The Democrat in question is Janice Hahn, a former Democratic House rep who’s been a member of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors since 2016. It’s rare that a member of Congress will leave that body to run for a position in local government but the Board of Supervisors isn’t any ol’ municipal board. It’s a panel of five people that sets policy for L.A. County, a jurisdiction of 10 million and the biggest county in the United States.

Hahn couldn’t help noticing that the county’s mask mandate was ignored by, uh, pretty much everyone at the Super Bowl held in L.A. this Sunday. So she’s been thinking.

And where her thoughts have led her is to the thankless position below. The COVID hawks to her left will spaz out and call her the Grim Reaper for “surrendering” to the Trumpist demand to drop precautions while the COVID doves to her right are destined to sneer, “Beginning to lose the trust of the people?”

Baby steps, though, right? An influential L.A. pol tilting against masks is a nice sign of progress towards post-pandemic normalcy:

Keeping mandates in place that aren’t followed just erodes the credibility the public has in our ability to make good, sound decisions.

— Janice Hahn (@SupJaniceHahn) February 15, 2022

Hahn isn’t the only member of the Board of Supervisors to oppose the mandates based on how fans at an L.A. football game behaved. Kathryn Barger, the board’s lone Republican member, tweeted this after numerous California pols were spotted maskless at the NFC Championship, also held at SoFi Stadium:

Not a lot of #COVID19 mask wearing @ yesterday's #NFCChampionshipGame. Vaccines/negative test results were required & strong air circulation was in place. Some fans felt this was enough protection. I believe we need to trust the public to make personal masking decisions.Thoughts?

— Supervisor Kathryn Barger (@kathrynbarger) January 31, 2022

“Let’s do away with blanket Covid masking policies — they don’t make a difference when they’re not consistently followed or enforced,” she said in a statement afterward. “We need to trust the public to make the best personal decisions for themselves based on their unique risks and circumstances.” That was on January 31. A week later, with other California counties dropping their mandates and the state dropping its own indoor mask mandate, L.A. County declared that it … would not give up its mandate.

But that was then, this is now. There are now two anti-mandate members on the board. The tide is shifting waaaaaaay too slowly, but it’s shifting.

It’s interesting that Hahn had a rethink based on behavior at the game, not the polling. If you polled a jurisdiction as blue as L.A. County, I’d bet there’d still be majority support for mask mandates. Liberals know what they’re “supposed to” say as a matter of tribal identity when asked their opinion on restrictions. But what they say and what they do are two different things, as Hahn shrewdly recognizes. Presciently, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote yesterday that the phenomenon of tens of thousands of people at the Super Bowl going maskless in the heart of Los Angeles was the de facto end of the pandemic mentality in the United States.

The Chinese Olympics that nobody is watching feature athletes getting served by people in hazmat suits. Meanwhile, SoFi stadium gathered over 70,000 fans for the big game, and the cameras panning the vast crowd showed the spectators to be almost entirely maskless.

This was the end of the pandemic in the United States — or at least the primary signal that, as a culture, we are ready for the end…

That a football game could “end” a pandemic may seem absurd — what does it have to do with the spread, with the facts of the disease and the latest variants, or with the rate of vaccine uptake? But cultures never make sense as pure calculations about inputs and outputs. Ultimately, we make a collective cultural decision about whether we are in a state of emergency or not. A big, raucous crowd of unmasked fans at a football game in America is normal. Broadcasting that game — and studiously refusing to reference or mention the pandemic — is a giant flashing sign. You probably have moved on or are about to move on. We’re moving on, too.

Why are Angelenos ready to move on? Probably because they’ve seen the data:

Every indicator in Los Angeles County is getting better and rapidly. The people in that crowd knew it, which is why they felt safe to be there – and unmasked. It's the worst kind of magical thinking to believe removing mask mandates will somehow reverse this trend. pic.twitter.com/ooY9tKnS5E

— Aaron Astor (@AstorAaron) February 14, 2022

As for Hahn’s worry that the public might begin to lose faith in public health officials if they’re not more nimble in adjusting COVID policy to scientific reality, I’m afraid it’s too late for that — among Republicans, at least.

Democratic numbers are steady overall but you can detect some lost faith in how the numbers declined last year among those who said they trust scientists and medical scientists “a great deal.” Democrats’ political identity is too bound up in respect for science for them to admit that they’ve don’t trust the experts as much as they used to amid shifting conclusions and confusing guidance. The most they’re going to concede is that they no longer trust them a great deal but only “a fair amount.” That’s what we see in that graph.

And note that those numbers are through December 2021, not last week. It’s anyone’s guess what the spectacle of having their kids forced to mask indefinitely while Super Bowl fans go nuts will do to liberal parents’ faith that the public health bureaucracy knows what it’s doing.

In lieu of an exit question, read Kevin Williamson on what drives the forever-maskers. A few days ago he compared their devotion to a form of religious purification. Today he locates it in the same desperate yearning for community that’s crippled so many Americans. Quote: “Communities founded in shared trauma are some of the most intimate and most enduring ones, which is one reason that Americans living in this age of peace and plenty expend so much effort inventing fanciful new traumas for themselves. Masks are for some Americans a sign of community, an exterior marker of shared values. And they will hold on to those — at the grocery store, in their emojis, in their hearts — because they do not have anything else to hold on to.”