The Mirror Test for a Divided America

Our nation won’t heal until we admit our own side’s failures.

Reality’s Last Stand is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.

About the Author

Julian is a columnist for Reality’s Last Stand and a member of the Braver Angels media team. He’s also the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to combating illiberalism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community.

---

Earlier this month, I attended an advance screening of Ari Aster’s new film, Eddington. Set in a small New Mexico town in 2020, the story follows a community torn apart by fierce disputes over COVID-19 lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests.

Aster has said he wrote the film to show us the problem, and in that, he certainly succeeds. Every character, on every side of every issue, is as obnoxious as possible. There’s the white girl who champions Black Lives Matter, lecturing the black police officer confronting her that he’s on the wrong side of the issue. There’s the woke high schooler who pledges to use his white privilege to shut up and listen to minorities—just as soon as he’s done delivering his own speech. On the other side, the conservative sheriff’s mother-in-law peddles Plandemic-style conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins. The sheriff himself is simple-minded, aggressive, and a pretty awful family man who runs for mayor—then falsely claims his wife was raped by his political opponent in an attempt to boost his campaign.

Every issue, every advocate for mask mandates or reopening, for BLM or for the police, is caricatured and lampooned. In Eddington, everyone is a bad actor. Aster’s point seems clear: whatever side we find ourselves on, we should be compelled to take a long hard look in the mirror. As he puts it in the film’s Press Notes, “I hope it’s democratic in the way that it gives equal weight to every instrument in the cacophony.”

Whether Aster’s strategy—skewering everyone to provoke self-reflection—can truly succeed is debatable. But whether or not Eddington inspires that kind of introspection, it’s something we badly need. The past five years have seen many of us behave poorly—or at least excuse and enable terrible behavior from people on our own “team.” We and our society will be stronger if we can face that honestly.

Moral Failures On the Left

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, many of us clung to lockdowns and social distancing with the desperation of a drowning man grasping a rope. Overnight, anyone who opposed or even questioned lockdowns became a villain—someone who must want children and elderly Americans to die. Snitch networks sprang up so we could report neighbors who dared visit family in person or refused to wear a mask. We put up with an ever-changing, often contradictory set of rules without protest—rules like wearing a mask while walking to a restaurant table but not while eating—and learned quickly that pointing out the absurdities was socially dangerous.

I remember one friend agreeing to meet in person after restrictions eased slightly. Before we sat down, he told me—without irony—that if I removed my mask, he would have the right to kill me. His reasoning was simple, if extreme: though healthy and with no underlying conditions, he claimed my unmasked presence would put him in mortal danger, granting him a right to self-defense.

Then the Black Lives Matter protests began, and all of that supposed public-health wisdom instantly evaporated. We were told it was too reckless and dangerous to attend our grandparents’ funerals, but perfectly acceptable for thousands of people to pack shoulder-to-shoulder in public squares to protest. Many nodded along when Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, declared: “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” Questioning that logic was a cancelable offense, so we convinced ourselves this massive political exception to lockdown rules somehow made sense.

The madness didn’t stop there.