In his 1992 book The Culture of Contentment, a series of essays that ring very true today, the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that “individuals and communities that are favored in their economic, social and political condition attribute social virtue and political durability to that which they themselves enjoy. That attribution, in turn, is made to apply even in the face of commanding evidence to the contrary.”
This is the exact problem we face now: a favored class that sees its own comfort as a sign that everything’s fine. As a result, the members of the Church of the Contented Establishment—from the White House to Jha and his Brown colleague Emily Oster, to David Leonhardt at The New York Times and Leana Wen at The Washington Post, to even infectious-disease doctors like Monica Gandhi at the University of California San Francisco—are pushing a narrative about Covid and our public health that, thanks to its influence within elite circles, is more subtly corrupting and poisonous than anything that outright Covid denialists like Ron DeSantis have come up with.
The Adults Are In The Room Now.