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by dividefuel
836 days ago
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My feeling is it became politicized because the left saw it as a chance to expose Trump, and the right downplayed it to avoid impacts on Trump's reputation. Like because one side took one stance, the other side inherently had to take a different stance. The right started out as "Covid is bad, but so is crashing the economy to prevent it", which turned into "Covid isn't that bad, wearing a mask is excessive", which became "The vaccine is more harmful than the disease". The left went from "Causing people to die is worse than any economy hit" -> "You should do everything possible to prevent it" -> "You should wear a mask at all times in public". I often feel the left would have taken reversed stances if the right had taken the pandemic seriously. If Trump had advocated shutting things down and pushed strongly for vaccines/masks, it seems pretty likely the left would have called this an authoritarian overreach and/or highly questioned the safety of the vaccines. In short, I think our culture is so highly polarized that as soon as something becomes a major topic, people immediately divide into separate 'sides' on it. EDIT: follow-up question -- was the pandemic as polarizing in other countries besides the US? |
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EG: even European countries that were more draconian earlier in the pandemic returned to relative normalcy, with less fear/debate around school reopenings, mandatory testing, mandatory masking, etc, sooner than the US.
In the US, sticky "showy extreme COVID vigilance is my essential identity as a good citizen" or "showy nonchalance is my essential identity as a free person" partisanship lingers.