Please Plan to Get Back to Normal

Consider setting an actual standard to get out of the 9/11 mentality

I really don’t want this to be the Journal Of Banging On Endlessly About Covid-19, but at the same time, it’s a bit hard to not bang on endlessly about it, given how it dominates so much of the #Discourse. Which just goes endlessly round in circles, in a way that’s really exhausting. It sucks up so much mental energy, though, that it’s hard to do anything else.

There have been a couple of Substack posts on the general topic in the last few days that really struck a chord for me. The first of these was from Freddie deBoer, comparing a lot of the current conversation to the George W. Bush years:

Forgive me if this others have made this comparison, but it’s remarkable how this moment echoes that one in the obsession with mutual surveillance and moral hygiene, all enforced with constant reference to a real crisis and imagined dangers. It’s not just the serial overreactions, the threatening intensity, the constant reference to dramatically worse events supposedly yet to come. It’s the feeling of mandatory panic, the insistence that anyone who does not allow the crisis to dominate their internal life is somehow guilty of causing it, the desire to blame a disaster on people who are thought to not take it seriously enough. This self-impressed doomsaying reminds me so much of the people who constantly said, after 9/11, that al Qaeda was all around us, that the big attack was yet to come, that sleeper cells planned to nuke shopping malls…. 9/11, too, produced a type of proud Cassandra, haughty and contemptuous, who simply lived to let the rest of us know that the rest of us just aren’t serious enough, who believed that the crisis meant that every single moment of our lives was now a character test, one that we failed if we did exist in a permanent state of anxiety and fear.

That’s maybe a touch hyperbolic, as is his signature style, but I think he’s at least adjacent to something real there. It’s not an analogy that had occurred to me before, but having read that, I can’t un-see it.

A related aspect that had occurred to me is that a lot of this conversation is very much of a piece with a kind of all-encompassing focus on personal improvement that seems to have taken over a lot of liberal-to-leftist politics in a way that often becomes counterproductive. Covid is the current most dramatic example, with the insistence that the primary thing we need is a kind of personal sacrifice: you must forgo going out to eat, you must wear an N95 mask any time you leave the house, etc., you must berate people online who don’t agree. But there are similar elements to the politics of climate change— you need to stop eating meat and take cold showers in the dark— and racial justice— you need to acknowledge and apologize for the racist history of our society.

This is not to say that those individual activities aren’t good things to do in isolation, but there’s a kind of rhetorical focus on them that can be really off-putting, in a way that feels kind of religious. Some of the exhortations to personal action come off a bit like a street preacher demanding that passers-by acknowledge their fallen state and accept Jesus as their personal savior. That emphasis on the expiation of personal sin through personal sacrifices pushes away some of the people who need to be brought along in order to achieve the larger-scale political changes that are actually necessary to make any significant progress.

To put it in terms that parallel de Boer’s analogy to the post-9/11 era, there are aspects of this politics that remind me of the Bush-era battles over symbolic language— dumb fights over denouncing “radical Islamist terrorism” and the like. As if we could get everyone on board with using a particular set of magic words (or not using them) would make intractable global political problems suddenly tractable.

The other post that clicked with me over the last few days was from Matt Yglesias, about getting back to “normal.” Yglesias (also characteristically) was calmer and wonkier than de Boer, and down toward the end of the post, he suggests an actual plan of sorts:

Joe Biden is very unpopular now, even though most of the individual ideas in Build Back Better poll well, and (more tellingly, in my view) there’s basically no grassroots mobilization against those ideas.

That, in turn, has generated a weird cottage industry of calls for him to do a “Sister Souljah moment” against someone or other, which I think is a very confused idea.

What he should do is forcefully articulate a pathway for re-normalization, and he should do some Biden coalition-building stuff and do it in conjunction with some other key actors. The president can’t order K-12 schools to change their quarantine rules. But the Secretary of Education can make it clear to the NEA and AFT that unless they enthusiastically agree to a return to normal schooling for next year, the White House is going to go nuclear on them. Then there can be a happy joint announcement with the Education Department, the CDC, and a bunch of education leaders that practices will vary district by district for this spring, but by next fall students aren’t wearing masks or doing quarantines.

Then the administration can set a date much earlier than the beginning of the fall school year and make that the day that the mask mandate for airplanes, Amtrak, and federal buildings ends. They can coordinate with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to do the same for Congress.

(Kind of a long blockquote, but not as a fraction of the original…)

I don’t know that I agree with every detail of this— I’m not sure what it would even mean to “go nuclear” on national teachers’ unions— but the general outline is good. We should have some sort of plan for getting back to “normal.” I don’t know that I’d argue for a date certain as opposed to some set of criteria— when case counts or the number of people in ICUs for Covid drops below some threshold, then we lift restrictions— but I absolutely agree with Yglesias that articulating an actual plan would do an enormous amount of good. Maybe not necessarily for Biden’s approval rating (and Democratic prospects in the midterms), but for the peace of mind of those of us who are trying to do the right thing, but getting tired of it all.

I also basically agree with him about the importance of mask rules, at least as a symbol of the state of panic. I don’t think they’re nearly as big a deal as a lot of folks do— my kids have adapted to wearing masks all day a whole lot better than they adapted to remote school— but they’re annoying (wearing a KN95 does not enhance the experience of sitting in a boring meeting), and a visible reminder of things being not normal. (A point also made by Josh Barro regarding perceptions of the economy.) I would particularly favor some sort of clear plan and standard for removing mask requirements for retail workers, who are suffering this way more than most of us in the commentariat.

(I say this in large part because I think these requirements are mostly symbolic, anyway— I doubt that sweating in an ill-fitting KN95 is actually saving the life of anyone pulling an eight-hour shift in Starbucks. It’s mostly just making the more Covid-cautious of their customers feel slightly safer. But then, my long-standing contention has been that the primary public health benefit of masks is that they make it annoying to be out and about in crowds, so people do less going out and about. that’s not really an option for most of the service industry, though.)

At the same time— and you knew there was going to be an “at the same time…”— I would also generally agree that the back-to-normal plan needs to be a plan, not an immediate dropping of rules. The graph at the top of this post is from the New York State dashboard showing case counts over time for the Capital Region, where I live, showing that the situation has improved dramatically in the last couple of weeks— we’re now back to where we were in December. But the case levels in December were still quite a bit higher than back in the summer, uncomfortably so. We’ve got a while yet before it’s time to throw all the masks and restrictions off.

But that’s yet another reason to have a clearly stated plan for getting out of this. Endlessly extending mask mandates and other restrictions, even by just a couple of weeks at a time, is wearying. It would be a whole lot easier to continue to put up with the annoyance of KN95s at all times if there were some clear standard for when they can come off. Not a date (though that would be nice), because circumstances could change between now and then, but some threshold level that, when a line on a graph drops below it triggers a lifting of restrictions. And likewise, a standard that when the line goes above it, various levels restrictions come back.

I’m honestly a little surprised that, two years into this nonsense, we still don’t have anything like a clear standard threshold for restrictions. Only a little, though, because I suspect the problem has a lot to do with the culture of public health authorities, who are professionally risk-averse, and would’ve liked for everyone to already have been wearing N95 masks through flu season back in 2018. The institutions that represent “The Science” here are thus biased toward pushing any kind of threshold impractically close to zero. And, of course, many of the folks on the other side of the argument are absolute lunatics that nobody wants to be associated with if they can help it. So we keep bumbling along with “just six more weeks…” endlessly, at least in states under Democratic control, because nobody’s willing to commit to overruling the hypercautious.

(Which again, lines up with de Boer’s 9/11 analogy, and the unending ritual of removing shoes at the airport security screening, because the professional paranoids who staff security agencies want it to continue, and nobody facing an election wants to stand up to them…)

Anyway, for the infinitesimal good it will do, I endorse Matt Yglesias’s call for Joe Biden (or, failing that, Kathy Hochul) to develop and articulate an actual plan for getting “back to normal.” Even if it doesn’t go into effect immediately, having some kind of standard to look at would do wonders for peace of mind.

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Anyway, that’s rambling and cranky, but hopefully clears the way for me to think about other things, at least for a little while. Here are some buttons:

And the comments section will be open. I’m going to try to get one last ski run in before this snow melts and is replaced.