America enjoyed an early Independence Day on Monday. Passengers and crew on commercial aircraft across the country erupted in joyful celebration. Videos of flight attendants leading their charges in impromptu mid-flight song and dance routines went viral. A nation born in pursuit of liberty from arbitrary government was experiencing a new liberation.
The cause of the elation was a ruling by a federal judge that the government’s rule requiring passengers to wear masks on aircraft and public transport should be lifted with immediate effect. Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the mask mandate imposed by the Biden administration more than a year ago, shortly after it had been renewed for another 15 days. In her ruling she said the Centers for Disease Control, the federal agency that had introduced the rule, had exceeded its authority.
All the main airlines immediately told employees they were no longer to enforce the mandate on planes. One happy crew member marched down the aisle, rhapsodically urging passengers to throw their masks into his open rubbish bag. Eager fliers responded every bit as cheerfully as those rebels dumping tea into Boston harbour two and a half centuries ago.
And yet, in a sign of the fractured nation that the US has become, not everyone was celebrating. Some passengers ostentatiously declined to unmask themselves (airlines made sure people understood that face coverings are now of course optional, not forbidden).
On MSNBC, the network that faithfully communicates the world view of the bureaucratic classes, a health analyst urged viewers not only to continue to wear masks, but also to take extra supplies with them when they travel so they can ask the ignorant unmasked passengers in the seats next to them to mask up. Believe me, you don’t want to be on the plane when someone tries that.
The actual medical efficacy of mask-wearing to help prevent the spread of Covid has long been in question. Particularly on aircraft - where the cabin air is pumped through high-efficiency particulate air filters - the risk of virus transmission is minimal. There has been no evidence that air travel has been a significant source of infection.
But of course mask-wearing in the US, even more than in the UK, has become the ultimate exercise in political symbolism. The mandate imposed by Joe Biden when he became president served two primary political functions. It was a signal that Democrats, unlike those ignorant Trumpian Republicans, were guided by the lights of science, knowledge and data. But it was of course also a very public manifestation of the authority the left loves to exercise. For two years now we have been witnessing the thrill that progressives get as they tell us to mask up, lock down, get vaxed, keep six feet apart. It has been like an extended dream for them.
Capturing perfectly the wider semiotics in which the Covid rules infrastructure is invested, just hours after the ruling lifting the mandate, Valerie Jarrett, chief adviser to Barack Obama when he was president, tweeted an image of herself defiantly still covered up, with the message: “Wearing my mask no matter what non-scientists tell me I can do.”
That short statement is so packed with intended and unintended meaning, so brimming with the self-superiority of the modern progressive’s mindset, that it’s probably best just to leave it there, as a monument to the spirit of the age.
We have learnt much about America in the past two years; the nation’s alarming vulnerabilities, the resilience of its people in the face of grave peril, the bipartisan frailties and idiocies of its leadership. But perhaps the most startling thing we have learnt is about the relationship between Americans and their government.
When the virus first took off in China, Americans looked on as the authorities there imposed drastic measures to curb its spread. It was widely asserted that, should the US face the same sort of threat, the impact and response would be very different. Americans, freedom-loving individualists who like to think of themselves as defined by a healthy disrespect for uppity bureaucrats telling them how to live their lives, would never tolerate the restrictions on movement or controls on behaviour that a population steeped in the duties of collective social obligation and cowed for generations by an authoritarian government seemed prepared to accept.
But in two years of the pandemic we have learnt in fact that many more Americans than we could ever have imagined are, in a sense, ideologically Chinese. They are closer in spirit to the authoritarian tendencies of the Chinese Communist Party and the people it rules than they are to the ideal of the original American revolutionary. A surprisingly large number of Americans have demonstrated a level of comfort with - and indeed, enthusiastic support for - the obligations demanded by a large modern state, a fact that sits strangely with the “live free or die” image of a proudly independent people.
I don’t mean to overstate the importance of mask mandates, or the rest of the panoply of rules we’ve lived with. Of course public health measures are not tantamount to totalitarian rule. But seeing it in these terms helps us to understand, I think, why the divisions in American political life are so deep. The pandemic has laid bare the stark differences between the traditional and the modern views of the role of government in the lives of Americans.
The signs are that, after two long years of life lived under chafing rules, the traditionalists may again be in the ascendant, as we saw at the widespread explosion of joy at the lifting of the mandate and as we see in the polling numbers that show Democrats deep under water.
The spirit of liberation may not last long, though. The Biden administration has announced that it will appeal against the judge’s ruling.
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