No Closure, No Healing
The Alt-Right and the Pandemic's Unfinished Business
It's become commonplace to attribute the rise of the alt-right to economic anxiety, cultural resentment, or the spread of misinformation. But there's an elephant in the room that no one wants to address: the unresolved trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Listen closely to those who've cast their lot with the populist right, and you'll find their justifications often begin with a litany of COVID grievances. The pandemic's shockwaves still reverberate through our communities, leaving a trail of unaddressed anxieties and resentments. Small businesses, abandoned by the state, teeter on the brink. Families mourn loved ones lost to the virus; their grief is tinged with bitterness. The specter of lockdowns and mandates lingers, fueling a sense that freedoms were unjustly curtailed. And for those who felt the pandemic's sting most sharply - the vulnerable, the marginalized - the experience has left them adrift, grasping for answers in a world that seems increasingly hostile.
If we, as a society, cannot find a way to heal the wounds of the pandemic, we are doomed to stumble forward, shackled to the ghosts of our past. Closure demands reckoning - a willingness to hear the grievances of those who feel unheard, abandoned, and driven to the extremes by a system that has failed them. The protest vote is not merely a rejection of the status quo; it is a cry of anguish from those who have nothing left to lose.
Arlie Hochschild's encounter in Pikeville, Kentucky, where an individual spoke of their 'bully' in her book Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, speaks volumes. The "bully" they've chosen, flaws and all, is seen as their champion against a faceless, menacing elite. It's a stark illustration of the alienation and resentment festering in the heartland, where the "elites" are cast as villains in an us-versus-them narrative. Democracy, for them, has become a weapon to strike back at a system they feel has betrayed them, leaving the rest of us bewildered and grasping for answers.
The pandemic's cruel lesson was a stark confrontation with our own mortality, a harsh reminder of life's fragility. It has left a gnawing unease, an uncertainty about the future that haunts our every step. And as with all traumas, the unaddressed wounds fester, the pain only intensifying with time. We find ourselves teetering on the precipice of a societal unraveling that we once believed impossible. The question that looms large is not if we will fall, but how we might yet find a foothold.
Where do we go from here? The path forward demands a reckoning – a truth and reconciliation process that acknowledges the lingering wounds, shatters the illusion of authority's infallibility, and fosters forgiveness. We must recognize that COVID merely exposed the festering sores of our polarization, not its underlying cause. The way forward necessitates a tapestry woven from the needs and suggestions of all, a blueprint for collective healing that transcends the fractures that divide us.
The pandemic also laid bare the brittle bones beneath our cult of efficiency. Our finely-tuned systems, optimized for profit and speed, buckled under the weight of a crisis they were never designed to withstand. Just-in-time supply chains snapped, lean staffing models crumbled, and centralized decision-making faltered.
Resilience, not efficiency, must be our new watchword. We must embrace redundancy, decentralization, and community-based solutions. Our relationship with risk must be reimagined; uncertainty, not a threat, but an inevitability to be embraced.
Yet, before we can truly rebuild, we must confront the lingering trauma of the pandemic. A collective reckoning is needed – a space for truth-telling, for acknowledging the pain and suffering inflicted, for learning from our failures. Only through this process of healing and reconciliation can we hope to forge a future that is truly just and equitable. The path will be arduous, demanding that we face uncomfortable truths and challenge our deepest assumptions.
But it is the only path forward, the only bulwark against the encroaching shadows. The alternative is unthinkable - a descent into the abyss, where resentment and recrimination reign, and the ties that bind us fray into oblivion.