When I first came across Jonathan Chait’s new Atlantic piece, “Why the COVID Reckoning Is So One-Sided,” I assumed the answer would be that Democrats had been the ones relentlessly and tragically wrong about virtually everything during the pandemic. No such luck.
In Chait’s telling, the Left remains uncannily open-minded, always striving for truth, while the dogmatic Right remains hopelessly bogged down in “pathological incuriosity.” Even when conservatives are right, they’re right in the wrong way.
These days, people on the Left, Chait contends, “have engaged in searching self-reflection—on school closings, the lab leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs.”
Now, you and I may believe dunking on libs who…