DAN DREZNER BURIES THE LEDE.

He concludes a column on the glaring failure of technocracy that "fifteen days to slow the spread" has become with the lament of the fellow-travellers who were on board with shutting everything down until an electoral outcome they could live with arrived.

Technically there are just six more weeks of winter. As it warms up in the northern half of the country, habitable spaces will expand significantly. The vaccination of the general population is almost here. Until then, however, the strategic reserves of the affluent class are being depleted. It is nothing compared to the deprivations that the working class has felt since last spring. That does not make the pain feel any less real.

Gosh, we were only pointing those deprivations out ... last spring.  It's not that the professor and pundit didn't see it.

The pandemic has bifurcated Americans in multiple ways. For half of the country — heck, maybe closer to 60 percent — the pandemic has led to mass unemployment, or massive food lines or greater risks that come with having to work outside the home.

The rest of the country has had the ability to work from home. They are in the upper half of the K-shaped recovery. And yet it sure seems like those loudly complaining about hitting the pandemic wall right now are coming from this more affluent group. Why is that?

In part the answer is that the affluent usually have the bigger megaphone and better access to mainstream media outlets. But I would like to proffer an additional hypothesis: The pandemic wall reflects the different ways that the professional class and working class have responded to the pandemic. Blue-collar types have responded with more resiliency; white-collar types have responded with more robustness.

Where "robustness" includes measures such as stockpiling, or hiring other people to assume the risks.  It's possible to stockpile for fifteen days or a month (hence those runs on toilet paper last spring) but all the money in the world doesn't buy you resilience. "At the same time, there are tantalizing images of a post-pandemic world on the horizon, so maybe switching to resiliency now is unnecessary if folks can hold out for just a few more months. Any hint of a slowdown in vaccinations or the emergence of more virulent strains, however, makes that pandemic wall feel more concrete."  Or perhaps, just perhaps, the symbolic analysts will come to the conclusion that the Expert Class isn't as Expert as they all think they are, and end the shutdown theater.