The (Critical) Left during Covid: What happened?

Kevin Bardosh sits down with Geoffrey Shullenberger, an American cultural theorist and editor at Compact magazine, to discuss his latest book (edited with Elena Lange), Covid-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear. We discuss how the political left, in America and Europe, responded to the pandemic both early on and as it unfolded. Despite some significant contributions in critical analysis, the majority of left-leaning thinkers were silent about Covid authoritarian tendencies. Why was this? And what happened? We explore these questions, and situate them in the broader historical changes within leftist thinking and culture that shaped how people reacted to fear, tribal identity and scientific evidence. We end by discussing the legacy of Covid on our cultural landscape.