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In the aftermath of Mondays Bostock decision, a common refrain issuing from social media and various articles has been, Yes, this decision is consequential, but lets wait and see how it plays out.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) were told, is religious libertys safe harbor. US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, in his opinion, cited the RFRA as key to settling future religious liberty disputes. Professor Daniel Bennett recently wrote,

The case will certainly have major implications for religious exercise. But contrary to initial reactions, this decision should not be read as a decision that dooms religious liberty in America, but rather as an inevitable step toward something Congress and most state legislatures have thus far been unable to do: crafting a compromise that balances LGBT rights and religious freedom.

To accept the logic of such voices as Gorsuch and Bennett, one must rely on at least two assumptions: One, that progressives see some sort of compromise as desirable; and two, that the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts provisions remain intact in the present form, well, forever.

As much as I want to share in Gorsuch and Bennetts patient optimism for a better way forward, I believe the aforementioned assumptions are flawed. Mondays decision, barring a comprehensive statutory compromise, will be judged by historians as a significant inflection point in the never-ceasing culture wars.

We already have the evidence for why.

On Thursday, Senate Democrats attempted a voice vote to pass the Equality Act, legislation profoundly hostile to religious liberty. To do this by unanimous consent only signals that Democrats, with the wind at their backs, have little desire to defend religious freedom and are advancing a take-no-prisoners approach in their culture war victory.

In a move that demonstrates just how cowed Republicans are in wanting to spend any political capital on defending religious liberty, only three Republican Senators rose to challenge it: Senators Josh Hawley, Jim Lankford, and Mike Lee. Were it not for these three Senators, the Equality Act would surely become law. Even still, given Mondays ruling, it seems that the spirit of the Equality Act has indeed become law, and all that awaits are its future entailments elsewhere in federal law.

A lesser-known feature of the Equality Act undermines the argument that RFRA will sufficiently protect religious dissenters. To understand why the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not the permanent salve some declare it to be, consider that a provision of the Equality Act aims at specifically undoing RFRA of its provisions where they come in conflict with sexual orientation and gender identity. The firewall heralded as the last preserve of religious liberty is already on the chopping block.

Toxic legislation with little resistance is not a good sign for religious libertys future. And yet, here we are.

In an interview from last year with National Review, noted religious liberty scholar Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia said that the Equality Act

goes very far to stamp out religious exemptions . It regulates religious non-profits. And then it says that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does not apply to any claim under the Equality Act. This would be the first time Congress has limited the reach of RFRA. This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.

For now, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act remains intact, but its provisions are one election away from passage if Democrats take control of the Senate. Even still, that its provisions remain intact is no sure proof that it will give relief to those who appeal to it in future cases.

In 2016, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet infamously compared those with traditional views about sex and gender to racists and Nazis. He was more than honest about what victors in the culture war ought to do: Give them no quarter. Writes Tushnet,

For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. Thats mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (You lost, live with it) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who remember defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didnt work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the wars over, and we won.

No normative pull at all. What does that mean? It means the Judeo-Christian understanding of sexuality and gender are not remotely persuasive or deserving of protection. It means to leave no room for it to flower or grow, especially if it is a hindrance to social justice. This hypothesis is what a lot of us have been saying for some time: Nothing within the internal logic of progressivism explains why there should be robust protections for those holding beliefs deemed harmful to society.

Are we really to believe that cultural elites so brazenly contemptuous of historic Christian belief will have the magnanimity to leave cultural and public space for those who they liken to racists to continue in their bigotry? We can hope, but I am not optimistic.

Like anyone, I am fallible and cannot predict the future. Maybe RFRA will stay intact; perhaps a compromise will be struck. If one is, expect religious liberty to grow increasingly narrow in its conception. A lot of religious libertys future hinges on elections, personnel, and policy. Those are doubtlessly important. What we must do in the meantime is work even harder, in truth and grace, to explain that what we believe is believed not just by faith alone, but reason as well. We must work even more diligently in our churches and in our homes to catechize ourselves, to know that what our faith teaches is not only true but beautiful. We must promulgate and fortify the virtues of courage, gentleness, humility, perseverance, and hope. A belief in an enchanted world such as our own is to believe that the God who created it and stands behind it always wills our good, even in the face of great challenge.

Because we believe that Christ is the ultimate Lord and Judge of history, Christians reject all forms of fear and panic, but that should not stop us from being honest about the bleak future awaiting religious liberty.

Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of Christian ethics and apologetics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Speaking Out is Christianity Todays guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the publication.

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Bostock Is as Bad as You Think - ChristianityToday.com

In Britain and the US the law is becoming an ass. Liberals historically held up the impartiality of law as central to what made these countries great. The system, at least in theory, was based on the key universal principle that all men and women would be treated equally before the law. Today this is being torn to shreds as the culture war is incorporated into legal and police practice, making a mockery of the most basic principles of law.

If the bias within the British criminal justice-system and political class wasnt already obvious, the differential treatment of Black Lives Matter protesters compared to other people who have breached lockdown rules has helped further drive a coach and horses through the idea of equal treatment before the law.

In the US, many public-health experts refused to condemn the BLM gatherings while at the same time stating that, This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders. So, just to be clear, for this group of experts BLM demos should be allowed, while those demonstrating against the lockdown should be targeted by the law.

Journalists, another section of the new elite, have been similarly biased. In the UK, an online BBC news report of the London demonstration was headlined: 27 police officers injured during largely peaceful anti-racism protest in London. The following weekend, a counter-protest took place in London, with many protesters drawn from the far right. Only six police officers were injured this time, but the BBC reported this as violent clashes with the police.

And of course we have all seen the muted, sometimes even supportive approach adopted by police authorities themselves to some of the protests, violence and vandalism in cities in the US and the UK.

With the recent Dominic Cummings case, the point was often made that he was wrong to drive where he did without consequence theres one rule for them and another for the rest of us went the argument. But this is an outdated understanding of who us and them are today. Indeed, the mass outrage by the media about Cummings should at least raise questions about the idea that the toffs are lording it over the little people.

Today, the form that us and them takes is less the old class divide and more one best summed up by Hillary Clinton when she denounced a vast swathe of voters as deplorables. Here we find the new elite standing not as advocates for traditional values and institutions, but rather as advocates for the vulnerable, in opposition to the basket of deplorables who are, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, as Clinton put it.

This incorporation of the culture wars into politics has been replicated in the development of law and policing practices in the past two decades. We can see this quite clearly in the development of hate-crime legislation in the UK, where the same criminal act is punished more severely if purposefully carried out against a person with what is now called a protected characteristic. In defining particular groups of people as vulnerable, the law is explicit in its move away from a universalist approach to crime and punishment. Instead, we literally have a law which grants more protections to certain groups than to others (whether they want it or not).

This process of prioritising certain crimes above others has been seen in Scotland, where violent crimes have been downgraded while hate crimes and cases of domestic abuse, even where no violence has taken place, are prioritised. The policing of domestic violence, for example, has been accompanied by an overzealous and interventionist approach to peoples private lives. But few if any criticisms are publicly raised about these police practices which have, at times, impacted badly on both the accused and the alleged victims.

Reach for the Scottish police training manual and you will not find a booklet that prioritises an understanding of law, order or even crime. Police Scotlands Initial Training Course Manual 1 starts with a 50-page explanation of Diversity Awareness. Those who are not aware are the people we are now meant to be concerned about, the people the newly educated cops know all about the deplorables.

The deplorables, in the British context, can be summed up by the put-down terms Sun reader and Daily Mail reader, or as Fintan OToole put it, the people with tattooed arms and golf-club buffers. These are the imagined bigots that make up white Britain, the White Van Man coupled with his more middle-class compatriot who lack not only the political but also the cultural and even emotional awareness of the metropolitan elite. These men and women are the targets of modern law and order.

We can see this even in the popular depiction of crime itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, crime was a conservative, right-wing issue. It was street crime, muggers and robbers who captured the imagination and who were depicted in cop dramas. Crime was also politically linked to radicals and hedonists, to outsiders and militants the enemy within, as Margaret Thatcher called them. Criminals were seen as lefties.

Now, with TV programmes like The Good Fight, crime has been reconstructed through the minds of the modern liberal elite and has come to be associated with the deplorables, the racist, sexist bigots, who have become the new abusive baddies responsible for all the crimes that matter.

Deplorable football fans in Scotland have been severely criminalised and policed over the past decade. The Offensive Behaviour at Football Act (now repealed) was a law that specifically banned offensive language among football fans while ensuring the cultured types your poets and artists were excluded from the law. Here, what are depicted as sectarian (ie, racist) fans have particularly been targeted with a variety of laws and initiatives to change their behaviour or their culture with the threat of up to five years in prison for their offensive behaviour.

This targeting of Celtic and Rangers fans the Old Firm included one campaign that attempted to discover Old Firm domestic violence. They are football fans, they are sectarian bigots, so clearly they must also beat their wives, went the argument, and police actions and interventions developed accordingly.

Even before the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act was passed, a man called Stephen Birrell was imprisoned for eight months for his online rants. His crime was to say he wants Celtic scumbag, Fenian tattie farmers to die. There was no threat of violence, simply an inane drunken rant. Sheriff Bill Totten explained that by arresting Birrell, he intended to send a clear message that the right-thinking people of Glasgow and Scotland will not allow any behaviour of this nature, or allow any place in our society for hate crime. It seems it was not enough for the right-thinking people of Scotland simply to disapprove of foul language it had to be criminalised and Birrell needed eight months in a cell to help him to become aware.

Online offences are being politicised and policed by the new elite. Facebook has a new board of censors filled with right-on individuals who approve of deplatforming deplorables. In right-thinking Scotland, the YouTuber Count Dankula was found guilty of offending people with a comedy video of a pug doing a Nazi salute.

Similarly, in England, there was the case of Harry Miller, who was harassed by the police for posting trans-sceptical tweets. And the list goes on, following a similar pattern, with similar targets and issues being addressed by laws, online authorities, political pressure and police practices all developing a new form of criminalisation and policing of deplorable individuals, ideas and thoughts.

There also appears to be a scale of deplorability the more right-wing a person is, the more they can expect the authorities and the law to interfere in their lives and activities. In 2012, for example, a pregnant mother of three, Toni McLeod, found that getting her children back from social services was at least in part dependent upon her giving up her friendship with people associated with the English Defence League. The social work report read, Toni needs to break away from the inappropriate friendships she has through the EDL in order that she can model and display appropriate positive relationships to the baby as he / she develops. Toni needed a culture change and the Durham County social-work department was going to make damned sure she developed one.

The culture war against the deplorables is not only a matter of who is being criminalised but also who is not being criminalised. We have seen, for example, the divergent attitudes to mass gatherings during the pandemic as well as to acts of vandalism and violence recently. This was previously clear in the case of Extinction Rebellion, which brought areas of London to a standstill and dug up or vandalised other parts of the UK with barely a raised eyebrow from onlooking police.

We have also seen the numerous cases of grooming gangs, made up of largely British Pakistani Muslim men, who used and abused thousands of underage girls while authorities turned a blind eye and the media said little. Those who spoke up, like Labours Sarah Champion, were ostracised. Champions crime was to claim that Asian grooming gangs had been allowed to thrive because people are more afraid to be called a racist than they are afraid to be wrong about calling out child abuse.

As has been noted, this lack of concern for white working-class British girls appears to be because it did not fit the correct deplorable narrative. If the perpetrators had been Sun or Mail-reading types, one suspects a very different approach would have been taken and a very different level of outrage would have been expressed.

The silence about the sexual abuse of underage girls also stands out in contrast to the #MeToo campaign which had an enormous impact on institutions across the UK. This involved largely middle-class professional women who rarely experienced anything like the levels of abuse that the girls in Huddersfield, Rotherham, Newcastle, Rochdale, Peterborough, Aylesbury, Oxford, Bristol and Keighley were subjected to.

These cases are important because they demonstrate what is becoming increasingly clear that there is a war going on, not just in culture, not just in politics, but in law and on the streets of Britain where PC police officers are helping to transform the nature of policing across the UK.

Britain is becoming a country less of the haves and have nots than the chavs and the chav-nots a country not only divided by cultural differences but also one that is becoming increasingly authoritarian as the new elite attempts to enforce its cultural values on the entire population with the threat of law, policing and ultimately prison.

Stuart Waiton is a sociology and criminology lecturer at Abertay University in Dundee.

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The culture war is destroying equality before the law - Spiked

PUBLISHED: 17:00 19 June 2020

Will Self

Following a social media post by the far-right activist known as Tommy Robinson, members of far-right linked groups have gathered around statues in London. Here, one argues with a police officer. Photo: Getty Images

2020 Anadolu Agency

WILL SELF on the paradoxes and contradictions which make up multiculturalism

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Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only continue to grow with your support.

Years ago I had the misfortune to be seated at a fancy dinner next to Conrad Black, who at that time was a controversial if ennobled media tycoon. Throughout the meal we argued about everything, such was the divergence in our opinions, our beliefs, and our very weltanschauung. Then, at the end, as we rose to leave, he grasped my hand firmly in his and said: Good! Thats settled then we agree, turned on his handmade heel and left.

At the time I understood Blacks besetting character defect to be a need to be always in the right and little thats happened since, including his imprisonment for fraud and obstruction of justice, has changed my view. There are some people who will do anything they can to maintain a sense of self-righteousness including arbitrarily enlarging it to include another whose views dont accord with theirs whatsoever. And this leads me, fairly logically, to the culture wars currently consuming the British body politic.

As the two sides of the argument concerning Britains culture square off in one corner conservative traditionalists, in the other post-colonial revisionists so levels of self-righteousness are rising throughout the body politic, inducing a feverish state within which the greatest crime of all is to be neutral. Yes: you can tell when things really are falling apart because the centre not only cannot hold but is actively under attack by partisans who claim that if youre not with them, youre necessarily opposed.

For the record: any essentialist judgement made about anyone by virtue of their race or ethnicity disgusts me, and I believe we should do everything we can individually and collectively to foster a society in which such judgements are entirely otiose. This being noted, a culture as Ive had cause to remark numerous times in this space is a vector that carries through time (and space) commonly held values, together with their associated practices, including aesthetics in the form of taste and the cultural objects (artworks and artefacts) born out of that taste and those values. The problem for multiculturalists is that they are caught up in a colossal paradox: in order for a culture to enshrine multiple value-systems it would have to cease being a culture, since its manifestly impossible to educate young people to, for example, believe in God and not believe in God at the same time.

The suppressed premise that lies behind both multiculturalism and liberal humanism more generally is that of world-governance: human rights were a sequel to the establishment of the United Nations following the Second World War, and unless you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient God capable of enforcing divine justice, you must aspire towards a mundane authority thats capable of doing the same for secular justice. Because no one has any rights purely by virtue of being human as any of the chattel slaves currently owned in Eritrea and Mauritania could tell you, or the indentured workers in the UAE and China for that matter. There arent even equal rights in this country something made abundantly clear by the disparity in death rates between the haves and the have-nots during the current pandemic.

Even if we did have an effective world government, able to ensure equal dibs for all groups everywhere, what could that possibly look like? Surely, in order to ensure that the God-believers could pursue their cultural agenda unfettered including proscriptions and practices that liberal humanists find deeply offensive their cultural space would need to be demarcated. So, this great progressive development would mirror the Biblical homily of the Tower of Babel: we would have built a great edifice exemplifying our commonality, only by that act alone to bring about still further fissiparousness.

Another way of grasping the paradox is that some people are currently passionately insisting on the absolute significance of cultural identities that they wish to be totally ignored when it comes to others forming judgements about them whether this is their ethnicity, their religion, their sexual orientation or gender. Meanwhile, others of the formerly dominant culture are reduced to a literal rump: obese thugs, p***ing in public and beating up on the police. Both sides are intent on colonising the past (which is, indeed, another country), because neither party is capable of envisioning a viable future. The British culture which was based, entirely hypocritically, on the manifest destiny of white Europeans has foundered on brute geopolitical and environmental reality; the multi-culture that aspires to succeed it will founder on its own internal contradiction.

Of course, neither moiety will thank me for pointing this out let alone indulge in the sort of radical critique of their own views that might lead to genuine clarity. For my part, I wont commit the Conrad Black solecism and insist on an agreement where none actually obtains. As it is with Brexit, for me, so it is with this: a plague on both your houses. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Almost four years after its creation The New European goes from strength to strength across print and online, offering a pro-European perspective on Brexit and reporting on the political response to the coronavirus outbreak, climate change and international politics. But we can only rebalance the right wing extremes of much of the UK national press with your support. If you value what we are doing, you can help us by making a contribution to the cost of our journalism.

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Will Self on the paradox of multiculturalism - The New European

In August 2011, Norman Eisen, then the U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, joined diplomats from a dozen other countries in voicing support for Pragues first gay pride march. The backlash was as swift as it was unexpected and the controversy over what was seen as inappropriate interference in domestic affairs became a defining moment of Eisens ambassadorship. It was not just fringe figures on the Czech right who spoke out against it, but also the countrys conservative president, Vclav Klaus. Even Karel Schwarzenberg, the foreign minister and a staunch Atlanticist, pushed back, saying that expressions of support to rights that nobody in the Czech Republic is denied are counterproductive and redundant.

If a post-Trump United States is to get back into the business of promoting democracy, freedom, and human rights around the world, special care must be given to avoiding a recurrence of the situations from past administrations in which the United States would insert itself into other countries divisive domestic debates.

Public diplomacy has suffered under the Trump administration. The president is notorious for cozying up to authoritarian leaders. Meanwhile, the promotion of democracy and core American values has been on autopilotjust occasionally punctured by dismal news such as the appointment of a Viktor Orbn admirer, Merritt Corrigan, to the position of the White Houses liaison with USAID, or more recently the firings at Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).

A course correction is vitally neededbut the next administration ought to be wary of an overcorrection.

To be effective, U.S. public diplomacy and the promotion of American values overseas cannot go through wild swings every election cycle. In the past, efforts at promoting democracy, good governance, and the rule of law generally sought to avoid political and ideological controversy, and thereby commanded bipartisan support. In an time of growing polarization and bitter culture wars, that will be no easy feat.

The Prague gay pride example demonstrates even the most innocuous acts in support of an obviously worthy cause can backfireeven under favorable conditions. The Czech Republic has been a reliable ally. It is also the least religious country in in the region, by a wide margin, and as early as in 2006, the Czech legal system began to recognize registered partnerships for same-sex couples, with little controversy. In short, little suggested that backing a gay-pride march in the countrys capital could backfire so spectacularly.

And that, mind you, was nearly a decade ago. Compared to the relative idyll of 2011, the divisiveness of cultural and values-related questions in Central and Eastern Europe has only grown. Russian propaganda actively seeks to depict Putins regime as a bulwark against Western decadence. Hungarys Orbn has actively exploited LGBT issues and migration to distract from his authoritarian practices and corruption at home. As he put it in a recent speech, Hungary is an island of peace and security in comparison to Western Europe, which is twisting in the multicultural grip of their vindictive colonies.

With the United States largely absent from the scene, the ire of Orbn and his ilk has been directed mostly at Brussels. And often, the would-be authoritarians have half-a-point. Two years ago, while the Hungarian government was seeking to chase out our foreign-funded NGOs and the Central European University founded by George Soros, the European Parliaments Sargentini Report lambasted Hungary for failing to to adapt working conditions for pregnant or breastfeeding workers, for the prevalence of negative stereotypes and prejudice against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, particularly in the employment and education sectors, and for the fact that Hungarys constitutional ban on discrimination does not explicitly list sexual orientation and gender identity.

To be sure, such criticisms may not be without merit. But they have also helped Orbn make his case to Hungarian voters that the real issue was not his rewriting of the countrys constitution and purges in the judiciary but a wholesale attack of Western elites on traditional values.

If November brings a Democratic victory, the next administration must avoid the risk of overreach by the left, particularly given the rising prominence of illiberal, iconoclastic voices who depict traditional American, and Western, tenets of liberal democracyrepresentation, limited government, and free speechas a faade for white supremacy and other forms of oppression of women and minorities. Inevitably, that will play into the hands of ruthless leaders who never believed in those principles to begin with.

The ultimate driver behind the Black Lives Matter movementthe effort to eradicate police brutality and racismis noble and just, and the movements recent protests resonated around the world, as a paradoxical testament of Americas continuing cultural dominance around. Yet the failures and excesses of the movements leadership and intellectual undercurrentsin the form of the so-called cancel culture, street mobs tearing down statues, and a deeply revisionist attitude toward historyare unlikely to travel well, particularly outside of English-speaking countries.

The reason is not that Europes history is without blemishesquite the contrary. Marked by serfdom, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and colonialism, and culminating in two world wars and the Holocaust, Europes past is a treasure trove of grievances. Yet, after the horrors of the first half of the 20th century, the continent has been consistent in keeping a tight lid on the ghosts of the past. Hence President Emmanuel Macrons flat refusal to consider taking down statues of controversial figures of French history, and hence the sense of panic around European capitals whenever past traumaslost territory, language rights of ethnic minorities, or reparations for old injusticesresurface in political conversations.

The progressive agenda of seeking to dismantle all lingering structures of oppression and to purify the public square, university campuses, and the corporate environment of sins of the past will provoke a reaction in the United Statesas it has before. But if, in an atmosphere of political triumph after the defeat of Trump and Trumpism, such ideas permeate policy choices made by the next administrationespecially over what causes and values the U.S. government lends its support overseasthen the 2011 kerfuffle in Prague will be nothing compared to the controversy progressive America risks stirring by its moralizing in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and beyond.

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Public Diplomacy and the Risk of Overmoralizing - The Bulwark

The surge of infections that marked the early pandemic in the Northeast has been delayed elsewhere by some combination of early action (as is plausibly the case in much of California) or because those places are more sparsely populated, more car-dependent and less reliant on public transportation or, bluntly, just luckier. Many places haven't seen a super-spreading event yet. We epidemiologists do expect places like New York City, where introductions of the virus and contact rates are both high, to be especially vulnerable early on. Elsewhere, though, cases have built at a slower pace. That may also partly be due to human reactions to the situation in the Northeast, or simply to different contacts occurring at different rates in different places with different climates. All in all, not terribly surprising.

But sadly, the arithmetic of infection is such that we do expect the pandemic to find its way to most places eventually and certainly to those places that are not guarding against it. And when it gets there, it will do what it's done elsewhere and transmit as much as it can, whatever the consequences for us.

The federal government seems, astonishingly, to have given up the fight. Even after over 116,000 deaths, there is nothing to see here, apparently. A few months back, we despaired at the failures in testing, in messaging, in action while Americans sickened and died. In the spring, the federal pandemic response was akin to bringing a rubber chicken to a gunfight. The attempt to defend against the greatest threat to public health in a century was limp, grudging and delayed. Now it is barely existent. They've taken their rubber chicken to play elsewhere.

The lessons left lying unlearned are staggering; citizens are being hit with bills for coronavirus testing, when testing is a pure and simple public good for everyone. (It is not, as President Donald Trump seems to believe, a "double edged sword" that "makes us look bad.") If you take a test and it's positive, then you should isolate and preserve others from the long consequences of the transmission chains you might kick off. If it is negative, you should be confident carrying on in your life responsibly distanced, of course, in case the test result was wrong or in case you get infected later. But if the test is free, there's no downside to getting it.

If this sounds like free testing could get expensive, please look at the cost of not testing. We paid that cost all spring. Look at the reviled shutdowns; they are the consequence of letting unknown amounts of infection build among your people until the only thing you can do to save lives is to call a halt to everything. In some places, even then, people keep dying for months because it happened too late. In others, cases don't climb and deaths remain low, because infection rates were lower when the intervention was made. Somehow both examples become evidence for skeptics to argue that shutdowns don't work, when it is plain that denying the virus opportunities for transmission is our best option.

Inaction presents a risk to the economy, and the sooner people accept that, the better. Shutdowns are less likely to be necessary again, and they'll be shorter when they are, if milder steps are adopted early on. If masks significantly reduce transmission, and it looks like they do, then large parts of society could get closer to normal, really soon. It might seem a restriction on your freedom to wear a mask, but it's a far smaller restriction than a shutdown and in any case, your freedom to choose not to wear a mask conflicts with the freedom of others not to be infected by you. Imagine if the president were to don a mask today, signaling to the whole country that they should follow suit, and the economy came roaring back without a corresponding tidal wave into the ICUs. This is surely a better option for everyone. A slowed economy is better than an utterly halted one.

None of this should be political, and yet somehow it is. The hyperpartisan nature of American society has taken a virus and fashioned from it a new battleground for the culture wars. I should not be surprised at the way the pandemic has become politicized, and yet I am. It suggests that I was somehow less cynical than I had thought I was, and I thought I was pretty darned cynical.

The politics may have been exacerbated by some of the epidemiology of the early pandemic, which has seen the risk of infection and death track closely with socioeconomic status and race. Exactly how much of these vulnerabilities are down to the existing systemic racism in American society isn't clear, but it surely contributes. We expect vulnerable people to put themselves at risk of severe illness or death while the more fortunate pretend the pandemic does not apply to them. Yet we are early on in the pandemic; there's a long way to go, and middle-class folks likely don't live in communities with much immunity.

While the rest of the country can perhaps make up a story in which disease happens in New York, because of whatever excuse confirms their prior beliefs, it's harder to pretend it won't be a problem if you look at the range of places the virus has done its deadly work. Wuhan, China (now a relative success story!), Iran, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and New York. In May, Sweden was posting the highest per capita mortality rates (which have since declined), but now Brazil is surging.

But if your community has not experienced infection so far and it's doing nothing to stop it, please ask yourself, do you feel lucky? Rich people living in the right place can imagine the pandemic is a problem for other people but only for now.

The sad thing is that the virus doesn't care about any of this. The virus will carry on infecting, transmitting, devastating organs and futures here and killing there, all without malice. Viruses don't do malice; that's a human trait. Humans are, furthermore, capable of a degree of incompetence which is functionally indistinguishable from malice.

In one of the essays he wrote before he found fame with "1984" and "Animal Farm," George Orwell declared that "to see what is in front of your nose requires a constant struggle." There's a pandemic under our nose. It's not going anywhere.

William Hanage is an associate professor of epidemiology at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

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William Hanage: We're pretending the virus is gone. That'll make it worse. - West Central Tribune