Let's Get Real About The Election

Whatever the eventual outcome of Trump's legal efforts -- and they don't look good at all -- the biggest issue for most of 2020 was the most egregiouis human rights violation in recent times, the worldwide COVID lockdown, a phenomenon that's continuing to do incalculable economic, emotional, and psychological damage but has been feckless to control the disease.

There's simply been no proportionate payoff to the human sacrifices that people have rendered in most countries -- the disease is if anything more prevalent now than it was in March, though it's much less fatal -- but my guess is that with the new year, the authorities, seeing no effective remedy, will simply try to reimpose exactly the same lockdowns as last spring, with the same effect.

Trump, and Trumpism, were irrelevant to this problem. If Trump had been re-elected by a landslide, we'd still be facing the Cuomos, the Newsoms, the Whitmers, the Wolfs, the Boris Johnsons, the Doug Fords,with exactly the same strategies. Trump would have been no help. Rallies, as we saw over much of the fall, had no effect. And whateever Biden and the Democrats do, or don't do, in coming months will likely be just as irrelevant.

Trump was a talented political novice, but even his talents were insufficient to stop the COVID moral panic that's taken hold, and still has hold, of the public imagination.

On the other hand, the most positive development in the COVID field in recent weeks was the victory in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn's US Supreme Court case. This has clearly kept states like Virginia, Colorado, New York, and California from declaring worship services "inessential" by decree and closing churches entirely, as they did last spring. But the Catholic Church is independent of Trump and Trumpism, and its efforts will persist.

By the same token, judges at local and federal levels are beginning to deliver opinions that the health authorities are losing the benefit of the doubt they'd been given last spring, since lockdowns and mask mandates in fact haven't had the promised benefit. The effort to defeat the moral panic on a legal level, or via civil disobedience or local nullification, has been and will continue to be independent of Trump and Trumpism.

I'm a little disconcerted, and even a little surprised, at the continuing focus and hysteria about the dead kraken. the increasingly ineffectual legal appeals of the election. The biggest problem we face is the one we've faced all year, that the health authorities have a credibility crisis: the remedies they proposed to "flatten the curve" have nevertheless been ineffective in preventing a full second-wave COVID outbreak, while, as respectable parties are beginning to note, the health authorities know almost nothing more about the diseaae than they did a year ago.

Forget Biden, at least for now. There's much more important work to do.