Covid-19, like 9/11, has functioned as all-encompassing excuses to justify the preferences of people who want those things anyway. After 9/11, the call went out that the country was soft and fat, that we were not sufficiently devoted to national defense, that we needed to be more aggressive in foreign affairs, and that the country had grown insufficiently nationalistic and militaristic, that we all needed to toughen up and salute the red, white, and blue. These were of course beliefs held by many conservatives long prior to 9/11, and they exploited the moment. The ritualistic expression of anger at those who wanted to live in a post-9/11 world was really the defense of a new regime. Now many on the left of the political spectrum are attempting to do something like the same, turn disaster into opportunity. Even if it’s merely the opportunity to do the only thing that gets them out of bed these days, the opportunity to judge others.

Some of this opportunism, such as using Covid to press the case for a more humane and efficient healthcare system, I agree with. Some I don’t, including a dismayingly common tendency to treat all of life and politics as a never-ending exercise in placing people on the naughty and nice lists, the ceaseless cataloging of people who are Good and people who are Bad. And this exercise has become so central to what liberalism is, so core to its culture, that I struggle to think of what liberalism might be now if not that, the drive to sort goodies and baddies. But of course a pandemic is exactly when we should be most eager to set petty tribalism aside, and the ultimate casualty of our binarism is any hope for genuine united collective public action, which is just what we need now.