My first Covid “friends” were Communists
This became polarized due to tribalism, not principles.
Some of my first “friends” in the fight against Covid irrationality in March 2020 were Communists, not libertarians, and not folks on the Right. Communists understand that you can’t freeze an economy.
It would take a couple months before there became a strong and clear Left-Right polarity to Covid. I believe that slow shift was due to tribal effects, not principles.
At any rate, as I talked about a year and a half ago, the debate ended up not about left versus right, but about authoritarianism versus freedom: Up versus Down.
We have always known "lockdowns" and "mandates" to be capitalistic endeavours that favour transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, followed by a further transfer of wealth from the inflation resulting from government bailouts.
All leftists knew this in 2019.
The ACLU also knew this in 2019.
But progressives and leftists lost their damned minds in 2020, and I think it's through very effective marketing from the germophobes at the CDC, the WHO, and Imperial College. These people should all lose their job.
I think that the left right paradigm still holds some water. Liberals generally believe that mankind can be perfected with the right "leadership", that government is a force for good, and that intentions are a important as outcomes. Conservatives generally believe that mankind is imperfect and cannot be perfected, that laws therefore protect mankind from overzealous government, and are suspicious of all governments. Government did everything to help people realize that authoritarianism was their central instinct.