One answer is to back a step up and ask: at what point could we last say that there was a consistent ethic of responsibility and accountability for the use of power in America? Well before covid I would say, and it’s into that gap which virus policy emerged, rose, and fell.

People don’t like cancel culture, and that’s understandable and (mostly) correct. But institutional impunity culture, in which no fuckup or misdeed is so grisly or contemptible as to endanger a slow gravityless plunge up the ladders of power for insiders, predates it.

Seemingly all western societies now have a deeply distorted and confused concept of where power comes from, what it owes to others, and what may be done in response to it. Everything is either a pitchfork mob or a thin-lipped and bloodless refusal to acknowledge duty of any kind.

People will not acknowledge failure because they do not understand power as being answerable for consequences or having any particular duty to achieve anything. It simply is, a berserk thing that roves here and there as it pleases, to be propitiated and feared like a pagan god.