...American epidemiologist with rotating opinions, warnings about the unlikely, and reassurances that if you wear a mask you won't get COVID, as long as you're wearing multiple masks, assuming wearing a mask is necessary in the first place...of recent days? He was a paragon of self-mastery, the indispensable virtue in an age when one must be an actor to be an effective bureaucrat, and a bureaucrat to be a scientist—"the princes and the servants of the princes and...the magi." Last year, one saw signs that read, "In Fauci we trust." Now, amid heightened scrutiny, Fauci rebukes those who question him with the pronouncement that he is science incarnate: "Attacks against me are attacks against science." Et Scientia caro factum est et habitavit in nobis. In the end, Fauci has no mastery over science nor public policy nor even himself. The only real power was exercised over his fellow citizens, which arose from their fear and was maintained through lies and half-truths he termed science.
Fauci’s fellow elites don’t need him anymore. Trump is gone, and trillions of dollars have been printed for Wall Street, the blob, and corporations, especially those whose interests are interwoven with the state, whose own power is substantially expanded. In the wealthiest—and whitest—Washington, D.C. suburbs, yard signs still remain to signal to any angry mob that might return. Fauci is expendable. A ruling class that knows how to benefit from every crisis is confident it can withstand whatever deluge may come.
It is of course likely that the ruling class will not only survive but continue to profit from every crisis that arises. But the unknown variable is how the children of the COVID generation respond. Children have a natural antipathy for lies. Today’s children have been frightened and deceived—by elites like Fauci, by their teachers, even by their parents. Elites will have to go to significant lengths to prevent today’s children from eventually learning that it wasn’t the science that dictated that they remain home and avoid friends and wear masks but mere fallible humans, perhaps with another agenda; that many rich and powerful elites benefitted from the pandemic shutdowns and the bailouts.
Many are likely to sooner or later rebel against the teachers who taught them that a person is good or evil on the basis of epidermal pigment or genitalia. They may also rebel against the parents who were either gullible or obsequious, for children often come to hate those who cannot protect them, much as they come to hate those who spoil them. It is they who may become the wrathful simpleton-citizens of Miller’s imagination, who will one day cry, "Let us stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing."
If that day ever comes, it’s unlikely the angry mob will find Anthony Fauci doing penance in a desert monastery.