Douthat refuses to truly acknowledge the real reason behind the left-right dichotomy on Covid. He keeps on coming up with fantasies on why the left is following science and the right is following conmen:

I keep writing about this subject, to the point of tedium — though I promise this will be my last such column for a while — because I think this right-left flip, this sudden-seeming role reversal, offers some sort of key to the derangements of our time.

Maybe the key is the absolute power of partisanship and polarization, in which once Donald Trump chose Covid-minimizing rhetoric, everybody else just rushed into their places.

Maybe the key lies in the left’s increasing sense of itself as occupying the seat of power and the right’s sense of its marginalization — which naturally changes the way each side reacts to the use of authority in a crisis and the interest with which each side reads Foucault.

Or maybe the key, as I suggested last week, is all about interests and in-groups and the way the Covid lockdowns affected right-leaning and left-leaning demographics differently — which is why the right briefly favored restrictions when they seemed likely to fall mainly on foreigners and the left briefly suspended its zeal for restrictions when the transgressors were left-wing protesters instead of anti-mask Republicans.

Or maybe Covid has just stripped away all the ideological scaffolding built atop our warring factions and returned us to some sort of Puritans-versus-Jacksonians dynamic from our country’s distant past.

Whatever the explanation, in the short run I think the bare acknowledgment that this weird flip took place might help a little with our polarization — tempering the liberal sense that the right is just a pro-Covid death cult and the right’s sense that the left wants us all to mask up and eat Soylent in our disease-free habitats forever.

He will not acknowledge that the distinction is simple: the left is more willing to listen to science, which can be very messy in its search for “truth”, while the right is more attune to fascists and immutable “truths” that were handed down in religious texts or by strongmen who tell them what to think.