When did you last test yourself for COVID-19?
There was a time when plans were cancelled at the first sign of a sniffle.
Four years later, the strange spell of COVID has lost its potency: The fever has broken.
Life continues as it did pre-pandemonium, but now with the lingering memory of how the pursuit of blind emotion — fear, in this case — clouds our judgment and compels obedience.
Identity politics is a different type of virus, one that was seeded by the far left to win the 2020 election.
Tailored to satiate fears during a period of social unrest, “progressives” convinced us that all society’s problems could be solved by bowing to the demands of social justice warriors.
Their carefully curated media image — as a balm to heal Trump fatigue with the Democratic Party’s compassion — facilitated their victory.
But with victory came contempt for at least half the electorate.
President Biden has repeatedly used the phrase “MAGA Republicans” to stereotype Trump supporters as dangerous authoritarians.
Democrats’ political consultants seem to have settled on this strategy to conceal their divisive and destructive policies of the last four years.
Millions of dollars feed this machinery — ads, focus groups, curated polls and an army of people knocking on doors — to create the illusion that with Kamala Harris, the party has great momentum.
Yet the spell of identity politics has worn thin, and foundational cracks are showing. Its fever is breaking, too.
When the failing Biden was swapped out for Harris, the transition was buttered with a slather of woke rhetoric.
She was presented as an inspirational figure: “a daughter of immigrants”; “the first female vice president in US history”; “the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket.”
Yet the media hype celebrating Harris for her gender and racial identity does not match voter priorities.
Last year, only 18% of US adults agreed that it was “extremely” or ”very important” for a woman to be elected president during their lifetime.
Identity politics has become a luxury belief that Americans can simply no longer afford.
Over the past four years, it has become clear that woke policies promising cohesion and safety have produced the opposite effect.
Utter despair on the streets of Democrat-run cities like Portland, Los Angeles and San Francisco contradicts the image of a party of compassion.
Economically, Americans continue to suffer the government’s overregulation and the heightened inflation caused by the steady printing of money and anti-growth energy policies.
Parents have been politicized through necessity as they observe the torment of their children: The unrelenting march of woke ideology though schools puts every child at risk of mutilation and indoctrination.
This government marketed itself on social justice, but no justice can be found in a warped system that shows leniency towards criminals, whilst its candidates support campaigns to defund the police.
White men in particular are waking up to the fact that they were guilt-tripped into blindly giving their votes, money and loyalty to progressive groups and causes.
They see today that the supposed beneficiaries of those campaigns are worse off, while they themselves are stung and demonized by ever-more-radical progressives.
Take Silicon Valley, once a hotbed of wokeism — but interventionist policies, it turns out, put the kibosh on innovation.
Radical progressives flown in from the humanities simply don’t fly in an industry that relies on meritocracy, so techies are increasingly abandoning the Democrats.
Feelings of betrayal have shattered the compassionate mirage for many Jewish voters, too.
The Oct. 7 attack on Israel led to an explosion of antisemitism, the benign treatment of pro-Hamas protesters and the coddling of Iran on the international stage.
This terrifying totality does not chime with predictions that Harris-Walz is a winning ticket.
It is now clear to many moderate Democrats that identity politics was not driven by a desire to emancipate or find justice for the marginalized.
Quite the opposite: The pains of vulnerable communities were exploited to achieve unchecked power for the few, as the woke hard-liners imposed policies through the administrative state rather than through representative government.
Luxury beliefs, like luxury goods, come with a huge price tag.
It is 2024 and Americans do not want to pay the price this time, regardless of the tales told by the polls and the media.
Those who do are either fools or masochists.
You decide.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the Restoration Bulletin.