Aug 31, 2025 06:26 PM
https://reason.com/2025/08/29/neither-cr...ead-up-hhs
EXCERPT: "Anyone who had any power or leadership role at the CDC during Covid deserves to be fired," conservative media personality Buck Sexton tweeted this week. "The failure was that universal and cowardice that widespread."
It's that last category of complaint whose potency seems undimmed a decade into Trumpism. Trump (like his counterpart on the populist left, Bernie Sanders), arose at a time of profound citizen revulsion at bipartisan elite failure: failing to prevent and then overreacting to the attacks of 9/11, the subsequent nation-building fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis and bailouts, plus all the issues (especially immigration) that the two main political parties seemed to prefer campaigning on rather than solving. The great derangements of Covid, the summer of 2020, and the Jan. 6, 2021, ransacking of the Capitol seemed to vindicate that bitter alienation from the ruling class, albeit in ideologically polarized ways.
Each main political team in the United States likes to tell itself a soothing fairytale. For Democrats, it's that they are the party of "science" and adult-like dedication to norms of impartiality. For Republicans, it's that they are the party of "truth" and the courage to tell it. When cross-examined at any length about dubious fidelity to these values, each side will beat a hasty retreat to what the other guys made them do. Or worse yet, they won't even know about their own side's glaring flaws.
RFK Jr. is to truth what a fish is to basketball. But Buck Sexton is absolutely right about the CDC serially botching its job during the pandemic. Has there been anything like a reckoning among the Democratic and managerial left since then? Or are they content to point at RFK and snicker?
If contrarian kookery and nihilism are bad policy responses on the right, so, too, is autopilot managerial liberalism on the left. Kennedy's predecessor, Xavier Becerra, appointed and confirmed in the teeth of the pandemic, was an absolute political hack with no relevant health-policy experience, touted at the time for being a Latino. He was, predictably, terrible on vaccine mandates and government censoriousness. And probably received 1/1000th the negative press that RFK Jr. has.
American governance will continue to spiral downward until voters start demanding something more than Well, the other guy is worse. Neither Kennedy nor his predecessor were fit for this job; may we one day have a politics where that easy truth isn't so rare to acknowledge... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: "Anyone who had any power or leadership role at the CDC during Covid deserves to be fired," conservative media personality Buck Sexton tweeted this week. "The failure was that universal and cowardice that widespread."
It's that last category of complaint whose potency seems undimmed a decade into Trumpism. Trump (like his counterpart on the populist left, Bernie Sanders), arose at a time of profound citizen revulsion at bipartisan elite failure: failing to prevent and then overreacting to the attacks of 9/11, the subsequent nation-building fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis and bailouts, plus all the issues (especially immigration) that the two main political parties seemed to prefer campaigning on rather than solving. The great derangements of Covid, the summer of 2020, and the Jan. 6, 2021, ransacking of the Capitol seemed to vindicate that bitter alienation from the ruling class, albeit in ideologically polarized ways.
Each main political team in the United States likes to tell itself a soothing fairytale. For Democrats, it's that they are the party of "science" and adult-like dedication to norms of impartiality. For Republicans, it's that they are the party of "truth" and the courage to tell it. When cross-examined at any length about dubious fidelity to these values, each side will beat a hasty retreat to what the other guys made them do. Or worse yet, they won't even know about their own side's glaring flaws.
RFK Jr. is to truth what a fish is to basketball. But Buck Sexton is absolutely right about the CDC serially botching its job during the pandemic. Has there been anything like a reckoning among the Democratic and managerial left since then? Or are they content to point at RFK and snicker?
If contrarian kookery and nihilism are bad policy responses on the right, so, too, is autopilot managerial liberalism on the left. Kennedy's predecessor, Xavier Becerra, appointed and confirmed in the teeth of the pandemic, was an absolute political hack with no relevant health-policy experience, touted at the time for being a Latino. He was, predictably, terrible on vaccine mandates and government censoriousness. And probably received 1/1000th the negative press that RFK Jr. has.
American governance will continue to spiral downward until voters start demanding something more than Well, the other guy is worse. Neither Kennedy nor his predecessor were fit for this job; may we one day have a politics where that easy truth isn't so rare to acknowledge... (MORE - missing details)