In fairness to Fauci, he’s less an idealistic authoritarian than he is a doctor trying to battle a pandemic. Yet the way he presents himself, and the way others contextualize him, serve to further this myth of the omnipotent elite. For much of left-wing America, Fauci isn’t just a trustworthy voice; he’s a shaman casting magical powder onto our national campfire. His visage gazes off of merchandise, votive candles, beer cans. The mantle of vicarious paladin that once fell upon Robert Mueller has now passed to him.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising in an America where scientism is slowly congealing into civic religion. Perhaps it isn’t even all that harmful. Edmund Burke wrote that in any prudential endeavor, ‘I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics.’ For us, that translates to: better we listen to Fauci during a pandemic than, say, an Alex Jones producer who has just noticed that a nurse who took his temperature with one of those forehead thermometers accidentally beamed the latest New World Order superweapon blueprints into his brain.

There’s no question that Fauci is brilliant and an adept communicator. And in a celebrity culture such as ours, surely there’s room for a celebrity plague doctor to guide us through catastrophe. The problem is that Fauci has been exalted well beyond that, beyond even a scintilla of accountability. Consider, for example, a pair of recent documentaries about him, one from PBS, the other from NatGeo. Both are pathetically fawning. The PBS one in particular plays like the kind of short banjo-twanging movie about Abraham Lincoln that you might watch on a wall screen at a history museum.