It must be so nice to be a Democrat and have a dependable voice like Paul Krugman’s in the country’s most important newspaper to rewrite history in your favor.
Krugman this week laughably claimed that the dumb controversy over widespread mask-wearing is the fault of President Trump deliberately polarizing the issue for political reasons. “Anti-mask agitation isn’t really about freedom, or individualism, or culture,” he wrote. “It’s a declaration of political allegiance, driven by Trump and his allies.”
He said that Trump’s “latest ploy” at convincing voters “that the Covid-19 threat is over” is his lack of enthusiasm for mask use.
Setting aside that there still remains no proof that wearing masks dramatically reduces the spread of a virus that results in a very minor infection for the overwhelming majority of people, how would anyone be under the impression that “the Covid-19 threat is over”? The media would never allow that.
CNN is still keeping a meaningless total of cases and deaths that goes back six months plastered on the screen, even as we’ve seen both numbers plummet since April, especially among people under the age of 65. In the week of Aug. 8, the last week for which Centers for Disease Control data is complete, the United States saw just over 7,000 deaths. That is down from the week of April 18, our worst week, when there were 17,000.
That indicates that the virus is being managed more successfully, which is more to the credit of advancements in treatment than it is to masks.
Regardless of whether masks work or not, the reason masks had such a sputtering start in the U.S. isn’t because Trump voters wanted to send a strong signal of their support for the president. It’s because health experts initially told us they didn’t do a thing to protect against transmission of the virus and because Democrats were insistent that nothing outside of indefinite economic shutdown, unlimited testing, and nationwide contact tracing would work to stop the spread.
So no, Democrats were not mask advocates. But they were and remain shutdown advocates.
Early polls showed that most people were completely fine with the mask. This changed as people realized that an entire political party just wanted everyone to sit inside indefinitely and accept no risk trade-offs — to wait for some elusive cure that in all likelihood will never come.
For the mask, it wasn’t until liberals realized that there was no stopping people from attempting to return to some everyday activity, out of both financial necessity and for the sake of their own sanity, that they started waving face covers around and using them to shame Republican governors who weren’t requiring them in public.
True, Trump didn’t help. He made fun of Joe Biden for wearing something that, even if it turns out to be 1% effective in reducing transmission, would have been worth it. But it’s a fantasy in Krugman’s mind that Democrats weren’t the first to politicize the little piece of fabric and turn it into a metaphor for their distaste for the president.
