What happens after the flood recedes? What scraped and scarred landscape might come into view as the waters drain away? Everyone agrees that politics will never be the same again, but, human nature being what it is, they almost always go on to argue that the COVID-19 pandemic simply vindicates whatever position they happened to hold before it started.
Thus, ecoactivists blame the pandemic on globalization, Republicans on the World Health Organization, Democrats on President Trump, China hawks on China. There may, of course, be something in some of these perspectives. What, though, are most voters going to conclude? Can we already glimpse the contours of the post-virus political order? In some important respects, yes, we can.
Let’s start with the cheerful news. The urgency of the crisis has shown how petty our previous obsessions were. Identity politics, intersectionality, and critical theory all suddenly seem very trivial. To protest, at a time like this, that too many epidemiologists are white men seems not so much irrelevant as self-absorbed. What kind of person, faced with economic and societal meltdown on this scale, is primarily worried about people referring to the illness as a “Chinese virus”? Let’s just say, in the current climate, an increasingly rare person.
Politics, as Andrew Breitbart used to say, is downstream of culture, and governments no longer need to act like virtue-signaling students. In Britain, companies have been relieved of the obligation to publish their employees’ salaries broken down by gender. It turns out that there are more important things to worry about.
At the same time, a great many petty regulations are being scrapped. Rules on plastic bags, alcohol licensing, restaurant takeaways, pharmaceutical research, and much else have been dropped or suspended. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has come up with #NeverNeeded to highlight the curious fact that many regulations notionally introduced on public health grounds turn out to be a hindrance when an actual public health crisis comes along. It is hard to imagine that there will be much appetite for reintroducing them.
On the other hand, we are witnessing an expansion of state spending unprecedented in peacetime. Indeed, if we measure just a single month, it may be unprecedented, period. It is true that, faced with a pandemic, governments around the world had few options. Having ordered profitable businesses to close on public health grounds, most governments recognized that they had an obligation to compensate their victims.
Why assume, though, that the state will shrink back again afterward? Governments have a tendency to seize supposedly emergency powers and then hang onto them when the emergency passes. “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom,” argued Pitt the Younger. “It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
How have we responded to the crackdowns of recent weeks? Have we gone along with them grudgingly and contingently? Or have we embraced them… well, slavishly? A bit of both, to be honest. But I have been horrified to see how many people take palpable pleasure in telling others what to do. The closures have empowered sneaks and busybodies everywhere. One British police officer was filmed telling someone to get out of his own front garden. Another told shoppers not to buy nonessential luxuries such as wine. Park benches have been declared out of bounds. People are snitching on their neighbors for being outside too often.
As during World War II, we are getting used to authoritarianism all too easily. That conflict changed Britain’s politics permanently. It took years to get rid of ration books and identity cards, decades to reverse the nationalizations and centralizations of power.
It also took decades to pay off the debt, which brings us to the single most important change. Throughout our lifetimes, we have taken rising prosperity for granted. Now, all of a sudden, we face years of stagnation, joblessness, and debt. Will we respond by focusing on the need for growth? Will we vote for politicians who promise to make the economy more competitive, friendlier to investors? Will we countenance things that, in normal times, would have been unthinkable, such as scrapping the minimum wage?
Or will we, instead, plunge deeper into populism? Will we argue that, if the state could find hundreds of billions of dollars to fight the coronavirus, it can easily find smaller sums to support industry, write bigger welfare checks, or subsidize healthcare? Will we cheer on leaders who promise to save us from ourselves, to take on “total power” for our collective good?
How did the Scottish poet Robert Burns put it? “Forward tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear.”
