Etelson is the author of “ Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide ” and co-founder of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative.
In a country so polarized that even a chain restaurant’s menu turns into a culture war food fight, it’s not surprising that we lack a consensus around Covid prevention policies. Covid found not only our public health apparatus wanting, but our public discourse as well. Two and half years in, we are not even attempting to negotiate the sharing of public space by people with widely divergent opinions regarding how dangerous Covid is and how far we should go in trying to protect ourselves and others from it.
Most of us, if we have the luxury of autonomy, order off the a la carte menu whatever precautions we perceive to be the most effective or manageable and then sit in judgment on those who load up their plates with different items. Some won’t dine indoors but will fly on an airplane. Some won’t go to a party but will sit through an indoor concert. Some host an extended family holiday meal but want all students in masks. Everyone thinks they’re right and that those who have calibrated risk differently are wrong.
Not just innocently wrong, but wickedly wrong. I have carefully weighed and fact-checked all the evidence, investigated the credibility of all my sources, fine-tuned my moral compass and drawn the correct conclusion. I value health and longevity versus pleasurable experiences the correct and proper amount. They have drawn the wrong conclusion because they, unlike me, are motivated by selfishness, neuroticism, disinformation and/or in-group conformity bias. They are ignorant. They are virtue-signaling. They are fascists. They don’t care about students’ well-being. They are gullible conspiracists. They cower in fear. They are being duped by bad actors.
Who is the “they” being castigated? Anti-vaccine “fanatics”? Zero-Covid “zealots”? It could be anyone, and that’s the point. In each epithet, one can see the shape of one’s adversary.
The virus mutates; new information about survival rates, natural immunity, and vaccine and mask efficacy becomes available; and many of us recalibrate accordingly but, whenever we do so, we are right once again and those who recalibrated differently are catastrophically mistaken.
The stakes of being wrong are high and so, naturally, resentment toward those who err is intense. There is a powerful desire to convince The Wrong of the error of their ways and intense irritation that they still just don’t get it or care to get it.
Even now, I imagine readers thinking to themselves: “How dare you both-side this when the other side is so clearly insane. I refuse to dignify the dangerous, ill-informed opinions of fascists and ignoramuses.” The thing is ... it doesn’t matter how right you are if the other side isn’t willing to listen. If the other side feels their needs and concerns are not being acknowledged, they will double-down on their priors and reciprocate with closed-minded ill-will.
What if we all give up the fantasy of overpowering The Wrong with our facts, logic and moral superiority? What if we accept that no one will win this war and, instead, try to negotiate a lasting peace?
What would such a negotiation look like? It begins with trying to understand where people are coming from. Empathy for people who act in ways we see as wrongheaded or harmful is not easy, but it is necessary. Imagine the depths that could be plumbed during a facilitated conversation between an elderly diabetic woman who lost her husband to Covid and a single mother who lost her job as a cashier when her kids’ school switched to remote learning.
Absent empathy, we blame each other for a state of affairs that is intrinsically bad and for which there is no panacea. No matter what restrictions we enact or rescind, there will be Covid deaths, there will be inconveniences and sorely missed experiences, there will be learning losses, there will be loneliness and suffering. Our task is to agree upon the best of the bad options, a process that begins with empathy and leads, hopefully, to creative compromises.
I don’t know what the outcome of such negotiations would be. Maybe there are mask-only and mask-optional flights, concerts and religious services. Maybe there are, as in the early days of the pandemic, special hours for more vulnerable people to shop. Maybe public schools are retrofitted with better ventilation and students given a remote learning option. Maybe free N-95 masks are distributed in all public venues. Once people start listening and brainstorming, ingenious ideas will likely emerge.
Learning how to engage in collective problem-solving could help us repair our pandemic-ravaged social fabric. It would also serve us well when it comes to other heated conflicts regarding the use of public space. For example, on the issue of women’s locker rooms, one side sees the exclusion of trans women with penises from traditionally women-only spaces as transphobic. The other side worries that trans women with penises present the same potential safety risks that having males in those spaces always has. Neither side is willing to acknowledge the other’s legitimate needs for safety, dignity and respect.
Covid isn’t done with us. In terms of death, it’s like having a 9/11 attack every week. The virus is destined to become more – or less – virulent, and the cycle of recalibration and recrimination will begin anew. Divisive politicians and media will prey on our mutual contempt and ramp it up to mobilize their base or boost their ratings. If we don’t negotiate the use of public space, our society will remain sick long after we’ve recovered from Covid.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.