[Freddie deBoer] Covid as Liberal 9/11:" Covid is not over, or have you forgotten?"

Forgive me if this others have made this comparison, but it’s remarkable how this moment echoes that one in the obsession with mutual surveillance and moral hygiene, all enforced with constant reference to a real crisis and imagined dangers. It’s not just the serial overreactions, the threatening intensity, the constant reference to dramatically worse events supposedly yet to come. It’s the feeling of mandatory panic, the insistence that anyone who does not allow the crisis to dominate their internal life is somehow guilty of causing it, the desire to blame a disaster on people who are thought to not take it seriously enough. This self-impressed doomsaying reminds me so much of the people who constantly said, after 9/11, that al Qaeda was all around us, that the big attack was yet to come, that sleeper cells planned to nuke shopping malls…. 9/11, too, produced a type of proud Cassandra, haughty and contemptuous, who simply lived to let the rest of us know that the rest of us just aren’t serious enough, who believed that the crisis meant that every single moment of our lives was now a character test, one that we failed if we did exist in a permanent state of anxiety and fear.

Ours is a discursive atmosphere in which (a year into the pandemic) a mainstream magazine published a piece where the author gradually became more and more convinced by a legitimately deranged prepper’s rantings about Covid as the end of days. (When said deranged prepper says “SARS-2-CoV-19 is to the human race what an asteroid was to the dinosaurs,” the author says that this prediction is likely half-right, then suggests it may be even closer than that.) People openly salivate over the prospect of another, more virulent strain. They do! Look on social media. The sheer white-knuckled excitement when they predict the next brutal wave…. These are ostensibly warnings but they sure sound like yearning to me. If 9/11 taught me anything it was that there is such a thing as a national mood, and that it can have serious consequences.

Covid-19, like 9/11, has functioned as all-encompassing excuses to justify the preferences of people who want those things anyway. After 9/11, the call went out that the country was soft and fat, that we were not sufficiently devoted to national defense, that we needed to be more aggressive in foreign affairs, and that the country had grown insufficiently nationalistic and militaristic, that we all needed to toughen up and salute the red, white, and blue. These were of course beliefs held by many conservatives long prior to 9/11, and they exploited the moment. The ritualistic expression of anger at those who wanted to live in a post-9/11 world was really the defense of a new regime. Now many on the left of the political spectrum are attempting to do something like the same, turn disaster into opportunity. Even if it’s merely the opportunity to do the only thing that gets them out of bed these days, the opportunity to judge others.

[...]

For those on the far left, I think, Covid has been particularly seductive. In the last several years I have watched as the nihilism and anger that have never been rare in the socialist left have metastasized, curdling into this terrible black pit in the heart of people who have ostensibly revolutionary politics but who believe that no positive change is possible. So many people I know, including many very good people, have given up; so many are resigned to the idea that the system cannot be reformed from inside. But they are also not so deluded as to think that armed revolution could possibly succeed. (As I am fond of reminding people, the state has satellites that can read your t-shirt from space.) So a lot of people who are ostensibly socialists and radicals have succumbed to this grinding nihilism, this black, lol-nothing-matters defeatism. And so they stock whatever’s left of their hopes in extreme events - in Charlottesville, which they insisted was the start of a new street war against fascism, all sense to the contrary; in January 6th, which they hoped might present them with the opportunity to resist a totalitarian government; in climate change, which they imagine will bring us a post-apocalyptic world of endless possibility, rather than the far more likely future of a hot and unpleasant and environmentally devastated world where the powers that be nevertheless still rule and where inequality only grows.

Then Covid came and, for a brief moment they convinced themselves that it was the big one at last, and everything was possible. Now they are forced to confront the fact that the system is more powerful even than a pandemic, and that no disaster is coming to save us from our miseries.