You can't fix stupid, though this PJ Media commentator thinks deprogramming might help
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Allah Pundit, PJ Media:
“One of the most consequential questions in politics right now is how malleable Democratic opinion is about dropping restrictions.
“… 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.
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“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.
[PJ Media]: “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.”
