Richard Vigilante:

The comic Covid anxieties of a Democrat doctor who should know better raised chuckles at several conservative media sites this week.

Apparently, the healthy, middle-aged doctor’s  reaction to a scratchy throat was to so obsess on his possibly Covidious peril that instead of staying home in bed he trudged—unmasked because his supply had run out—from one drugstore to another in a frustrated quest for Covid home tests, exposing any number of store clerks to the deadly rumor, to determine whether he should panic even more. He did eventually find a test but then worried on that he had not secured more because apparently multiple serial tests are needed to be sure.

Amusing certainly, but it made me think about a phenomenon I’ve been observing most of my life and wonder if all along I had got it wrong.

Liberals are constantly proclaiming themselves frightened of something. It’s the most common tactic of the woke.  Why else demand “safe spaces” in places the normal do not fear to tread?

Here’s the thing, though. For many decades whenever liberals proclaimed themselves terrified, I assumed they were only pretending, or at most engaging in the willful suspension of disbelief that makes horror movies entertaining.

I thought they were making it up in order to score political points or generate that frisson of faux heroism.

My first signal of this came from receding echoes of the McCarthy Era.

Though I am now quite old, the Senator and I shared this mortal coil for only seven months before he shuffled it off for good, making me no sort of eyewitness. Still, just about all the liberals I ever knew as a young man—a group confined exclusively to out-of-town teachers at my public high school as I grew up in an amazingly right-wing neighborhood attending General Douglas MacArthur High School—at one point told me tales of how terrified they had been in the days when Sen. McCarthy roamed the earth.

This seemed silly. After all the principal outcome of the Senator’s claims to have detected an abundance of Communist agents in U.S. government was that he was persecuted from that day until his death, censured by his own party and President, eventually to expire in an alcoholic stupor, a danger to no one.

My suspicions grew because the liberals who told the story invariably cited their fear as proof of the Senator’s fearsomeness, like a child insisting his fear of monsters in the closet were proof they were there.

(I pause to note McCarthy was right. He hadn’t made up “the lists.” He was given them by FBI whistleblowers after the Truman Administration, at first diligent in pursuit of Roosevelt era infiltrators, later refused to go after commie spies for which the Truman folk might be blamed. Dem leaders freaked when they heard McCarthy cite “the lists” because they knew they were real. The whole story can be found in Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans.)

After McCarthy, liberals seemed to do it over and over, decade after decade, louder and louder with each iteration, for a succession of issues.  Always the same argument: we’re frightened, therefor you must be a danger.

This seemed to partly account for Trump Derangement Syndrome. Liberals’ claim to fear that Trump would overthrow the Constitution seemed largely a cover for their actual shredding of it. Liberals professed to be terrified of Trump’s words,  outstripped them in their own anti-democratic deeds.

Anyway, that was my theory: liberals were no more cowardly than the next guy, just oddly willing to pretend to cowardice to win an argument.

The Democrat doctor has moved me to reexamine history. Maybe liberals aren’t pretending. Maybe they really do frighten easily.

Early in pandemic days, cowardice did seem possibly the simplest and most efficient explanation for liberal Covid weirdness.  A look at the timeline suggests that opposing liberal and conservative reactions to Covid predated their ideological association. Only after each side observed the behavior of the other did that behavior become a battle flag. Even before that liberals really were more frightened, and conservatives really were more relaxed.

Perhaps this divergence afterward came to appear ideological because it naturally aligned with liberal submissiveness to government and conservative skepticism toward it.  Maybe liberals masked up and locked down not primarily because they like being dominated, but because they really were afraid.

This might also explain liberal hysteria about global warming or even nuclear winter (for those old enough to remember).  On the right, we have gotten the habit of seeing green panic as contrived because it so obviously aligns with socialism, as the nuclear winter willies so obviously aligned with being soft on the Soviets.

Perhaps that’s unfair. Maybe they are just scared of shadows, including their own.

One reason I have suspected the opposite, that liberals pretend to be afraid in order to achieve some other goal, is that I have assumed that if people really were afraid they would be loathe to admit it lest they appear cowards.

Consider student resistance to the Vietnam war. In truth it would have been perfectly normal, thoroughly healthy to say “I don’t want to go to war because like any normal person I don’t want to die. If my country had been attacked, to defend her I would put my fear aside. But I feel no obligation to do so because some politicians think this war is good ‘policy.’ “

Who could object?

Instead, the anti-war types went on and on about how their real objection was to the morality of the war, not to the prospect of dying but the burden of killing. They cheered for Ho Chi Minh. At the end some argued the draft dodgers were the real heroes and should be the ones getting a monument.

Would they have made such an argument if their fear had not hung heavy on their consciences?  And does that suggest equally that when people do claim fear, some other motive actually prevails?

But perhaps all that is wrong. Perhaps they aren’t pretending. Perhaps they really are just afraid?

A wise friend of mine long ago told me I would never understand an opponent unless I started by believing he believed what he said.

Dorothy is dumbstruck when the Lion, terrifying a moment before, breaks out in tears as Dorothy scolds him. His behavior seems to make no sense. But then she realizes it does. He’s just afraid.

People afraid of guns, afraid of diseases, afraid of men who act like men, afraid of being given more of their own money to decide what to do with themselves, afraid of giving people more power instead of the government — yes, that’s the Democratic Party today. Cowards.