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Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so. For example, I made this comment a couple days ago about how everyone was just flat super poor back in 1900, and we're literally at least 10x richer now. I had likewise told the following story in the old place, in context of wealth to afford vast quantities of food (and how that may interplay with societal obesity):
I didn't completely spell it out, but that was my wife's father's story when he was a child in Canada. (I also hedged on the number; my best memory was that it was precisely one 50lb bag and one 5lb chunk). That was not that long ago.
Yesterday, I read an obituary for a 95 year old who was born in a homestead dugout in New Mexico. Literally born in a hole in the ground.
Perspective on how utterly ridiculously quickly we went from basically universal poverty to nearly universal wealth is often lacking in many conversations where it could be quite beneficial. Sure, some in the capitalism/communism debates (or more generally the sources/causes of wealth and how it interacts with society's choices/governance), but also in obesity conversations (as mentioned) and even fertility conversations. Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!
I still don't properly know how exactly to craft an argument that comes to a clean conclusion, but I really feel like this historical perspective is seriously lacking in a country where the median age is under 40 and many folks no longer have communal contexts where they get exposed to at least a slice of history from their elders.
My parents grew up south Europe, born during WW2, and I couldn't believe the level of poverty they endured. I visited the 7,500 person town they grew up in and even today in 2024 it still doesn't have consistent running water and each house has maybe 20 amp electrical service max. You could eat a chicken once a month on special occasions. Dinner involved some starch and beans, every night, usually the same thing. Family members having spent time either in prison for being reported by neighbors with a gripe, or serving as conscripts, or both.
Violence too? Each parent had a sibling killed under circumstances they never quite explain to me. Another sibling (my uncle) becomes mentally retarded from some disease they couldn't even put a name on, because access to health care didn't exist. "He just had a fever when he was young and was never the same when the fever went away". This is almost certainly from a preventable childhood disease that no longer exists in the modern world.
How fucking frightening a world was the relatively recent past. And yet my parents hardly complain about anything. I cannot fucking deal with listening to them stoically describe their upbringing and early life in the US (as illegal immigrants, another fun adventure) and then contrast with the median gen-Zer complaining about their absolute life of amazing luxury today.
I'm sure the horror damaged my parents in ways that aren't legible and that they would not have chosen it if they could do life again, but I'm also not sure this life of absolutely pure luxury we have today (by contrast) actually is the stuff that a good world springs from. Maybe the problem is bad morals, but I struggle to articulate it. It sure would be a shame if you needed the
hard timesto create thestrong men.This is, incidentally, why Covid-era anti-vaccine activism was incomprehensible to a lot of boomers and the natural reaction was that stragglers were crazy and should probably be forcibly vaccinated. When the struggle had been getting enough vaccinations to cover even the poorer areas in various countries, hearing that scientists had cooked up an extra sciencey vaccine with a brand new mechanism was not a cause for concern but for joy and extra trust.
Same attitude applies to other topics - I once listened to an old local leftist lady recount how left-wingers of her generation couldn't quite always understand why the younger generation campaigned for more veggie food days for school meals, since her generation had campaigned for more days when meat was served in school meals, as one way to distribute the rising wealth.
It is not possible to understand what happened in 2020-2022 as a proportionate response to disease because it wasn't. COVID is not a disease that primarily affects children or leaves them with disabilities. COVID is not a disease where the number infected can be changed in the long-term by any existing intervention. The motive that best explains the turn to extreme pro-mandate activism (such as supporting assaulting people with needles, or throwing them in concentration camps) is it's status as a shibboleth - that vaccine mandates can be used as an excuse to carry out political purges of people you don't like, who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated.
Except that doesn't account for the Boomers as above. Who are more likely to be conservative themselves. The motive that best explains the turn is simple fear.
As I'll keep repeating every time this was brought up, the Tory British government did not want to mandate lockdowns and the like, the original response was not to do that. But so many MP's got inundated with letters and emails and phone calls from fearful constituents that they made a very public U-turn. Particularly from older voter's who are more likely to be on the right.
Conservative UK Boomers were not trying to purge their political enemies, they were simply scared. Now you can certainly make the argument that they were wrong to be so badly scared (though of course age did make them more susceptible than younger folk), and you can certainly make the argument that the media et al was part of why they were so scared, but they were not calling for tighter controls and lockdowns and vaccinations as an excuse to purge political enemies. It simply does not pass the smell taste. There was simply no reason for them to want to do so. Indeed, unlike in the US, Conservatives were more likely to be Covid vaccinated than Labour voters.
And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take also suggests that they weren't using it to purge political enemies, again because the government was a Conservative one, and didn't even want to do the things they ended up doing in the first place.
What group of people who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated do you think the Conservative government driven by Conservative voters were trying to purge?
Boomers are more likely to be conservative in the UK sense, but this is not conservative in the American sense. Similarly, the Tory government of the time was also not meaningfully conservative in the American sense. But also, the difference between young people and boomers is pretty small: Most young people supported lockdown, just less so than boomers.
Simple fear is not a credible explanation of what happened because it simply shifts the discussion to why there was fear for this and not other similarly (and over their whole lives, more) dangerous illnesses for the old, such as cancer, heart disease, or dementia. Why would people demand such extreme interventions as imprisoning all of society to protect themselves from a spicy cold, while ignoring the 20 QALY bills littering the ground called "stop smoking", "stop being fat", "stop drinking" and such? And for reference, a lifetime of heavy smoking is several orders of magnitude more dangerous than getting COVID. It's more QALY loss than dying from COVID, even.
Which again, just shifts the question to why did they do this? There are several glaring gaps in this narrative of why lockdowns happened. Why did "boomers" suddenly fear covid so much while not fearing other common boomer ailments? Why did "boomers" suddenly believe this was something that the government should do something about? Why did "boomers" suddenly believe that lockdowns were an option and would work, when this was never done or even meaningfully suggested prior to 2020? And most importantly, why did countries that didn't buy into lockdowns not have their government's similarly browbeaten into doing lockdowns by public demand? Swedes did not have a lockdown, and Swedes mostly agreed with that policy. Swedes opinion of their government's response to COVID is better than most countries, which is the opposite of what you should expect to happen if lockdowns were the result of some inevitable grassroots demand.
The UK's unwritten constitution functions as an elective dictatorship by parliament. In 2020, this shifted somewhat to be an elective dictatorship by the executive of government. But in either case there was no reason why MPs couldn't ignore constituents and refuse to do lockdowns. You could argue that this would make them unpopular and lose their seats, but look at the 2024 election results. They did lockdowns and lost their seats harder than any government in living memory has ever lost their seats, half because of the predictable consequences of lockdowns destroying the economy, public services and the social fabric, and half because they ramped up immigration even higher. At no point have the Tories indicated any aptitude for popularity-maxing, not that lockdowns even are popularity-maxing in the long run.
The conclusion that best matches the data is that every step was driven by government decision because the government wanted to do lockdowns. There was fear because the government wanted fear, and made it so. There was demand for government intervention because the government communicated that they could control the virus. And there was demand for lockdowns because the government communicated that it was possible, would work, and eventually, that anyone who didn't want them was evil in some way. And in Sweden, none of this process happened because the government there didn't want lockdowns, and therefore didn't do any of the groundwork necessary to impose them on a pliant public. I do not believe the government accidentally stumbled into lockdowns for the same reason I don't believe it's possible to accidentally build a shelf - you can't accidentally do something that requires deliberate planning and coordination to carry out. Especially, you can't accidentally stumble into committing crimes against humanity.
There is further evidence that the people responsible for lockdowns wanted lockdowns, mostly contained in leaked conversations, but I think it is unnecessary to present such conversations to make the rather simple claim that governments do things because they want to do them, and don't do things they don't want to do.
"Forced" to? How? Pressured by the public is one thing, but forced? I'm willing to hear out some explanation of how the government was forced, but if it doesn't involve shadowy figures putting a literal gun to the head of MPs, I'm not sure how they can be "forced" to do something they don't want to do.
Opponents of lockdowns and the pandemic response in general. Because as a group, we were the only meaningful opposition and threat to the government at the time. It's a matter of public record that the government spied on lockdown critics. when it wasn't more openly sending the police to beat us up. Any other prospective "threat" can be easily dealt with by declaring another variant and locking them down again.
They lost seats to a party that wanted even longer lockdowns enforced even more harshly. The simple fact remains that Boris opposed lockdowns. Many senior Tories did; there was more hostility toward lockdowns in the UK government than in any comparable Anglo country, and almost all of Europe, outside of some of the most conservative state governments in the US.
The Tories u-turned after all neighboring countries had implemented harsh lockdowns and after the press (which was normally quite pliant) began an extreme campaign of fear-mongering. Cummings (supposedly intelligent, although I think he’s clearly shown himself otherwise) then panicked and told Boris that he had better implement lockdowns or risk some kind of popular revolt if the UK’s death rate was much higher than other countries.
The UK worships arr en haech ess, and arr enn haech ess was (according to the press and itself) about to be overwhelmed with corpses and dying grandmothers who had survived the Blitz only to die because Boris didn’t lock down the country. In this context, they made a poor decision. It is worth remembering, though, that even on this right wing forum there were many people advocating harsh lockdowns.
And if Labour was in charge to do the even longer lockdowns enforced even more harshly, Labour would have been kicked out by voters after the economy was even worse. Voters might not understand that lockdowns are the reason the economy is fucked, but they'll punish the incumbents for it all the same.
All neighboring countries had not implemented harsh lockdowns.
Cummings was pro-lockdown very early. This seemed to be more out of some infatuation with perceived Asian efficiency/superiority leading to a desire to randomly copy China, rather than any coherent explanation of why lockdowns might work. Only after he broke lockdown restrictions was this memory-holed and the story changed to one where he wasn't supporting them from early on.
As for the idea of a popular revolt over the government not imprisoning you hard enough, how is it coherent to revolt with demand to be imprisoned? If you organically fear covid, why would you pour out into the streets to overthrow a government to replace it with one that will imprison you? Slavish obedience to government and revolt do not go hand in hand.
Which fails to explain why the press would claim that the NHS was about to be overwhelmed and that lockdowns would cause it to not be overwhelmed, leaving the origin of the policy unexplained.
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