Despite the COVID-19 pandemic presenting a multifaceted moral and strategic case for organized resistance and advancing the expansion of the welfare state, the left failed and continues to fail to do so. William Silversmith looks into why the left irrationally failed to organize around the pandemic with disastrous results.

The near-total failure of the U.S. left to reckon with the ongoing pandemic has had far reaching and dismal effects on the pandemic’s policy trajectory and impact. The political vacuum resulting from the left failing to exert pressure to preserve the protections put in place in 2020 has been filled by the right through barbaric libertarian messaging that nearly everyone seems to accept. After an initial period of social solidarity lasting a few weeks to at most a few months, the capitalist class first leaned on the libertarian right wing to oppose "lockdowns" (more properly termed “shutdowns” outside of a few very limited measures). The success of this initial approach has proceeded to encompass all countermeasures to COVID-19 and ultimately public health in general. Their calculation was that they could discipline labor, solidify their position, and make more money with the virus unleashed than with it contained.

Once vaccines became available under a Democratic administration, money was poured into opposing "vaccine mandates" and propaganda characterized vaccines as somewhere between totally ineffective to the real reason people were dropping dead. This was done mainly to keep the Democrats from getting credit for a vaccine that was developed under a Republican administration after the Republicans lost the Presidential election and Donald Trump attempted a comically poorly planned coup.

The sheer cynicism of these political calculations on both sides was showcased during the Vice Presidential debates when future Vice-President Kamala Harris was criticized by then Vice-President Mike Pence for undermining public faith in the vaccine after saying, “If public health professionals, if Dr. Fauci, if the doctors tell us we should take it, then I’ll be in the first in line to take it, absolutely, but if Donald Trump tells us I… we should take it, I’m not taking it.”

Despite Harris’s reference to “doctors” and “public health professionals” as an independent professional set of experts, throughout the pandemic it has been clear that public health has been subservient to the political authorities. All the politicians needed to do was find an acceptably pliable personage, for example Dr. Fauci, to muddy the waters a bit, and it would become clear that the important part of Harris’ quote would be the part about Donald Trump. If the election had gone the other way, we may have seen a substantial fraction of liberals become anti-vax instead of conservatives.

Counterfactual aside, the Republican anti-vaccination campaign was effective at slowing or halting vaccination rates within the politically conservative section of the population and can be credited with a large number of deaths. The successful media polarization of the population between pro-vax and anti-vax factions paved the way for obscuring the more fundamental positions of “pro-virus” or “anti-virus” later on.

The Biden administration vaccinated the most receptive people very quickly over a few months, and then rates slowed to a crawl. Once vaccination rates plateaued, the Biden administration, eager to get re-elected on the traditional basis of a good economy and to keep America in a hegemonic world position, decided to wean the public off of other public health measures. This propaganda aimed at liberals was successful at erasing their remaining solidarity. Convinced that vaccination made them superhuman, away went social distancing, masking, or even quarantines once the CDC downgraded their guidance (apparently triggered by a request from Delta Airlines), to protect the economy during the Omicron wave. The Biden administration suppressed information about the true damaging nature of the disease, focusing exclusively on metrics that made them look good. Once the majority of the public had been infected and survived or died, the survivors were led to believe they were now immune or at least that future infections would be "mild." Vax and relax. Even the conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis urged, “[Y]ou’re immune, act immune.”

With the conservatives, the liberals, and the innate caution of the general public eroded, the criminal Biden administration was able to slowly strip away the visible reminders of the pandemic such as masks, protective guidance, testing, and data reporting, leaving the public both at risk and increasingly blind. The administration has eroded even the vaccine-only strategy by psychologically linking COVID-19 with influenza via aligning their vaccination schedules regardless of efficacy waning or differences in seasonality (COVID-19 is not seasonal, though it is usually most prevalent in winter). The Biden administration can now be credited with more deaths (782,000) than the Trump administration (418,000), though in part this is due to a longer term in office during the pandemic. It's notable that the cumulative number of deaths chart is essentially a straight line through both administrations until the spring of 2022 when the slope becomes more gentle [ed. This also correlates suspiciously well with changes in testing and reporting regimes]. With four percent of the world population, despite having attempted to suppress official case numbers, the U.S. leads the world in the official case counts. It's clear that the government doesn't care about the pandemic unless there are refrigerated morgue trucks parked outside of major hospitals.

A lingering question in all of this is where has the left been? It is our job to politicize the pandemic and starkly present both a vision of a better world and establish the correct enemies in the public mind.

The Failure of the Left

When looking at this from a distance, it's frankly bizarre how absent the socialist movement has been from what is arguably the number one issue facing the world, as it is disrupting the operation of business, is in every single persons' face every single day—lingering in the back of their minds. This is even more baffling when we consider what has been taken away since 2020.

The U.S. state handed out free money. The idea of a free at point-of-service national health system suddenly just seemed like the way things were supposed to be. Indeed, Medicaid was expanded and people were not allowed to be kicked off. Even the New York Times acknowledged that we had implemented Medicare for All for a single disease. Low-wage workers were called "essential", offices were abandoned, there was an eviction moratorium, and for a blessed few months, people mostly cooperated.

The state very publicly funded the development of a high-tech vaccine in less than a year with Operation Warp Speed and distributed it for free. Early on, there was talk of making the recipe patent-free and doing technology transfer to the rest of the world immediately, a broadly popular idea that naturally occurred to many people. Bill Gates and the pharma lobby were able to put the kibosh on that in the near term. It took until June 2022, 19 months after the mRNA vaccine began distribution to health care workers and high risk groups in the U.S., a partial version of the COVID-19 TRIPS waiver (TRIPS: Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) for vaccine patent rights passed the World Trade Organization, enabling a few countries to increase vaccine production after most of the vaccine sales had already been made and dose volume had stagnated in many countries.

There weren’t only welfare state goodies left on the table, but a vibrant street movement for social justice as well. During the summer of 2020, there was a massive movement to resist state violence that was supported around the world in the form of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter protests. For a short while, things seemed to be breaking our way. It is hard to overstate what enormous opportunities were presented (to some extent are still presented) and instantly squandered. Simultaneously, as described above, the absence of our side allowed untold death and destruction to rain down and we appear to have accepted a false devil's bargain to sacrifice the medically vulnerable. What on Earth happened? Why did we fail to advance these gains, defend these gains, or at bare minimum protect the most vulnerable whom we so love to claim as our own?

In retrospect, there are a number of factors that seem to explain the misbehavior of the left. The first and probably most important factor has been a kind of paralysis. Even though everyone is vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19, the people who care most and are most aware of the pandemic are often clinically vulnerable, but this means that in-person protests and actions are potentially very risky for them.The left has apparently bought into the propaganda about the mildness of the virus and so is failing to manage mitigation itself. Therefore, in-person actions present a problem to anyone interested in preventing transmission, which should be everyone.

The George Floyd uprising actions, which occurred during the D614G and Alpha waves, were outdoors with fairly decent masking compliance (mainly using surgical masks). Nonetheless, I fully expected transmission to spike due to the dense crowds. I participated because I thought the benefit of making a significant contribution to fighting racist oppression from the police might be worth the risk, even if few or no ordinary activities met that threshold. Still, it was a big risk. In April 2020, it was widely reported that Black people suffered from the highest COVID-19 mortality rates in the nation. I was very pleasantly surprised and relieved to find that the protests didn't have a large impact on transmission. Indeed, at the time public health experts made a similar calculation and promoted the protests combined with masking.

Nonetheless, it was luck that we didn’t pay dearly for that decision given the evolving understanding of COVID-19 transmission. Since then, the virus has evolved to become much more transmissible. We are in a dynamic situation. Omicron and its sub-variants are beastly and require rethinking around controlling transmission, such as upgrading to respirators.

These questions around protest, to my knowledge, have not been broadly confronted explicitly since the summer of 2020, except in certain regional groups such as Senior & Disability Action in Oakland, CA which successfully got a mask mandate temporarily reinstated in government buildings. The Massachusetts Coalition for Health Equity protested outside of Mass General Brigham in response to their attempt to ban patients asking for masking accommodations and managed to get them to back off slightly.

With a handful of exceptions, this has left the field of physical action nearly uncontested, and the worst people in society, funded by billionaires, have been free to demand an end to "lockdowns" and the elimination of all mitigations so that “natural selection” can run its course. However, there are many other factors at play as well in the failure of the left to confront COVID-19.

There’s been a pattern of failure to react or of under-reaction to novel events. The COVID-19 crisis, Black Lives Matter protests, the 2020 Presidential election, and the Ukraine war have all evidenced this phenomenon of a short lived acute reaction (or lack thereof) combined with a lack of follow-through, reflection, and analysis. At least until October 7, 2023 and the beginning of the current wave of the genocide in Palestine, it almost seemed that the larger the issue, the more disorganized and unstrategic the U.S. left is. See, for example, the climate crisis, which has been long brewing and is likely the greatest threat to human life and society ever faced, but the level of analysis and organization has been short of the effective level. So, too, is this the case with nuclear arms. (The exceptional nature of the Palestinian liberation movement, though still inadequate for stopping the genocide, deserves its own separate treatment.)

With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, the shockingly human-centric acute reaction by the state caught everyone off guard. For a little while, I wondered to what degree many of us were hoping the virus would do our work for us. Unfortunately, the responses of the state were designed to protect the integrity of the capitalist system and thus were peeled away soon after each measure was expected to cause more financial pain than it relieved for the business set. It was on April 12, 2020 that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released its first “National Return to Work Plan.”

In 2020 the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were four years out from the "Bernie Bump," meaning plenty of people had sufficient time to burn out. I recall that in 2020, after two years of participation in DSA, I had been meaning to take a vacation as the stress of working and organizing combined was exhausting. My understanding is that this is not an uncommon experience. Little did I know that a forced "vacation" was right around the corner.

On top of this base weariness came the loss of the Bernie Sanders campaign due to a variety of dirty tricks that ended up nominating perhaps the most conservative politician in the Democratic primary—a man who would go on to become known as “Genocide Joe.” While during my time in DSA, I had been taught theory, organizing, and protest tactics, it remained true that the driving force behind most of the energy in the organization came from the hope of a Bernie Sanders presidency. I wasn't as emotionally attached to Sanders and the presidential campaign as many others were (I did help campaign for him out-of-state in Massachusetts), but I can't help but imagine this was a depressing and soul-sucking experience for a great many of my comrades. I know I felt pretty numb watching him concede on my phone, lying in bed, trapped inside an apartment while my then-girlfriend treated people at the hospital. Even more depressing was the way Sanders lined up behind Biden like a good soldier. Without Sanders providing a brightly lit path to follow, there was an overall loss of direction.

In the immediate aftermath of the campaign's controlled demolition, the hot organizing theory for building left power was a turn to decentralization and mutual aid, staples of anarchist theory. Decentralization stripped us of the ability to respond at a national level when important policy was being made at that level. Mutual aid did not prove to be a panacea, and while it was good to do good works, the “mutual” aspects were challenging. It was difficult to get people in desperate situations to have symmetric contributions due to the fact of their desperation. Even more fundamentally, it was difficult to pivot "red Doordash" type services that helped people stay at home into conversations. Most people, while nonetheless very thankful, don't want to chat with the delivery guy. Unfortunately, a degree of centralization is required to flexibly and effectively respond to a large-scale crisis.

On top of these elements, while the left does attract many people who are medically vulnerable and disabled due to the level of oppression they face, the majority of the new leftists that joined up in the wake of the Sanders campaigns were on the younger side. I can't help but think that this affects our movement's risk perception from COVID-19. Is it viewed as a problem for "other people" that we are just altruistically helping?

The reasons for our failures are many and require deep thought for how to rectify them. How can we produce a revolution without the ability to flexibly and strategically respond to novel events?

William Silversmith (he/him) is a former member of the Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) Democratic Socialists of America Steering Committee, a co-author of the national resolution "DSA Organizing for Pandemic Justice", a former member of the executive board for the DSA Disability Working Group, and was an elected delegate to the 2023 DSA National Convention. He is on the steering committee for Socialist COVID-19 Organizing Resistance & Education (SCORE). The views expressed in this article were devised personally and may not necessarily represent that of his affiliations.

Silversmith has previously written on the scientific evidence for cognitive dysfunction from mild COVID-19, the state of the pandemic in June 2022, and wrote about the upcoming DSA national resolution in April 2023. He has also written on Trump's secret documents and wrote a self-published series on nuclear weapons. Silversmith can be followed on Medium at @willsilversmith and on Twitter and Bluesky as @matrixmarxist.

Silversmith thanks and hopes to build on the small but excellent selection of prominent socialist English language analysis of the pandemic post-2021 including Raia Small's "Why Has the Left Deprioritized COVID?" (Sept. 2022) and Comrade Dremel's "Let them Eat Plauge" (January 2023) as well as the World Socialist Web Site for its consistent and excellent coverage of the pandemic.

This article was originally drafted in Summer 2023, but it took until now to find a home. In the author’s opinion, this demonstrates the value of the new Dynamic Zero publication.