Thank you, Anthony, for responding to this piece, which was indeed contradictory and confounding. On the one hand, he appeared to be lauding lockdowns as an effective policy (especially if they are "hard" enough), while also acknowledging their unsustainability, and the great harms of their companion, school closures. The latter should have led him to a less myopic consideration, namely the fact that even if hard lockdowns prevented some Covid deaths pre-vaccine (i.e. "saved lives"), they surely cost orders of magnitude more lost life years in the long run, due to lost education and livelihoods.
I also missed an explicit acknowledgment in Yglesias' piece of the fact that lockdowns are an intrinsically authoritarian policy, which indeed is most naturally implemented by a right-wing government, making the Left's support for them all the more peculiar and disappointing.
As you say, would liberals have supported quarantine camps along the Mexican border? Of course not, but somehow they had no issue restricting the educational and social rights of children, and closing down public life and promoting "social distancing" in a way that even if not considered a hard lockdown, still did profound damage to social cohesion and economic prosperity, while at best protecting those who could comfortably work from home. The myopia of this approach was indeed evident early on, and we will pay for it for decades. Yglesias' piece does not inspire confidence that the mistake will not be repeated.
"I also missed an explicit acknowledgment in Yglesias' piece of the fact that lockdowns are an intrinsically authoritarian policy, which indeed is most naturally implemented by a right-wing government, making the Left's support for them all the more peculiar and disappointing."
Yes, that would have been useful to include. I was impressed that Jacobin published some critiques of lockdowns from left-leaning perspectives.
Your point about the United States is insightful. While some members of the "laptop class" saw expanded freedoms during the pandemic (i.e. the ability to work from Cancun or Wyoming), some of the most vulnerable in our society -- including children from low-income households -- had their lives dramatically restricted for years.
I also worry that many of our elite pundits (i.e. those like Yglesias read in the White House) don't seem to understand that harsh Covid lockdowns involved unacceptable violations of basic human rights.
I'm afraid they still believe that "saving lives" justifies restricting life on a broad scale, under the assumption that it would be for a limited time, and that the price is only a temporary loss of quality of life (problematic in itself given the fact that life is short and always precarious). But that's where the issue of myopia comes in - lockdowns both cost lives in the present (missed medical care, increased substance abuse, etc.), and will cost many more life years in the future. The failure of leaders (and of society at large) to consider and understand this is what is truly worrying.
Thank you, Anthony, for responding to this piece, which was indeed contradictory and confounding. On the one hand, he appeared to be lauding lockdowns as an effective policy (especially if they are "hard" enough), while also acknowledging their unsustainability, and the great harms of their companion, school closures. The latter should have led him to a less myopic consideration, namely the fact that even if hard lockdowns prevented some Covid deaths pre-vaccine (i.e. "saved lives"), they surely cost orders of magnitude more lost life years in the long run, due to lost education and livelihoods.
I also missed an explicit acknowledgment in Yglesias' piece of the fact that lockdowns are an intrinsically authoritarian policy, which indeed is most naturally implemented by a right-wing government, making the Left's support for them all the more peculiar and disappointing.
As you say, would liberals have supported quarantine camps along the Mexican border? Of course not, but somehow they had no issue restricting the educational and social rights of children, and closing down public life and promoting "social distancing" in a way that even if not considered a hard lockdown, still did profound damage to social cohesion and economic prosperity, while at best protecting those who could comfortably work from home. The myopia of this approach was indeed evident early on, and we will pay for it for decades. Yglesias' piece does not inspire confidence that the mistake will not be repeated.
"I also missed an explicit acknowledgment in Yglesias' piece of the fact that lockdowns are an intrinsically authoritarian policy, which indeed is most naturally implemented by a right-wing government, making the Left's support for them all the more peculiar and disappointing."
Yes, that would have been useful to include. I was impressed that Jacobin published some critiques of lockdowns from left-leaning perspectives.
Your point about the United States is insightful. While some members of the "laptop class" saw expanded freedoms during the pandemic (i.e. the ability to work from Cancun or Wyoming), some of the most vulnerable in our society -- including children from low-income households -- had their lives dramatically restricted for years.
I also worry that many of our elite pundits (i.e. those like Yglesias read in the White House) don't seem to understand that harsh Covid lockdowns involved unacceptable violations of basic human rights.
I'm afraid they still believe that "saving lives" justifies restricting life on a broad scale, under the assumption that it would be for a limited time, and that the price is only a temporary loss of quality of life (problematic in itself given the fact that life is short and always precarious). But that's where the issue of myopia comes in - lockdowns both cost lives in the present (missed medical care, increased substance abuse, etc.), and will cost many more life years in the future. The failure of leaders (and of society at large) to consider and understand this is what is truly worrying.
Yes, this is why I would like a bipartisan pandemic response commission to take place.
There was at least one other country with a 100+ million population that attempted Zero Covid: Vietnam.
(Although of course they are another communist dictatorship like China.)
I was also troubled to see democracies I (mostly) really respect force authoritarian Covid policies on their citizens.