An interesting point, in fairness – if I may.
There is no sense in which Sweden did terribly badly. No one, least of all myself, advanced this case. The point is that the right wing – all along the spectrum from the Daily Telegraph to The Spectator to Spiked to Twitter loons – seized on Sweden as supposed proof that no economic hit need be taken. ‘Sweden’ became a shibboleth for the idea that you could apply, be it in Belgium or in Botswana, a portable paradigm for non lockdown or a lockdown so flimsy as hardly to register in economic terms.
Specious guff about ‘excess deaths’ soon became part of the same parcel. To think beyond long established patterns in this regard involved recognizing humankind cannot control everything by sheer force of will. This reality disturbs all right wingers and disturbs most of all the loon contingent, because for them not just money is at stake but also their psyche, because of the personality alibi factor.
Said parcel’s knots unravelled, under force of events, and that shibboleth soon became a chimera. But the right believe stubbornness is next to righteousness and could not – would not – absorb lessons learned on the ground. The Barrington Declaration – a clusterfuck of shills for climate change-denying uber loons – codified said stubbornness.
Present scenarios, while vertiginously complex in most ways, have always been in one way quite straightforward:
A — B — C
A: pandemic.
C: normal society (which everyone, bar god knows whom, wants).
The question: how do we get from A to C?
My mind was always open and pragmatic. But the reality is that the loons took B to be ‘herd immunity through rampant infection’. Depending on mood, they bluster or they obfuscate on the topic. But this B route has been their settled preference for over 12 months.
I genuinely think a lot of them, desensitized by video games in youth, were excited in a strange sense by the prospect. And a lot of them, which or whether, are just angry nasty people, a category in which you do not seem to fall, just people in search of a personality alibi. They want to think they are winning and thriving because other people are losing and suffering.
There was a never a chance this version of B would be chosen as portal. Not in the slightest. Why? Because populist politics – and the right, in its top reaches, is always a velvet populism – is forever hinged on mob emotion. Even King Loon himself, Dominic Cummings, quickly sidelined that inflection of B, after politically self-preserving thought got taken. Populism and avoidable deaths, after all, are oil and water. The stupid are the first to turn on their prior masters, since the stupid, by definition, are the truest believers.
Some people on TFK, including its loudest loons, do not have the first grasp of the political issues and the ethical issues involved in footstomping about the economic issues. First off, can a society that tiered itaelf in emergency times, sloughing off certain citizens on medical criteria, ever resume prior normality on this front? No, I would say, with sound reason. That society would have watermarked itself with poison for at least three generations.
The same truth is there about the state’s equal duty of care to all of its citizens, irrespective of age or medical condition. While alive, you are a citizen. An economy can recover. Undermining citizenship is in no way so amenable to time’s hand. And these loons think they are conservatives…
