Has the Left really been engaging in good faith introspection and contrition about its mistakes from that period?

Over the weekend, I disputed Atlantic staff writer Jonathan Chait’s contention that the Left has been engaging in genuine introspection and contrition about the mistakes it made in fanatically supporting the fallacious public-health conventional wisdom — the need for lockdowns, the impossibility of a lab-leak origin of Covid-19, the utility of masks, etc. — of the Covid era.

Not only does Chait overstate “the case for leftist introspection,” I wrote; he also outright ignores that some, such as Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, are still “attempting to alter history concerning Covid, even five years later” by denying their own culpability for the Covid response.

In the Washington Examiner, our former colleague David Harsanyi castigates Chait and those like him further. Chait is “is irked by all the ‘gloating’” and “football-spiking,” Harsanyi writes, because Democrats, “Chait says, merely engaged in a good-faith debate.” He finds evidence of Chait’s supposed good faith: “a COVID-era piece headlined ‘American Death Cult,’ accusing Republicans of deliberately murdering their own citizens.”

For Harsanyi, a “handful” of articles published five years later “begrudgingly admitting that lockdowns pushed by public health institutions and politicians failed” and an admission by Chait that “in a ‘bout of confusion in the face of fast-moving events,’ mistakes were made” are not enough to exculpate him and others who made similar public statements at the time. Harsanyi makes a striking comparison: “Imagine, if you can, pro-Iraq War Republicans demanding Democrats coddle and praise them for retroactively admitting they were wrong without ever explicitly taking responsibility.”

Harsanyi is right to push back against the self-serving revisionism of Chait and others. We won’t learn the right lessons from that strange period without guarding against attempts to alter our collective memory of it.