Covid-era moral outrage on both sides converged into dehumanizing each other

Evidence

We who complied with the public health measures judged those who did not for their refusal to put the well-being of the immunocompromised ahead of their own convenience, and for their indifference to the huge sacrifices made by health-care workers as unvaccinated people filled up the Covid wards. How could they be so heartless? So willing to rank human life as more or less worthy of protection and care? And yet when unvaccinated people became ill with Covid, many of the people who claimed to have been appalled by their callousness talked about how maybe they didn’t deserve health care, or told bad jokes (which were not always jokes) about how perhaps Covid would rid the world of stupid people, or went as far as French president Emmanuel Macron, who said that unvaccinated people were not full citizens. We defined ourselves against each other and yet were somehow becoming ever more alike, willing to declare each other non-people. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 394

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘willing to declare each other non-people’ line echoes the dehumanization dynamics in white supremacist thought and, structurally, the doubling device itself — both sides rendering the other as non-people. — connects to: COVID-19’s shared mortal threat deepened rather than healed American polarization — Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian…, 126
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox Klein isolates — people defined wholly against each other who thereby become ever more alike, both declaring the other non-people — resists easy summary and rewards rereading.