What Are The Social Tensions Underlying The COVID Panic?

US flu outbreaks in recent decades include Asian Flu (1957-58), Bird Flu (1997-98), and Swine Flu (2009-2010). Although the discussions I've found indicate that they were comparable to COVID, they resulted in no calls for draconian social controls. In fact, the 1918-19 Spanish Flu, while it was far more severe than any of the more recent epidemics, didn't cause equivalent moral panic. Restrictions on social gatherings and public meetings were of much shorter duration and far more limited. (No Spaniards were vilified, either.)

There was apparently something missing, particularly from the flu epidemics of the 1990s and 2000s, that might otherwise have caused the widespread calls for drastic social controls we've seen with COVID. This suggests, if the premise that COVID is a moral panic is correct, that social tensions exist now that didn't in recent decades. What might they be?

One way to try to answer this question is to ask what groups are identified with the crisis -- in sociological terms, the "folk devils". In yesterday's post, I pointed out that the moral enforcers have been definite on one question, that the country in which the crisis originated, China, is the one group that's definitely not at fault. This at minimum suggests that if the Chinese food markets or flu labs aren't at fault, something else at least must be, and the enforcers must know who they are.

Well, what groups are most disadvantaged by the COVID controls? Most visibly, it's the more observant Christians and Orthodox Jews, who are the ones who've been systematically suing civil authorities for relief or commiting civil disobedience. Another group is small businesses, who are disadvantaged by restrictions that require them to close, when equivalent mail order and big-box retailers can stay open. A third group is food service and personal service workers, like waiters, bartenders, barbers, and cosmeticians. (Those who work for cash or tips aren't even covered in government relief programs.)

Thus the groups most affected are observant believers, the entrepreneurial working class, and the working poor. Given the moral enforcers have begun to extend their prohibitions to family-oriented holiday celebrations, imposing severe limits on the size of even family gatherings and discouraging holiday travel, the group being singled out for adverse treatment extends even beyond Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox Jews to non-observant people who operate within traditional family and community-oriented value sets.

People in this group are often portrayed as carrying on with traditional activities in ignorance of their newly discovered epidemiological effects, or deliberately engaging in superspreader events while disregarding the destructive effects on society out of pure self-indulgence or "science denial". Church services and Trump rallies are chief offenders here, but others include wedding or holiday celebrations in excess of the circumscribed limits, and unauthorized parties in the Hollywood Hills.

So the groups deemed most responsible for COVID spread turn out to be those most affected by the controls, and the continued spread of infections irrespective of controls is blamed on the unwillingness of the affected groups to abide by the controls, when it's fairly plain that the public does wear masks, is socially distanced, and simply can't get haircuts or facials or go to restaurants, which are closed. The most prominent violators, the Califonmia megachurches, actually record minimal infections. Grace Community Church was in fact officially cleared of a charge that it had experienced a COVID outbreak.

The key marker for identifying anyone in the bad group is refusal to wear a mask. Although in the most populous areas, masks are very common, if not de facto compulsory, surges in COVID cases occur notwithstanding. The reaction of political and health authorities is simply to scold the population for not wearing masks or social distancing, when simple observation of conduct on the street indicates that people do in fact wear masks and socially distance. Nobody asks the perfectly reasonable question whether the surges have some other explanation, and nobody tries to answer it.

On the other hand, those least affected by controls outside the 1%, naturally with exceptions, are the college-educated suburban professional class, especially those with undemanding but prestigious office jobs that now have been transformed into work-from-home sinecures. Drs Fauci and Birx, prominent moral entrepreneurs, are representative of this class, with Dr Fauci's working-class accent somehow carrying an aura of quasi-meritocratic authenticity. I'll have more to say about the nature of moral entrepreneurs in a subsequent post. But the more prestigious the people, the more they're entitled to ignore the rules they set up for their inferiors.

Broadly speaking, those are the opposing interests. But prejudice against flyover country or the wrong side of the tracks is nothing new. I saw it daily in the Ivy League as a student there. A moral panic is the result of social tensions. People knew their place back in the day -- what's changed? I would venture that the difference is that the people who used to know their place are getting uppity. As Glenn Reynods, one of the more conventional thinkers around, nevertheless puts it,

What’s happening in America is an echo of what’s happening in democracies around the world, and it’s not happening because of Trump. Trump is the symptom of a ruling class that many of the ruled no longer see as serving their interest, and the anti-Trump response is mostly the angry backlash of that class as it sees its position, its perquisites and — perhaps especially — its self-importance threatened.

The problem is that the "folk devils" here are roughly half the population in many Western countries, which strikes me as a reason the panic is not sustainable. But the social tension caused by the rise in the classes who owe nothing to the current elites is palpable, and I think it also led to the other moral panic of 2020, the Black Lives Matter riots, which is a whole separate subject I'll defer for now.