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Notes -
While I think the second part is surely correct -- ass-covering is an age-old political first-responder -- I'm not sure that many governments were anxious for life to return to "as it was." It need not be conspiratorial, but as the underlying theme of progressivism is that 'everything is terrible until we achieve utopia,' there was a lot of incentive for blue governors, urban mayors and unions to try to leverage the crisis as an opportunity for systemic change to some pretty fundamental aspects of life, like remote work and schooling, the operation of elections, etc. That these things have mostly returned to normal was, in my understanding, not without resistance and only because of normie insistence on "as it was."
Globally speaking there was, in the end, fairly little difference between right-wing and left-wing politicians in the harshness of Covid measures - or, rather, there were both right-wingers and left-wingers going with heavy, proactive measures approach (say, Orban and Ardern) or anything from light to non-existent measures (AMLO in Mexico, Bolsonaro in Brazil). It's not something one can strictly blame on progressivism, and the crisis certainly was also used for all sorts of agendas by all sorts of parties.
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