2020 Accountability is MIA

AOC, Fauci, and ‘Woke 1.’

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Garry Kasparov is the chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which publishes The Next Move.

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Never say never: I agree with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on something!

In an ABC interview from a couple of weeks ago, the New York congresswoman happily declared that “Woke 1 was crazy.”

“Woke 1,” as it’s become fashionable to call the start of the decade moral panic, was indeed crazy.

Land acknowledgements were crazy (try acknowledging everyone who’s ever lived on a piece of land in literally any other part of the world).

The firings. The social exile with no hope of recovery. The policing of speech. That was more than crazy: it was destructive on a societal level.

Many progressives made excuses for lawless behavior amid several high-profile police killings of Black Americans. They whetted Americans’ appetites for a different type of lawlessness: the crackdown we are seeing rogue federal agents conduct now. People know that ICE is bad, that law enforcement has a troubled history in this country. Yet when they see Democratic electeds treat riots with kid gloves, they’ll support an authoritarian right over the specter of anarchy and chaos.

Some may bristle at my reference to demonstrations in this period as riots, but AOC herself used the word in 2019 when she declared that groups that “are marginalized and marginalized and marginalized […] have no choice but to riot.”

What is missing from the conversation about 2020—Trumpism, Woke 1, the origins of coronavirus, and so on—is real accountability. Accountability was the missing ingredient in Woke 1, where the priority in approaching alleged wrongthinkers was always cancellation; punishment rather than rehabilitation—if, in fact, the accused had even done anything wrong.

So I am not out to cancel AOC, though I agree with her on vanishingly little. Her electoral career is for voters to decide. What I would like from the congresswoman is accountability; not for her to simply disown her bad ideas but to seriously interrogate what made those ideas bad.

The same can be said for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the target of a Republican-led witch hunt for the better part of a decade, but is also a deeply flawed leader.

Before I proceed, because I understand that criticism of Dr. Fauci is a tripwire in many conversations, let me be clear: I vociferously oppose RFK Jr.-style vaccine denial and the dollar-store pseudoscience the president himself advanced during the first administration. I vaccinated myself. My entire family was vaccinated. My only regret is that my mother—who was still in Moscow—was not able to take it; she died on Christmas Day 2020 before the jab was widely available. You can understand why this topic is personal for me.

Fauci was in an impossible position during the pandemic, but he was also arrogant. He confidently dismissed alternative theories about the origins of the pandemic while privately entertaining other possibilities. He spoke with absolute certainty in public when he was not so certain behind closed doors. He assumed that Americans wanted false reassurances when what they really wanted was honesty.

People who stepped out of line faced severe professional and social consequences. Prominent media outlets constructed a deeply uncharitable straw man of anyone who questioned the wet-market hypothesis, calling it “old-fashioned racism.”

Journalist Terry Moran claims ABC censored his story on the lab-leak theory after running it by Fauci. Moran, mind you, is no Trumper—he was fired from ABC for (correctly) calling Stephen Miller a bigot.

Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who received the Nobel Prize in medicine for his groundbreaking discoveries on HIV, was rendered an outcast for trying to prove a lab origin through scientific analysis. Of course, he also harbored anti-vaccine views (Newton had an interest in alchemy—nobody’s perfect). But viruses were Montagnier’s expertise, and on the coronavirus he was shut down for deviating from the party line. You can agree or disagree with him, but his summary dismissal is antithetical to the free exchange of ideas.

During the pandemic, many careers and reputations were upended. The room for serious intellectual investigation shrank rapidly in 2020.

It’s worthwhile to engage Fauci on all of these points in the context of a thoughtful, well-reasoned congressional hearing.

But today’s Republicans don’t do thoughtful and well reasoned, and because of that, people like Rand Paul have made it less likely that there will ever be an honest reckoning with Fauci over his missteps. Fauci is pleading the Fifth again and again because being forthright now will expose him to even more abuse. Republicans have set up accountability as an all-or-nothing game, a choice between a politicized arrest or acting as if nothing went wrong.

Given those options, most liberal-minded people would choose the latter, and we can’t blame them, because Fauci’s mistakes are not criminal and throwing him in jail would be a terrible miscarriage of justice. But that’s still a deeply suboptimal outcome from the perspective of truth and good governance.

Now, there are public figures whose actions should land them in front of a judge (I can think of a few in the current administration). AOC and Fauci are not such people. From the proponents of Woke 1 or those who stifled the conversation around the pandemic, what we need is accountability.

The problem is that accountability is a moderate solution. Americans, with your revolutionary spirit, struggle with that kind of moderation; it provides neither the relief of absolution nor the satisfaction of righteous punishment. But those sharpening their blades should remember that no democracy was ever rescued by the guillotine.

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