Many progressives embraced Covid-era abnormality as a catalyst for revolutionary social change. They’re having a hard time letting go now.
Many progressives embraced Covid-era abnormality as a catalyst for revolutionary social change. They’re having a hard time letting go now.
G allup’s pollsters published a troubling discovery on Tuesday in a survey asking American adults how they were coping with post-pandemic life: For a shocking number of Americans, there is no such thing as post-pandemic life.
In the last week of February, only 33 percent of Americans said their life “is completely back to normal,” post-Covid, up modestly from October’s 31 percent. Another 20 percent said that while returning to the status quo ante was possible, it hadn’t happened for them yet. But most — 47 percent — said their lives had not returned to normal and never would.
Partisanship plays a substantial role here. Only one-third of self-identified Republicans had given up hope that “normal” would ever return, while a majority insisted that it already had. By contrast, 53 percent of Democratic respondents said “normal” was a thing of the past, and under one-quarter of them said the pandemic was fully behind them.
The number of Americans who say that “normal” will never return has not budged since October 2022, remaining static even as the external conditions supposedly responsible for that pessimistic outlook changed dramatically for the better.
At the beginning of that month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped publishing data on Covid cases and Covid-related deaths after more than two years, shifting to weekly virus-tracking updates instead. Dr. Anthony Fauci cited a “considerable diminution” in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths to justify the CDC’s move, which followed similar moves made by multiple state-level health departments. Norwegian Cruise Lines, one of the few remaining commercial institutions with restrictions against unvaccinated customers still on its books, dropped that prohibition and stopped requiring passengers to wear masks or test for infection before boarding on October 3. A few weeks later, Governor Gavin Newsom revealed that he would not renew California’s Covid-19 state of emergency, noting that the threat posed by the virus had become “a manageable situation.” Near the end of the month, a state court in New York reinstated with benefits and back pay the 16 sanitation workers who had been let go for failing to comply with New York City’s vaccination mandate.
All of which is to say that a rational consumer of Covid-related news in October 2022 would have concluded that the risk posed by the virus had become negligible. And it’s not as if Covid-related developments have gotten any worse since; indeed, the coronavirus that paralyzed the planet in early 2020 barely registers as a subject of much news coverage today.
Nor can we assume that the number of Americans who believe “normal” is now just a happy memory are enthusiastic about their new normal, especially since Gallup’s results so closely correspond to respondents’ partisan affiliations. Another Gallup poll published last week revealed that a staggering number of Democrats believe the pandemic is still with us.
Forty-two percent of self-described Democratic voters told Gallup pollsters in the last week of February that they don’t believe the situation surrounding Covid is “improving.” Thirty-six percent still worry about their risk of infection. Fifty-five percent say they self-isolate “at least a little” from non-household members, and 48 percent say they still wear facemasks outside their homes. All this among a demographic with a self-reported vaccination rate of 82 percent.
The phenomenon Gallup measured has little to do with the virus or the relative risk it presents to the public. It doesn’t seem especially correlated even to conventional politics. After all, these rank-and-file Democrats have simply disregarded the cues their party’s elected officials have been sending for months in relation to the pandemic. They have developed a fraught relationship with what they believe constituted “normal” in the before-time. And that should not come as much of a surprise.
A conscientious reader of center-left thought during and after the pandemic might conclude that this is a desirable attitude for Democratic voters to hold. After all, the pre-pandemic normal was just not good enough.
“There is no getting ‘back to normal,’” the “experts” asked by CNN’s reporters said in September 2020. “The sooner we accept that, the better.” Trend-setters in progressive media agreed. By May 2021, with “normal” rushing back to the fore, CNN’s Melissa Mahtani advised readers to “keep,” “build upon,” or just “create a new normal — better than the one before.”
That same month, Vox.com’s Sigal Samuel confessed, “Many of us are also feeling anxious about returning to normal, having realized that our pre-pandemic lives contained a lot that we’re better off without.” Samuel’s informal poll of Vox readers found many were overcome with anxiety over the prospect of returning to pre-pandemic social life and resuming the commute to work. And, of course, pre-pandemic life was insufficiently attuned to American society’s nagging ills — from systemic racial discrimination to insufficient regard for those who struggle with disabilities and mental-health issues.
“Normal” in the years that preceded the pandemic was not good enough for women, and “women of color, in particular,” according to the Harvard Business Review’s Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg. “Normal” was not good enough for American students, or at least not for those who weren’t “getting their academic or socio-emotional needs met,” and whose educations “didn’t align with what they wanted for themselves,” Boston-area teacher Neema Avashia told WBUR. And “normal” wasn’t good enough for the White House. “We really expect Biden to go above and beyond just getting back to normal,” said Lisa Rosenberg, the executive director of government-accountability watchdog Open the Government, while mourning Joe Biden’s pivot to the bad, old “normal.” Of course, going “back to normal” would be the worst possible outcome for American minorities, according to any number of American politicians.
It would be bizarre if average Democratic voters had never once encountered, much less internalized, these moral exhortations to reject normalcy as it was defined before a once-in-a-century plague imposed some temporary revisions to the status quo. How many of the adults in Gallup’s surveys who believe “normal” is never coming back despite the lack of environmental obstacles to its restoration subscribe to this neurosis? We can’t say. But it’s unlikely to be none.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, his critics routinely condemned his personal excesses and those of his administration by insisting that the condition the nation found itself in was “not normal.” Many of those same figures pivoted during the pandemic to embracing abnormality because it served as a catalyst for revolutionary societal change. And their co-partisans seem to have developed some psychological resistance to post-pandemic normalcy as a result.