The Great Confinement

You may have already figured it out, but I do not go in for political prognostication. Thus, when I read Arthur Herman’s prophecy of massive Republican gains in the 2022 Congressional elections, I am curious, but not entirely persuaded.

Herman’s analysis, impeccable in many ways, draws an analogy between America in 2022 and America in 1932. Since America rejected Republicans in 1932, he suggests that it might well reject Democrats in 2022.

For all I know, he may be right. But, my own crystal ball is somewhat fogged over these days, so I will not offer my own predictions.

I have another, more substantive reason for reporting on Herman’s Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning. In it, he suggests that the populace is turning against the party of government because the Biden administration, coupled with government bureaucrats and scientists has been so singularly inept in dealing with the Covid pandemic.

Perhaps symbolized by the ineptitude of the Biden administration-- that model of diversity, inclusion and equity-- government ineptitude was also on display during the Trump administration effort to deal with the virus.

 

As the Great Depression destroyed the American electorate’s faith in Wall Street and big business, sweeping in a Democrat-dominated political order, so too has the “Great Confinement”—in the form of lockdowns, shutdowns and mandates—wrecked faith in the basic competence of American government. As in 1932, the party out of power stands to benefit.

The policy, from America to Britain to Australia and New Zealand, has been what Herman calls, correctly, the Great Confinement. Governments around the world went into full panic mode and exercised their power to shut down their countries. That is, to shut down business, to shut down schools, to shut down offices and to shut down public meetings. Apparently, they wanted to exercise their own authority and to show who was really in charge.

It was an historical first. Industrialized nations closed down their economies, en masse:

For the first time in history the leading industrialized nations decided to close their economies and order citizens to stay home for months at a time. They shuttered schools and businesses, imposed mask and vaccine mandates, and disrupted virtually every institution on which modern life depends.

They were in panic mode. And they were doing so without any consideration for the fallout. They failed to consider the damage to the mental health of children from school shutdowns. They failed to consider the damage to toddlers from mask mandates. They failed to consider that adolescents would be more depressed and suicidal. And they failed to consider the impact on the economy.

Unfortunately, the Great Confinement didn’t work. It neither failed to stem the spread of Covid nor prevented large numbers of deaths. In many cases—the New York nursing-home horror being only one of the most extreme examples—it may have made the suffering worse. The governments responsible for the Great Confinement managed to do lasting damage to their nations’ economies. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, the global economy could suffer up to $35 trillion in losses by 2025.

It was almost like a Green Wet Dream. The irrational fear that Nature was punishing us for mass industrialization produced a regimen whereby we were being called on to sacrifice our lives, and our children’s lives, in order to atone for our sins-- and, not incidentally, to save the planet.

In the Journal of the American Medical Association, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Harvard Professor David Cutler called Covid “the greatest threat to prosperity and well-being the U.S. has encountered since the Great Depression.” They estimated the economic cost of the pandemic could run as high as $16 trillion—with barely a quarter ($4.4 trillion) attributed to premature deaths from Covid itself. At the same time, trillions of dollars in government spending to compensate for lost jobs and lost livelihoods has added fuel to another epidemic: inflation—the worst in 40 years.

From the psychological point of view, the government, especially the philosopher king bureaucrats who refuse to accept any opinion that does not correlate with theirs, decided that it was necessary to impose itself on the populace at large. This involved discrediting alternative policy proposals and also forcing people to take vaccines.

While the nation’s pseudo-intelligentsia is all in with the notion that if only we could rid the world of disinformation, all would be well, and people would naturally do the right thing-- see yesterday’s post-- the reality is, people who feel that they are being coerced to do something, by government or by managers, will most often pushback. They will, in the interest of saving face, reject the imposition.

Herman described government overreach:

The pandemic tempted governments and their elite allies to treat citizens as passive objects to be dictated to, bullied and coerced en masse—an attitude not unlike that found in China, Cuba and North Korea—instead of as active thinking subjects with whom government is in partnership. With few exceptions (the Nordic countries are the best examples), governments failed to find ways to affirm that despite the pandemic, citizens were still individuals imbued with inalienable rights and independent moral standing. This is, after all, how most people see themselves in modern society—as free autonomous beings rather than as laboratory rats in a series of social science experiments.

When people recall the pandemic, they will, Herman argues, be less likely to recall the virus and more likely to recall the damage done to their children, from school shutdowns. They will recall the damage done to the careers of parents who had to stay home to help their children with schoolwork.

They will remember that at a time when they needed government to provide leadership and sanity, its officials became hysterical and decided that they needed to take over the country. It was, dare we say, a coup.

What people will remember from this extraordinary episode isn’t the experience of Covid itself, terrible though that’s been. It will be the ineptitude and incompetence of governing institutions that are supposed to protect citizens—and the indifference, as this was happening, of the media and scientific establishment.

And, let’s not forget the spike in urban violent crime. And also, as we have often noted on this blog, the extraordinary dereliction of schoolteachers.

In the U.S., the Great Confinement has left scars on the national psyche comparable to the effects of the Great Depression. This loss of faith has been compounded by government failure to deal with spiking violent-crime rates and the shocking dereliction of duty on the part of the nation’s teachers. Children and families feel as if they’ve been left stranded by the school systems they pay for with their tax dollars.