Five Years

Covid's Political Reckoning

I was at a Trader Joe’s, seeing what was left inside the ransacked freezers, in hopes of scoring a Margherita pizza and some General Tso’s chicken. Even on a regular day, Trader Joe’s isn’t good for much else. From a nutrition standpoint, it’s about as useful as the Hudson News gummy bear section. But this was not a regular day. In Oklahoma City, a 7’1” basketball player from France named Rudy Goebert and his Utah Jazz teammates landed to prepare for their game that night. Shortly afterward, he reported to team officials that he didn’t feel well. It felt like the flu, he said. At that same moment, in Australia, Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, sat sniffling with the same symptoms. Soon—at least as far I knew, as I scrolled my phone in a long line with my pizza and miscellaneous snacks—they were all linked as the first three names I and many others recognized to personify a virus the world soon knew as COVID-19. It was March, 11, 2020.

Goebert along with Hanks and Wilson quickly recovered. Many millions more—especially those without access to testing and health care—did not. Around the world, the wails of sirens became as commonplace as the warbling of the spring birds. In time, over 7 million people around the world would die from Covid—including 1.2 million Americans. Many, of course, are still dying this year, this month, and this week. In Covid’s immediate wake five years ago this month—as the nation ground to a halt—tens of millions more lost their jobs, as businesses shuttered around the country and the world. Just as far too many people would enter into the back of an ambulance with perhaps a faint wave from a loved one never to be returned, far more left worksites and offices and even classrooms never to return, entering a period of uncertainty that for many, continues to this day.

Covid, however, was a boon for some. For example, since 2020, the world’s billionaires have increased their wealth by over $3 trillion dollars—even while the American poverty rate has remained at or above 11%. Still, in every sense, Covid was a mass trauma event from which the world—and America—has not yet recovered. Just as the virus irrecoverably changed some individuals’ bodies forever, Covid also changed American political system permanently.

Like the Great Recession before it, Covid’s reach has been both constant and intermittent, causing a steady drumbeat of malaise that vacillates between individual inconvenience and mass suffering. And much like the Great Recession—which caused the launch of an insurgent movement within the Republican Party in 2010 called the Tea Party, and later, a populist movement within the Democratic Party in 2016 that is now reemerging in 2025—Covid revealed the unrepentant anger that has only grown in the last 15 years in America, one aided and abetted by phone addiction that has grown worse since 2020, too.

After the Great Recession from 2008-2010, the two parties diverged in a way they had not in decades. Republicans championed grievance and resentment as never before—as Democrats embraced a kind of consultant-class coolness reliant on the right facts, figures, and Hollywood afterparty. Crucially, however, neither party ever took the necessary steps to aid those who were most affected by the recession, beyond initial emergency spending packages. The nation’s affordability crisis—which later came to define the 2024 election—grew worse, along with Americans’ anger, as wages continued to stagnate and the American Dream slipped further and further away.

When Covid came a decade later, the two parties diverged again—and again, neither party addressed the basic affordability needs for tens of millions of everyday Americans, beyond similarly-styled stopgap bills. Now two crises had come and gone—the recession and Covid—and the entire political system had failed twice to address the root issues that caused lasting suffering. Instead, a decade after the Tea Party, the GOP veered again toward its baser instincts: denialism, paranoia, and the general disregard for any pretense when it came to accepting outcomes for things like elections, or reality in general. Democrats, however, became obsessed with pretense itself. While the 2020 election was somewhat of an outlier—a referendum on then President Trump’s inability to lead during crisis—Democrats did not course correct after the election. Rather, rules-based order, consensus, bipartisanship, inoffensive cultural markers, scientific expertise—these tenets, which have long served society writ large—became the platform for an entire political party. However, being led by palatability and the use of proper terms so as not to offend is not a marker of political savvy. It’s a sign of caution. In a sense, after Covid, the Democratic Party chose to become America’s H.R. department. Necessary, one supposes, but at the end of the day, kind of an annoying stickler.

Democrats attached themselves to the Know-Betters: the academics, the eggheads, the wonks, the nerds. Those who stare down the bridge of their nose at you because you are wrong and they are right. Republicans, meanwhile, began to run against expertise and academia—and rather than notice why it was working, Democrats doubled down and mocked them. Rather than listen to Joe Rogan or buy a ticket to a NASCAR race, they alienated those fans by calling them rubes. And rather than seek to understand why Americans might be upset with a society that failed most of its people twice in the prior decade plus, Democrats ignored their own liabilities and as a result, lost control of the political high ground. Instead of finding out what people cared about—or, imagine, providing new ideas that address those concerns—Democrats chose to become a clique.

In just the past few weeks, there’s been numerous examples of Democrats’ continued misguided strategy. And of course, it must be said—Democrats are not in power. Republicans are, and Republicans under the heel of the President are intent on selling off every parcel of this country to billionaires who continue to line their pockets, at the expense of Americans, their jobs, and their freedoms. To them, the Constitution is just a piece of paper. Still, beyond Senator Chuck Schumer’s waving of the white flag to those same Republicans, Democrats continue to pretend this country has not changed irrevocably. Instead, they have allowed Republicans to define them before the argument starts—and have ceded the grounds on the very issues that won them elections in the first place: fighting for Civil Rights, Health Care, Abortion, Social Security, Medicare, the Minimum Wage, Unions, and so on.

Rather than shake their cane at the problem, Democrats need to change course. First and foremost that should mean abandoning the gerontocracy and embracing new people with new ideas. That means ditching phrases like “the opportunity economy” and addressing issues people care about, like immigration, rather than smugly ignoring them. And that means acknowledging what people have lost in the past five years. While 1.2 million Americans lost their lives, millions more lost loved ones and friends. And even more than that lost years of their lives—years when they had hoped to continue with school, or move up at work, or get married—and today find themselves worse off than they were that same day I was in line at Trader Joe’s, scrolling my phone, oblivious to what the next half-decade would bring.