Backlash Likely From New Round of COVID-19 Restrictions | Eastern North Carolina Now

As North Carolinians adapt to a stricter mask mandate from Gov. Roy Cooper, Rich Lowry of National Review Online issues a warning about a likely response to government’s COVID-19 restrictions.

ENCNow
Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Mitch Kokai.

    As North Carolinians adapt to a stricter mask mandate from Gov. Roy Cooper, Rich Lowry of National Review Online issues a warning about a likely response to government's COVID-19 restrictions.

  • The backlash is coming.
  • It already seems clear that the first major political and cultural eruption of the Biden years will be a roiling populist backlash against the next round of COVID restrictions.
  • We saw this sentiment play out in sporadic anti-lockdown demonstrations last spring, and it has driven ongoing resistance to masks, but it is, in all likelihood, about to reach an entirely new level — fueled by exhaustion with the virus, elite hypocrisy, and the shattered credibility of the public-health establishment.
  • The ascension of Joe Biden will add force to the reaction. It is an iron law of American politics that whichever party doesn't control the presidency will suspect the other of plotting to impose a tyranny, so the fear and loathing of COVID restrictions, somewhat muted on the right while Donald Trump was president, will deepen and intensify.
  • The Right's populism and limited-government impulse, which separated in the Trump years, will presumably be reunited in the push against lockdowns in a way that they haven't been since the Tea Party.
  • "Lockdowns. Mask police. Curfews. What about freedom?" asked conservative Representative Jim Jordan in a recent tweet, forecasting things to come.
  • It'd be much better if we could find a prudent middle path through the next several months, as the pandemic enters its worse phase and as new vaccines arrive that will soon start changing everything. But a significant segment of the American public has lost its patience with a new normal that has, at times, been arbitrary and poorly thought through. ...
  • ... In retrospect, though, the nationwide lockdowns of the spring closed down some states before they experienced their initial waves of the disease, imposing economic, mental-health, and medical costs without much upside.
  • After that kind of sacrifice, it's hard to double-dip and ask people to do it again.

Go Back


Leave a Guest Comment

Your Name or Alias
Your Email Address ( your email address will not be published)
Enter Your Comment ( no code or urls allowed, text only please )




Our State Has Gotten Freer John Locke Foundation Guest Editorial, Editorials, Op-Ed & Politics The Supreme Court and ‘Pandemic Tyrants’


HbAD0

Latest Op-Ed & Politics

illegal alien "asylum seeker" migrants are a crime wave on both sides of the Atlantic
Displacing Constitutional Law

HbAD1

As the first presidential debate between President Joe Biden and Donald Trump nears, the Biden campaign is ratcheting up its attacks on the presumptive Republican nominee’s 34 felony convictions.
If you want to show how NOT to build a school there is no better example than this new Eastern Elementary School being planned in secret.
Average increase in costs at the grocery store

HbAD2

Standards for DACA, championed by President Joe Biden, were set so low
A rule that compels speech and engages in such viewpoint discrimination is impermissible
Tucker Carlson, Fox News Channel’s biggest prime time star, has left the cable news giant.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made his first trip overseas since 2019 this week, meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo on Monday to discuss economic matters as the 44-year-old gears up for a likely presidential campaign.
Judge has ruled that her case can proceed on charges of civil conspiracy and fraud
now Democrat candidate in Texas and faked hate creime against GOP opponent
President Joe Biden delivered remarks on Tuesday at gun control advocacy group Everytown’s annual conference, Gun Sense University — and as is often the case when Biden speaks about guns, critics were quick to point out a series of factual errors.

HbAD3

 
Back to Top