Opinion the Coronavirus Makes Our Old Culture Wars Seem Quaint⁠↗

But what really takes my breath away is how out-of-touch the daily debates on the internet were — “the discourse,” as some of us were taught to call it in college. Among the things the pandemic has clarified for me is the decadence, as my colleague Ross Douthat has described it, of our old culture war. Many of the battles of the past decade now seem self-indulgent and stagnant; others a waste of time.

This was always a moral issue, one we should have faced decades ago. But this pandemic has shown us that we’ve given a totalitarian country control over the supply of many things that we need to survive, like N95 masks and basic pharmaceutical products. How much more would we be willing to pay for goods essential for public health and the national defense to be produced here? And how could we properly value and protect those who do that work?