2024 Was the Pandemic’s Revenge on Normalcy

The stock market’s V-shaped reversal out of the 2020 COVID-19 crash where the S&P500 fell around 35 percent in a month, then reached new all-time highs five months later, is emblematic of the larger attitude many have had towards the pandemic. It is generally looked at as a thing of the past despite still impacting the present, especially for immunocompromised people, and after a genuine panic over something truly existentially terrifying, much of elite and polite society tried to go back to business as usual. This fundamental shock to the world has had myriad reverberations, most obviously with very tangible ones like inflation. The flippant attitude you sometimes see towards the pandemic as a footnote of the past and not a decade(s)-long society-altering event is kind of shocking, and 2024 proved that the attempt to return to normalcy was perhaps the naivest belief of this era defined by bad information.

Life was genuinely scary at the start of the pandemic. People who assert it is still ongoing are factually correct, but there is an immense difference in the scale of death and sickness between 2020 to 2021 and 2022 onward.

Nearly 850,000 death certificates attributed COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death from 2020 to 2021. Unemployment reached Great Depression levels. American children lost ground learning basics like reading and math during the first year of the pandemic and have yet to recover. Humans are inherently social animals, and cutting us off from each other for prolonged periods undoubtedly damaged us in ways we are only just beginning to understand. I know I feel different now than I did before, and in some ways I can articulate and identify it, and other times it’s just a gut feeling. This was a catastrophic historical event made worse by a president who voters punished for his colossal mismanagement of it in 2020, yet many of those same people voted for him in 2024, under the broad-based notion that folks felt they were better off four years ago than they are now.

As crazy as that sounds, it’s not a belief without merit. There was an unprecedented expansion of government aid during the pandemic, and people felt it, like in the historic drop in child poverty. They felt it even harder when it went away under a Democratic president while prices remained elevated and the rent is too damn high.

Low wages are growing, but the decline in disposable income over 2021-23 due to the phase-out of Covid policies completely swamps that — not crazy to believe this is behind a lot of people’s discontent with the economy pic.twitter.com/TKjPL2YQMT

— Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) December 4, 2023

The early stages of the pandemic before the vaccine cracked everyone in some way, and this election was America’s suppressed revenge. Joe Biden and his astonishingly out of touch inner circle believed they won in 2020 due to amorphous appeals to democracy, not a (hopefully) once-in-a-generation event alongside the largest social justice protests since the 1960s which enabled their aged nominee to run a straightforward presidential campaign from a basement in Delaware against a historically unpopular incumbent, and hide his flaws that Julian Castro pointed out in 2020 and was subsequently blacklisted by the Democratic Party over.

Biden appealed to people when his appearances could be carefully managed through a Zoom call, but as soon as folks got vaccinated and could return to something resembling normal, it became clear that Biden could not join us. His public appearances were kept to a minimum, and only when it became obvious for the world to see that a man saying things like “Vice President Trump” was not up to the challenge, did the feckless Democratic Party put its foot down and stage a coup it should have done after the midterms in 2022 so as to allow for a real primary in 2024.

But the Democratic Party decided to put its head in the sand and try to return to a pre-Trump normalcy after winning in 2020 when anyone paying attention knew that was gone forever. The idea that a lot of people would vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 because of Liz Cheney doing a bipartisanship can only exist in a world tucked safely inside the safe space of MSNBC and CNN’s television studios. Democratic politicians further proved how out of touch they were by talking up Bidenomics, a term voters time and time again said they did not associate with Biden’s actual policies, which they said they had not heard about, but they did blame what Biden said was Bidenomics for their inflationary economic circumstances. I would like to think that this is the last election ever where Democrats will assume the media will distribute their talking points for them, but 2024 proved that with this political party, all things are possible.

It’s Not Just Democrats Who Operated on Bad Information

While there is plenty of credence to the notion that this fundamentally good economy as measured by nearly every traditional metric is not working for everyone, that’s not to say that everyone’s complains about our manifestly unfair socioeconomic status quo have…shall we say, a basis in objective reality. One thing that is apparent in reading all of these post-election interviews with Trump voters is a lot of people are just flat-out making shit up and telling themselves what they want to hear. This excellent and heartbreaking report in the New York Times about “the alienation of Jamie Cachua,” an undocumented immigrant, contains infuriating exchanges like this with Sky Atkins, his Trump supporting father-in-law:

“I’ve never felt like a foreigner until now,” he told Sky.

“I’m not going to let anything happen that puts your family at risk,” Sky said.

“It already did,” Jaime said.

“All those criminals that Trump’s been talking about — the rapists, the gang members — that’s not you,” Sky said.

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said on 60 Minutes before the election that “it depends” in response to a question of “so you are carrying out a targeted enforcement operation. Grandma’s in the house. She’s undocumented. Does she get arrested too?” Homan also said that one solution to not splitting families up is to arrest entire families, and he recently said that use of family detention centers is “on the table.” Sky is not alone in telling himself a fairy tale about what Donald Trump has been openly saying he wants to do, as evidenced by Google searches for “Trump deportation” spiking after the election.

This is also a reckoning of the pandemic, as the long-time trend of rising distrust in media and government came to a head as people were abandoned by Donald Trump in 2020 and went searching online for anyone to tell them what was going on, with a lot of folks headed towards the greater Joe Rogan cinematic universe. It didn’t help that the institutions we trust most also made mistakes to chip away at their legitimacy, as the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization said in May of 2020 that ordinary citizens do not need to wear masks unless they are sick, later rightly saying that healthy people should wear masks since it reduces the transmission of disease. While this position they took in May 2020 was directly related to the shortage of N95s and other protective personal equipment that Trump exacerbated as the world scrambled for supplies in the midst of a crisis, the fundamental fact is that these organizations changed their tune on the science behind this core directive and gave people room to doubt other common assumptions as the background noise to daily American life became inundated by bullshit made up by some random guy on YouTube.

Like whether the economy was collapsing. Or whether COVID-19 is a threat. Or whether Joe Biden is alive. Or whether vaccines cause autism. Or whether George Soros is bankrolling everyone yelling at Elon Musk on the internet. Or whether Hunter Biden is giving nuclear weapons to Ukraine, or any other random conspiracy theory being elevated by Google’s algorithm which spent the year inspiring a coup in South Korea and proving itself to be an enemy of humanity. Another big impact of the pandemic was major corporations tightening their vice grip on our modern Gilded Age, as they gained more power which they are now pledging in fealty to the very litigious and petty incoming president. None of this is normal.

The mainstream media followed this rightward shift towards misinformation, or truthiness, as Stephen Colbert once aptly coined it, exemplified by Rebecca Blumenstein, President of NBC News, telling Semafor that NBC ran an unrelated sensationalist story to align itself with the public’s feelings “given the high prices of groceries, housing, higher education and healthcare” about “how people in Nebraska often drive two hours roundtrip to a bakery in Omaha to save two dollars a loaf of bread.” Anyone familiar with gas prices and third-grade math could poke some logical holes in that anecdote framed by NBC’s president as an important story, but much of the mainstream media has long given up its role as an arbiter of truth, and now instead sees itself as a stenographer.

This was demonstrated most clearly in Israel’s genocide of Gaza, as simply contrasting American media coverage to Israeli media coverage proved that American media aligned quite often with the State Department and Benjamin Netanyahu’s talking points, sometimes quite literally letting him write their headlines. Meanwhile, we know much of Israel’s genocidal depravity due to reporting from Israel’s oldest daily newspaper Haaretz and the joint Palestinian-Israeli independent site +972 Magazine, as well as Electronic Intifada. This smokescreen put up in America was a full-blown propaganda effort to try to pretend that there was still some semblance of normalcy in Israel, as the Biden administration gave lip service to a 20th century order they were actively destroying through their enthusiastic support of a genocide. The problem they discovered is that through alternative forms of media which gained popularity throughout the pandemic, like Tik Tok, this narrative the State Department is normally used to controlling through their traditional media organs fell far beyond their reach.

The world is awash in disinformation and has been since the onset of the pandemic, both from monopolies like Google and Facebook elevating bad actors and powerful bad actors themselves. The media is wholly unequipped to deal with this for many reasons, but chief among them is that they did not enter the pandemic with enough broad-based credibility to help dig us out of this mess. This has led people to seek out alternatives, and as Jamelle Bouie so elegantly explained on Bluesky, “we are entering a golden age of people being so open-minded their brains leak out.”

I don’t know how to fix this or what comes next, all I know is that the early stages of the pandemic opened a door which can never be shut to a world that most of us are still struggling to understand. In some ways it is a more honest time, as talentless talking point-driven frauds like mildly sentient Joe Biden and lying Very Serious mainstream media anchors have nowhere to hide anymore, but more talented hucksters like Donald Trump have never been more powerful or beloved. The very concept of normal is dead and gone, and 2024 killed it for good.