The pre-COVID-19 order isn’t coming back, “for the former things are passed away.”
Even if a vaccine or a cure is discovered tomorrow, we won’t pick up where we left off. The world that lies beyond the lockdown is an altogether colder, harsher, and more authoritarian place.
In part, this reflects changing geopolitics. We talk of the pandemic as a global crisis, but its impact has not been felt symmetrically. Western economies have been unusually hard hit. China is the only nation on the planet that has bounced back to where it was: Its economy will end up growing by 2% in 2020 while the United States shrinks by 5%, the eurozone shrinks by 8%, and the United Kingdom shrinks by 10%. And that’s before we get to the debt figures. Chinese Communist Party leaders are now comfortably set to meet their objective of running the world’s largest economy by 2030.
That fact alone is vast enough. English-speaking populations have been ascendant for three centuries, long enough for their precepts — free speech, regular elections, uncensored newspapers, jury trials — to come to look like universal values. We may be about to discover that there was never anything universal about them.
Indeed, even in the core Anglosphere states, liberty is retreating before the disease — or, rather, before the panic and collectivism induced by the disease. An extraterrestrial visitor, judging only by the texture of daily life, would think that the U.K. and the U.S. were more repressive regimes than Russia or China, where people are free to eat out, attend concerts, and travel. The citizens of those autocracies also display a sense of patriotism and purpose that has been lost in the liberal West, wracked as it is by identity politics and culture wars.
At least as consequential as the shift in global power is the shift inside our heads. Epidemics, like all shared threats, make people warier, more introverted, more tribal, less tolerant of dissent, and more hostile to those seen as outsiders. The coronavirus incubated the Black Lives Matter riots just as surely as medieval plagues incubated pogroms. And the worst of it is that the alteration of our brain chemistry will outlast the virus.
Long after World War II, the last time people felt a comparable collective threat, British voters continued to support food rationing, identity cards, a controlled economy, and conscription — all things that had supposedly been brought in on a temporary basis during the fighting.
As we haul ourselves out of the pupa of lockdown, we will find that we have metamorphosed. Free inquiry, open competition, small government, the elevation of the individual over the collective — all these things, which used to be understood, even if grudgingly, as the basis of an open society, are being decried on all sides as somehow self-indulgent.
Obviously, market capitalism always had its critics. But, whereas the criticism used to come largely from one end of the spectrum, it has now become near-universal. Last week, the founder of the Davos schmoozefest, Klaus Schwab, declared: “Free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition, and enabled the emergence of massive new global monopolies.”
Every assertion in that statement is false, but all are so widely believed as to pass without comment, even on the Right. Many notional conservatives echo Schwab in portraying a distaste for intrusive state regulation, not as a default but as a kind of religion.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican, calls it “market worship.” Oren Cass, who as recently as 2012 served as Mitt Romney’s economic adviser, talks of “libertarian fundamentalists who see the free market as an end unto itself.”
In fact, libertarians are the opposite of fundamentalists. An open, liberal order is the product of reason. It feels counterintuitive: However prosperous we become, there is always a little part of us longing for the security and hierarchy of the kin group. After all, we lived in tribes for almost the whole of our existence as a species. Never before have we been so likely to sleep in our own rooms. Even in normal times, it sometimes felt, however irrationally, as if something was missing.
Now, thrown together by the disease, people in every country are rejecting the individualistic assumptions that guaranteed their freedom and their prosperity. Once those assumptions have been junked, they won’t easily come back. Nature pours back in. Our liberal order will soon be choked by creepers like some ancient Mayan ruin, swallowed up in the spray of green. By heaven, we’ll miss it when it is gone.
