The people have spoken.

…but check back with them in a month and they might be speaking differently.

For now, one glance at this result from YouGov will show you why Joe Biden was scrupulously noncommittal when asked by Lester Holt a few days ago whether it’s time for mask mandates to go away. Democratic politicians know they need to roll back restrictions as we transition to endemic COVID. They learned the hard way in Virginia what can happen at the polls when they drag their feet on getting back to normal.

But their base really, really doesn’t want to.

And partisan splits remain, with most Dems – who are more concerned about COVID generally – in support of mask mandates. Reps – who are less concerned – opposed. https://t.co/ajEAbWXivs pic.twitter.com/Ikyn3Iqw61

— CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) February 13, 2022

Surely parents are against school mask mandates, though, right? Not exactly:

…but a majority of parents still support masks in schools. https://t.co/ajEAbWXivs pic.twitter.com/5oAsLwcXEz

— CBS News Poll (@CBSNewsPoll) February 13, 2022

One of the most consequential questions in politics right now is how malleable Democratic opinion is about dropping restrictions. Not all liberals are mask fanatics, after all. Opinion on the left about lifting mandates probably runs the same gamut as opinion among Americans who are hesitant about vaccination. There’s the “wait and see” group that’s willing but wants others to go first; there’s the skeptical group that’ll need some convincing to change their minds; and then there are the unreachables who’ll never adapt voluntarily. Biden and his party are praying that the first two groups will tolerate Democratic officials relaxing COVID rules and maybe even come around to supporting the idea if they get enough cues from the right authority figures. If Biden and Fauci and the CDC reassure liberals that “the science” now counsels against mandates, the 85 percent of Dems who currently support required masking might erode quickly.

Or it might not. The challenge for Democratic politicians is that each party has incorporated COVID politics into its tribal identity. Asking their voters to adopt a more Republican view of restrictions as the pandemic winds down is asking them to admit that the “bad guys” at long last have the better of the argument, something many will find intolerable. Democratic strategist Neil Oxman told Politico that elected officials in his party need to be careful about how they approach their own base with respect to relaxing mandates: “There are a lot of Democrats who would think, ‘Wait a second, what is this guy? Trump?’ I don’t think you stand up there and start screaming about how Fauci is wrong.”

Kevin Williamson elaborated on that point in an essay today at NRO, comparing masks to how different religions throughout history have adopted head or face coverings to as part of their sectarian identity. A true believer who’s spiritually invested in their covering as a symbol of their purity won’t part with it lightly, Williamson notes:

And that is what is making unmasking — and a more general return to normal — so difficult for so many of our progressive friends: It has become a cultural and social issue, and a quasi-religious one at that. For a certain kind of progressive, giving up masking feels like giving in. It doesn’t feel to them like the epidemic has been beaten — it feels to them like they have been beaten, and their cultural enemies (Joe Rogan, and that estranged uncle who is angry on Facebook) have won…

The problem with figures such as Justin Trudeau is that they have defined themselves wholly in opposition to their critics. What is Justin Trudeau? That is a question that really can be answered only in the negative: He is not x. We are in much the same situation in the United States, where the core identity of each political party is simply that it is not the other political party. The mask scolds at your local grocery store cannot give up ritual face-covering for the same reason the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea cannot give up their mutual rivalry: Without it, they will not know themselves…

What [anti-restrictionists] are running up against — and what Joe Biden is running up against among his own base — is a species of religious fanaticism. Like the declarations of progressives who once swore off “Trump vaccines,” it is a matter of identity, not a matter of policy, much less one of science. That is why a big Republican showing in the midterms will produce a convulsion among progressives, one that looks like a political crisis but that is, at heart, a spiritual crisis.

Having spent two years convincing themselves that maximum COVID precautions at all times is the ne plus ultra of civic virtue, Democrats will now have to somehow accept that abandoning that view doesn’t amount to sinking into right-wing vice. Essentially, they’ll need to be deprogrammed. Biden and his party’s establishment have less than nine months to do it.

Exit quotation from Gavin Newsom, who’s pushing to drop mask mandates in California’s school and meeting predictable resistance from the teachers unions: “They just asked for a little bit more time, and I think that’s responsible, and I respect that. But we are also in a date with destiny. We recognize that we want to turn the page on the status quo.”