Yet it’s also true that there exists a broad scientific consensus that outdoor spaces are much safer than enclosed spaces. Marc Lipstich, of the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, a go-to immunologist throughout this crisis, recently wrote with two colleagues that “the science could not be clearer: The benefits of getting outside vastly outweigh the risk of getting infected in a park.”
That logic should apply with equal or greater force to beaches, which usually have more room to avoid close contact than do narrow paths in public parks. Photos of people on beaches appearing to violate social distancing rules don’t prove that beach-goers are more likely to ignore social distancing requirements than park visitors. California is simply choosing a highly restrictive interpretation of the evidence.
The growing divergence between permissive rules in Texas and restrictive ones in California gives other states two models to follow, according to their partisan preferences and cultural worldviews.
Conservatives can embrace their libertarian sides, chafing (perhaps literally) at mask rules and other restrictions as examples of government overreach. Coupled with a partisan desire for the economy to rebound at least somewhat before the November elections, they have a potent combination of incentives to read the evidence very permissively.
Liberals, for their part, can embrace communitarian values of mutual care — while also taking part in a bit of virtue-signaling. The horrified reaction to images of non-socially distanced people on beaches carries a whiff of moral condemnation that goes beyond concern about real-world consequences. And while liberals don’t want the economy to tank any more than conservatives do, I do know a few who will admit privately that they hope any rebound will start after the election, not before.
The attitudes on both sides are not new, of course. The pandemic isn’t creating new divisions; it is reinforcing and exacerbating those that already existed.
What’s new is that Covid-19 is now poised to translate the red-blue divide into a remarkable set of policy differences. As those differences diffuse across more and more states, we may see the emergence of two new normals. And the virus knows neither politics nor borders.
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and host of the podcast “Deep Background.” He is a professor of law at Harvard University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. His books include “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.”