The Backwards Populist Narrative on Covid

Attributing blame for our overreaction to the pandemic

In the last several years, I’ve often thought that the reaction to Covid provided the best case for populism and throwing in completely with the Trump-era Republican Party. I believe that the vast majority of non-pharmaceutical interventions like masking, school closures, and shutdowns were extremely damaging and nowhere close to being cost-benefit justified, that this was clear pretty early on, and it was especially true and obvious after vaccines became available.

Many on the right present the pandemic as the moment they lost their innocence and realized how bad the people who rule over us are. Conservative influencer Auron MacIntyre, for example, writes the following in the introduction of his book The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Became Tyrannies.

Americans did not want to live like this forever. A large percentage of the population was ready to get back to normal and take whatever risks might come. The experts who had locked down the entire country were drunk on the incredible power they had amassed in the space of only a few months and had no interest in letting it go.

MacIntyre is careful not to say that most Americans wanted to get back to normal, but the general story is one in which perfidious elites forced their preferences onto a reluctant nation. This is a fairly typical origin story on the right. Covid restrictions and mandates were key to both Elon Musk and Joe Rogan turning towards Trump, and they were by far the two most significant individuals added to his coalition in the years leading up to the 2024 election.

The problem with this narrative is that it gets things almost completely backwards. Elites seem to have been more eager to return to normal than the masses, who, according to polls, wanted more extensive and longer-lasting measures to fight Covid than the policies actually adopted in any American jurisdiction. Moreover, the public in subsequent years has not changed its view on these matters in light of new information. The masses were never yearning for freedom. They were in fact begging for government to exercise even more control over their lives in the name of safety, and elites only gave them part of what they wanted.