As new COVID-19 cases surge in Arizona, North Carolina, Florida and elsewhere, any forthcoming re-institution of lockdown measures will surely face more intense backlash than ever before. And for that, you can largely thank U.S. liberals and leftists.

Let’s get it out of the way up front: President Trump and Republicans are far from blameless for the United States’ unforgivably poor response to the pandemic. At the small-scale “Reopen America” rallies which sprouted up in April, right-wing protesters defiantly waved pro-Trump signs and banners — despite Trump himself having endorsed states’ restrictive lockdown policies, and at one point even rebuking the GOP governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, for removing restrictions prematurely.

This confusion owes to Trump’s rambling, scattershot style; his overriding conception of the presidency often appears to be “pundit-in-chief,” rather than anything having to do with actual governance. So he muses semi-coherently about the issues of the day, including the coronavirus, without necessarily taking any kind of firm position on anything — thus enabling supporters to latch onto whatever’s most emotionally satisfying in a given moment.

For as much as Trump’s most histrionic critics love to declare him a fascist, a bonafide ideological fascist almost certainly would have executed a far more ruthless and uncompromising state response to the virus. Instead, Trump has been muddled and incoherent, sometimes endorsing strict containment measures, sometimes opposing them, and at all times seeming to approach the subject more as an aloof TV commentator than any kind of competent executive.

But it is roughly speaking “the Left” which has now truly obliterated any remaining political legitimacy of virus mitigation policies. In the support they have near-unanimously offered to the nationwide eruption of protests over the past several weeks, left/liberal politicians, media personalities, corporate figures and technocrats have demonstrated beyond any doubt that their posture toward lockdown measures was always wholly contingent on politics. Countless Democratic officials saw fit to abandon, seemingly overnight, any regard for the containment measures that they had previously championed so vehemently — and in some cases, enforced with aggressive state action. As such, they have revealed their position to be fundamentally arbitrary and negated any reason why they should ever be listened to again.

There are too many examples to list, but just in my own encounters with elected officials, a great number have conceded to me directly that their participation in these various protest actions directly violated state and local law. Councilman Donovan Richards, who represents Far Rockaway — one of the areas of New York City most severely hit by the virus — told me the following about a Long Island City protest event in which he was a participant on June 6: “By state law and by city law, it’s probably illegal.” The mayor of Robbinsville, N.J., Steve Fried, told me the state-backed protest event that he helped organize and facilitate on June 7 was “technically not legal” per New Jersey state law, which still prohibits gatherings of 25 or more people. And Rep. Madeleine Dean, who took part in a protest event in Schwenksville, Pa., on June 14, told me “I don’t know the number” of people allowed at mass gatherings in the congressional district she represents (she apparently didn’t think to check ahead of time whether she was breaking the law) but speculated, “I have a feeling it would not be in violation.”

In fact, the protest was in violation. Montgomery County, Pa., is another one of many jurisdictions in which mass gatherings of 25 or more people are still prohibited. But it clearly doesn’t matter, because these politicians have demonstrated they believe political exigencies entitle them to flout the legal strictures that everyone else in society is expected to abide by. From Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, mayors have not only sanctioned but explicitly encouraged residents to attend state-backed protest gatherings at which “social distancing” is non-existent — and participated in these events themselves — even when doing so directly violates their own still-existing executive orders. (By the way, there is growing consensus that shouting and chanting in one another’s faces at hyper-close physical proximity is a perfect way to spread the virus.)

One reason for this cognitive dissonance is that politicians and other supportive elites don’t tend to view these protests as “political” in a traditional sense — even though protesters routinely make explicit policy demands, and are actively seeking to influence the direction of U.S. government entities in accordance with their professed values. So these elites don’t perceive any contradiction between their newfound support for unwieldy mass gatherings and their previous denunciations of such gatherings.

Adding to the whiplash is that the protest “movement” has widely adopted shockingly manipulative rhetoric to justify their activities, often brandishing slogans that liken “white supremacy” and “racism” to a “virus” or a “pandemic.” Attend virtually any protest action and you’ll find placards bearing such messages as, “Racism is a virus too — stop the spread” and “White supremacy is the real pandemic.”

It would be one thing if it was just random protesters who’d embraced such rhetorical exploits. But there are countless instances of front-line doctors, nurses and public health “experts” also making the very same nutty argument, thus giving it their quasi-authoritative imprimatur. Astoundingly, infectious disease specialists at the University of Washington — which in the early phases of the pandemic had been among the country’s chief sources of coronavirus information — authored an open letter suddenly declaring mass gatherings “vital to the national public health.” The letter was signed by more than 1,200 medical doctors, Ph.D.s, professors and others affiliated with some of the country’s most prestigious institutions. It’s a reversal so jaw-dropping, and with such profound global implications, that it may well constitute one of the most seismic collective psychic breaks in human history.

Because a direct result is the forfeiture of any lasting credibility these elites might have hoped to possess. Good luck trying to issue any neutral-sounding “public health” guidance in the future. As should have been obvious, but apparently wasn’t, the virus doesn’t care about how righteous your cause may or not be. And now we will all have to live with the fatal consequences.

Tracey writes on politics.