Republicans should continue to run against lockdowns
Timothy P. Carney
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COVID-19 is over, and the lockdowns and school closures are in the past. A lot of normal people don’t want to think about the weeks or months they spent fake-homeschooling their children, not seeing other families, avoiding their grandmother, and washing their groceries — because it’s all kind of shameful to think about.
So it’s tempting to think that no politicians should talk about them. After all, voters don’t vote on the past. They vote on the future.
WHAT WILL CHANGE NOW THAT BIDEN HAS ENDED THE COVID-19 NATIONAL EMERGENCY?
I agree that backward-facing issues cannot be the centerpiece of a political campaign. But the lockdowns and school closures ought to be part of the message for 2024 candidates as, in a sense, the lockdowns and closures continue to be with us.
Learning loss isn’t a thing of the past despite despicable efforts to pretend it’s not real. Parents, teachers, and students continue to suffer academically from what school districts did to them by making them stay at home in late 2020 and early 2021.
The anxiety and depression caused by the lockdowns also aren’t bygones. Isolating children from their friends, taking away their sports, clubs, and activities, filling them with an irrational fear of breathing — all of these things have left lasting harm on young psyches.
The crime wave is real, and the lockdowns are a major factor. Look at how the crimes on the rise are senseless, antisocial crimes such as carjackings that end in wrecks and felony assault. These are crimes not of desperation, but of alienation and sadness.
The politicians and bureaucrats who caused these harms continue to blame the coronavirus for the harms of their lockdown policies. Yes, the virus was absolutely devastating, but the virus isn’t running for reelection. The policymakers whose cowardly and uninformed policies harmed children remain and are running for reelection.
My former county executive, Marc Elrich, was one of the absolute worst. He closed public schools for over a year, repeatedly tried to close private schools, and mandated masks on schoolchildren for two years, long after he stopped wearing them.
The lockdowns caused economic harm, killing many small businesses. More importantly, they caused social, emotional, and cultural harm by de-socializing children, especially teenagers.
Public officials who harm children should pay the price. Every politician who supported the lockdowns after May 2020 should regularly be forced to explain this mistake and explain why that mistake won’t happen again.
More broadly, people in public life need to make clear again and again the value of civil society, the necessity of gathering, and the evil of isolation.
That’s why I was cheered to hear Scott Parkinson, a former aide to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) who is now running for Senate in Virginia, point to the lockdowns as part of his motivation to run.
The Associated Press reported that Parkinson said, “Frustration over pandemic-related school and business closures ‘changed his worldview’ and pushed him to seek public office for the first time.” He has pointed out the harms of the lockdowns and named names of the culprits.
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Parkinson is running against Tim Kaine (D-VA), who was a senator and not a local official responsible for locking people down. But Kaine did support former Govs. Ralph Northam and Terry McAuliffe, Virginia Democrats who were unrepentant school-closers.
Kaine should be pressed on the lockdowns. So should everyone who was in power in 2020 and 2021.