I think the first time I noticed America’s political class divide when I was doing my first talk show, at KSTP, way back when. I made the, um, profound observation that while the American Left had always sought a “class war” in which they – or at least the garden variety of “they” – saw themselves as the little guy revolting against the Leviathan, in at least one contest, the gun control “debate”, they were in fact the patricians, trying to keep the plebs in line.
I was young and naive. Literally every cultural argument breaks down on those lines, down to the rhetoric Big Left uses.
And that class war’s biggest flashpoints in recent years were Brexit in Europe, and Donald Trump in the US. The Big Government response to Covid was an extension of that skirmish.
Which brings us to this weeks’ most interesting story, the argument over the case for or against Amnesty for the culture-war criminals.
Speaking to the case against “Covid Amnesty”, I present this piece from Unherd. Or rather, one part of a huge case for, not “amnesty”, but truth and reconciliation.
It was a salvo in the class war – America’s patrician class’s way of getting the plebs back for Brexit and Trump.
One of many “money” pullquotes:
Public faith in objectively shared political ground was already dissolving while my daughter gestated. If the Virtuals have a problem now, it’s that their counter-volley to Trump and Brexit consumed the last vestige of trust in that shared political ground: our faith in science. And the notion that such ground exists is the sine qua non of Virtual political legitimacy in its current technocratic form.
In this light, Oster’s call for amnesty can present itself as an effort to rebuild the neutral space of shared political endeavour after a period of conflict. But it reads as a continuation of now-familiar efforts to weaponise the appearance of such neutrality and common purpose, in the interests of one side of that conflict.
We all knew every pandemic policy would come with trade-offs. The lawn-sign [the “In This House…” mob – Ed.] priesthood forbade any discussion of those trade-offs. I don’t blame the class that so piously dressed their own material interests as the common good, for wanting to dodge the baleful looks now coming their way. But no “amnesty” will be possible that doesn’t acknowledge the class politics, the corruption of scientific process, the self-dealing, and the self-righteousness that went to enforcing those grim years of lawn-sign tyranny.
The whole thing is worth a read.
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