THOSE WHO DENY FREEDOM TO OTHERS DESERVE NOT RE-ELECTION.

Wall Street Journal contributor Daniel Henninger offers a provocative claim.  "The Pandemic Killed Biden’s Presidency."  That's an intriguing claim, considering that the whole basement strategy boiled down to "we're taking this seriously, and not exposing a feeble old man to the bug" whilst the first year of the Biden presidency Jarret regency was all about ongoing mask and vaccination mandates.  Meanwhile Donald Trump was busily being his own worst enemy and exposing himself to the bug.

In retrospect, the basement strategy might have been the best move, given the correlation of forces.

The president in Covid’s first year was Mr. Trump, who in his current campaign appearances talks a lot about completing the border wall and Crooked Joe Biden but almost not at all about his nearly nightly appearances at the White House with Covid-response architect Anthony Fauci. When Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia reopened in April 2020, Mr. Trump said he told Mr. Kemp, “I strongly disagree with his decision to open certain facilities,” and that the governor had moved “too soon.” Other than the Covid-vaccine development, Mr. Trump’s confused handling of the pandemic contributed to the erosion of his voter support.

But then Dementia Joe became the figurehead for whoever is in charge of Hope, Change, and Malaise these days, and the fun began.

The Biden policy set has consisted of the conventional liberal response of big spending and a more radical commitment of nearly a half-trillion dollars to an array of green subsidies.

To be sure, Mr. Trump started the pandemic spending blowout with the more than $2 trillion Cares Act in March 2020, which sent people a one-time federal check. Fraudsters took advantage of the free-flowing aid and also looted the Paycheck Protection Act. But these measures at least had some direct connection to the pandemic itself. Mr. Biden’s trillions, beyond expanding unemployment benefits and existing transfer payments, went primarily to infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing and renewable energy projects. That’s like dropping dollars from 50,000 feet. Talk about trickle-down economics.

Yes, eventually some of that money spent on consultants and studies makes its way to the caterers of those Georgetown cocktail parties.

Unfortunately, in the room the rent-seekers come and go, and they don't talk about the lives of normal people any more.

The Covid-19 pandemic profoundly disrupted the intricacies of the private market and individual lives. We’ve argued here that the people running the modern Democratic Party have become disconnected from the daily realities of the private economy in which most people reside. Mr. Biden constantly purports to empathize with how people live, but it’s being dismissed as just talk.

To this day, the Covid-19 pandemic is frustrating the rhythms of daily work, child-rearing, housing, career decisions and even pedestrian supply-chain expectations. As a Democratic president, Mr. Biden could have pushed the teachers unions after his election to reopen public schools. He didn’t. Instead, he dedicated his political capital to implementing industrial policy and funding a wish list of progressive obsessions, notably some $400 billion on “clean energy.” Why should a pandemic-weary electorate reward that? Most of the Biden spending looks like pie in some future sky.

Washington has spent more than $6 trillion on everything the federal government could imagine since the pandemic began. No one seems to think it had any effect on their lives. America’s voters are sending a message and it’s about a lot more than abandoning an unpopular president.

In addition, the second-guessing of the corona tyranny has begun, and Rich Lowry is taking stock.  "Oh, NOW our public health poohbahs tell us our COVID approach was narrow-minded."  It's not that I want to say "See, I told you so," but see, I told you so.

Francis Collins, the former of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic and current science adviser to President Biden, noted that he and his colleagues demonstrated an “unfortunate” narrow-mindedness.

This is a welcome, if belated, confession.

Not too long ago, anyone who said that epidemiologists might be overly focused on disease prevention to the exclusion of other concerns — you know, like jobs, mental health and schooling — were dismissed as reckless nihilists who didn’t care if their fellow citizens died en masse.

Now, Francis Collins has weighed in to tell us that many of the people considered close-minded and anti-science during COVID were advancing an appropriately balanced view of the trade-offs inherent in the pandemic response.

“If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is,” Collins said at an event earlier this year that garnered attention online the last couple of days.

This is not a new insight, or a surprising one.

No kidding.  We can't bring back the people who died deaths of despair, or restore the childhood of those toddlers and kindergarteners denied their opportunities to interact or to play or to go to the tot-lot.

We can, however, take an education, and ensure that the Wise Experts will recognize divisions of labor in expertise, and engage in modesty next time.

The problem comes, of course, when public health, or “public health,” becomes the only guide to public policy. Then, you are giving a group of obsessives, who have an important role to play within proper limits, too much power in a way that is bound to distort your society.

Francis Collins, again: “So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”

True and well said, but that’s an awful lot of very important things to attach “zero value” to.

He also admitted to having an urban bias, driven by working out of Washington, DC, and thinking almost exclusively about New York City and other major cities.

Indeed. Moreover, while Dementia Joe was critical starting his term of the governors of the Free States, The Donald also was, until he sort of grasped that freedom ought be a watchword of his campaign?

If Collins and his cohort got it wrong, the likes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp — and the renegade scientists and doctors who supported their more modulated approach to the pandemic — got it right.

It’s always worth remembering that the pandemic was a once-in-100-years event, and initially we had very little information and very few means to prevent and treat the disease. It is inevitable that decision-makers are going to make mistakes in such a crisis, and adjust as they go.

Mr Lowry concludes with an integrative passage suggesting that no matter whether in the academy or in opinion journalism or in government, the epistemic closure of the Professional Managerial Class is not because all the relevant knowledge problems have been satisfactorily structured and there genuinely is a Technocratic Consensus.

That said, the scientists who were in positions of authority could have shown more modesty. They could have welcomed debate.

They could have distanced themselves from — or better yet, denounced — the campaign of moral bullying carried out in their name.

Many people wanted to outsource their thinking to the experts and then, with a great sense of righteousness, rely on arguments from authority to demonize their opponents and shut down every policy dispute.

Francis Collins, one of the most eminent scientists in the country and a subtle thinker who dissents from the orthodoxy that science and faith are incompatible, would have been an ideal voice to counter the propaganda campaigns that aimed to suppress unwelcome views and even unwelcome facts.

Instead, he stuck with his tribe.

It’s progress, though, to realize that scientists, too, are susceptible to group-think, recency bias and parochialism; that the experts may know an incredible amount about a very narrow area, while knowing little to nothing about broader matters of greater consequence; that point of views considered dangerous lunacy may, over time, prove out, so they shouldn’t be censored or otherwise quashed.

It’s not just that the scientists acted like blinkered scientists during the pandemic; they tolerated, or participated in, agitprop that was inimical to the scientific spirit and to good public policy.

That's shaping up to be a theme among the posts that open the New Year.