One reason for the partisan divide over COVID is the growing “diploma divide” in American politics. Voters with college degrees are becoming more Democratic while non-college white voters are becoming more Republican. And Republicans are deeply resentful over what they see as condescension toward them.

A right-wing speaker told a church audience in Oklahoma that what he called “the metropolitan elite … want to crush you … They call you ‘the smelly Walmart people.’ … They have contempt for you.”

During a fight over mask mandates, a city commissioner in Enid, Okla., is reported to have told a local audience that America is in a moment when the people who ran things from the beginning — mostly white, mostly Christian, mostly male — are now having to share control. “You don’t just get to be the sole solitary voice in terms of what we do here, what we teach here, what we show on television here. You don’t get to do it any more. That’s where the fight is.”