” This will be “a time for healing,” not a time for blame. Such statements might not even be intentionally misleading. It is just simpler on a person’s conscience to refer to a consequential error as something “all of us did” instead of as something “I promoted.” Intentionally or not, if the weight of public discourse earnings this way, the general public memory of who supported those policies will have currently begun to warp.
Third, the very first textbooks to discuss the covid era from the perspective of history, a history which will have to yield the disastrous consequences of the policies that were carried out, will read by kids who were not yet alive or were too young to bear in mind it. This will be the very first generation to form an understanding of the covid period who did not live through it themselves.
While a historical narrative that does not point out the function progressives played in pressing lockdown, mask, and vaccine mandates would seem clearly incorrect to those of us who lived through them, it would not stick out to those who did not. And if minds are adequately softened throughout the instant postcovid age, in which the public discourse will diffuse blame, those who did live through the covid era may not observe this omission from their kids’s history books or may not care enough to correct it.
Those history books will likely consist of two broad realities, both of which will be as real as they will be misleading. First, they will say lockdowns, mask requireds, and the advancement of the mandated vaccine all started throughout the Republican politician Trump presidency. Second, they will likely have the ability to say those policies were all ended throughout the Democratic Biden presidency. These facts will associate in the minds of a generation the start of such policies with a politician connected to conservatism (which libertarianism will be lumped into) and the discontinuation of those policies with a politician linked to progressivism.
Only time will tell whether anything like this will really take place, however history appears to suggest it likely will. The number of people today know that America’s past experiments in Prohibition, ethnic discrimination, and eugenics were all as soon as fervent policies of progressivism!.?.!? And in many methods it already seems to have actually started: only days after a Johns Hopkins University study discovered that lockdowns triggered even more damage than good, the Biden administration declared it has “not been pro-lockdown; that has actually not been his agenda– the majority of the lockdowns really happened under the previous President.”
Withstanding this ideological propensity to reword the history of today’s public health policy errors– not as a petty exercise in celebrating over others’ failures, but as a method to assist future generations prevent the next set of destructive progressive concepts– requires us to be conscious today of how that rewriting of history might start and to be prepared to inform the public on what has actually been left out once it does.