Opinion: The Myth of Polarization during the early stages of the COVID pandemic in the U.S.

When Covid arrived on American shores, the United States did not have to collapse into Covid partisanship, with citizen turning against citizen and each party vilifying the other as the source of our national misery. Instead, political leaders could have moved forward more or less in unison, navigating epidemiological uncertainties unencumbered by the weight of the culture war.

You may be laughing, but this is actually a pretty good description of what genuinely happened in the spring and summer of 2020, despite how you may remember those days now. Back then, the president was a lightning rod who seemed to polarize the country’s response all by himself, although he had rhetorical help from podcasters and radio hosts, governors and members of local school boards. But at the state and local levels, for many months, red and blue authorities moved in quite close parallel. For the most part, red and blue people did, too.

This is one of the revelations of “Lessons From the Covid War, an Investigative Report,” by 34 experts, published in April by PublicAffairs. Over the next few weeks, inspired by this book and a few other efforts at pandemic autopsy, I’ll examine the experience of 2020 and how it is already distorted in our memory.

One of the biggest distortions, the authors of “Lessons” argue, concerns that familiar bugaboo of Covid polarization. As the years unfolded, the country’s pandemic response began to suffer under the pressures of familiar red-blue conflict. But early pandemic partisanship, they suggest, is something of a myth.

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