I think the conversation generally has been more nuanced than Jill Filipovic has it, but she’s certainly right when she says, “We did our part; the Trump Administration did not do theirs.” That said, Filipovic’s take does nicely summarize (can you “summarize at length”?) the complicated network of costs and benefits that have risked being over-simplified into “stop the virus versus open the economy”.

That said, I do think she’s right about the dangers of the weird and should-have-been-unnecessary tightrope we might be left to walk, even if I don’t completely agree that we’ve already been surrendering to it.

This is a dangerous place to be. It’s a place that has liberals playing defense, and trying to mitigate the very worst of the harm. And that often means dumbing down the conversation, or not hashing out the murky middle, because this is an emergency and we really can’t give the death cult any more ammunition.

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Addenda

1. I do also essentially agree with her analysis that “we haven’t heard a careful and transparent proposal on the left”. I imagine in part because the elected left (as opposed to the agitating or organizing left) hasn’t figured out—or, worse, believes it’s still politically impossible—how to propose addressing all the ways in which the SARS-CoV-2 exposed existing imbalances, inequalities, and inequities to public view, even though such a proposal would be full of things the public already supports, and the damage of the pandemic offers up a ready-made opportunity to fight for them.