Opinion | How Will Blue America Live With Covid? – The New York Times

Then there are blue-state elementary schools, where some of the constituencies that support mask requirements may not be assuaged even after vaccines are available for younger kids. At that point, according to both polls and personal experience, there will still be lots of vaccine hesitancy among even liberal parents and you could imagine a coalition of more Covid-fearing parents and teachers unions demanding masking requirements until a school hits a vaccination threshold that remains perpetually out of reach.

Already on certain college campuses you can see a version of this permanent-seeming abnormalcy. Even with vaccine requirements for the faculty and students, some schools have tried to layer on miniature medical surveillance states, with constant testing and exacting masking rules. (At the University of Southern California, The Wall Street Journal reported recently, students must leave classrooms to take a sip of water, rather than just sliding their masks down. ) Students and their parents have successfully pushed back against some of the creepier measures a wearable bio button to monitor heart rates and other health indicators at one university, a location-tracking app at another. But the spirit of bio-surveillance fits in nicely with the larger trend toward a kind of supervisory progressivism in campus life, with the attempted bureaucratic regulation of speech and sex, the tech-enabled monitoring of on-campus movement and communication. And if Covid is endemic, if the risk of outbreaks persists indefinitely, it s not clear that these biopolitical experiments will automatically fade away.

Especially since the culture of deep-blue America is caught up in the same toxic feedback loops of polarization as deep-red America. If certain forms of Republican insouciance about Covid are forged in the fires of cultural resentment, in which you reject Faucian micromanagement by ditching masks and refusing the vaccine, certain forms of liberal overregulation seem forged in fear of red American contagion in which we just have to mask our kids indefinitely, even though many other developed countries aren t doing it, because we need to set an example of seriousness to shame all those red-state anti-maskers.

via www.nytimes.com

Ross Douthat.