Jan. 19, 2025
When Covid-19 first emerged as a health crisis in China five years ago, observers noted that authoritarian regimes — with their hostility toward whistle-blowers, their manipulation of data, their fear of the free flow of information — facilitate the spread of disease.
Within a few months, it became clear that the flip side of that proposition was also true: Disease facilitates the spread of authoritarianism.
In Hungary, the virus was the pretext for Prime Minister Viktor Orban to establish a dictatorship on the model of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte used the pandemic to issue shoot-to-kill orders against political protesters. In Israel, the government’s decision to use cellphone data to track the movements of infected individuals quickly became a model and alibi for other states to pick up the practice, with no scruples about the data they collected.
It didn’t stop there. The pandemic provided a ready-made excuse for democratic governments around the world to obstruct opposition parties, ban public assemblies, suppress voting, quarantine cities, close borders, limit trade, strong-arm businesses, impose travel restrictions and censor hostile media outlets in the name of combating “false information.”
Remarkably, the tactics met with comparatively little resistance, partly because they were advertised as only temporary, and partly because the concerns of civil libertarians paled next to calls to “flatten the curve.” But as the lockdowns of 2020 were extended from spring to summer and then to early fall, a process of normalization began to take hold.
In the U.S., Joe Biden accepted the Democratic nomination from his Delaware home after it became clear that holding a convention would pose unacceptable health risks. Effectively barred from campaigning by restrictions on public rallies (as well as fear among his aides that the 77-year old nominee might contract the virus), he sought to mount a virtual campaign against an incumbent who wielded the emergency powers of government to aid his re-election. Donald Trump handily won again in November.
As civil liberties receded, big government grew. Unprecedented unemployment meant unprecedented increases in Medicaid rolls, jobless benefits, housing assistance and food stamps. It was left to Trump to preside over an expansion of the welfare state the likes of which Bernie Sanders could only have dreamed about a year earlier.
Nor did things change much after the lockdowns were lifted, as people remained reluctant to venture into restaurants, shops and planes — and less able to afford them. Millions of business failures and personal bankruptcies translated to tens of millions of loan and mortgage delinquencies, which in turn caused a financial crisis. Dozens of banks had to be nationalized outright, while the government took stakes in every industry it rescued. By the time a safe vaccine was finally available, the damage had been done.
The developing world experienced the crisis far more severely. “Flattening the curve” made little sense in countries whose medical systems were already overwhelmed and underequipped long before Covid-19 came around. Stay-at-home and social distancing orders were treated as a cruel and unenforceable joke in densely populated cities like Lagos, Cairo, Jakarta and São Paulo. People faced with hunger if they didn’t get to their jobs were prepared to take their chances with the coronavirus.
The result was a frightful fatality rate, not-much mitigated by the fact that poorer countries have younger populations. Then there were effects of the global depression on the world’s most vulnerable economies. The destruction of the maquiladora industries in Mexico quickly led to the abrupt collapse of state authority along the border, a vacuum immediately filled by the cartels. By 2023 Trump had finally built his wall, backed by bipartisan congressional support.
At the outset of the crisis it may have seemed that progressive parties stood to benefit politically. The opposite proved true.
Environmental concerns seemed like idle luxuries when gas was cheap and CO2 emissions plummeted along with economic activity. Demands for gun control and criminal-sentencing reform fell flat in the face of increasing levels of crime. Trump’s repeated calls for getting America “back to work” resonated with rural and suburban voters, who thought they had less to fear from the virus and tended to measure personal risk differently than urban elites.
A bellicose spirit also took hold. Economically damaged regimes — China, Russia and Iran especially — looked to offset domestic discontents with foreign adventures. Military enlistments rose everywhere, partly as a form of employment, partly out of a sense of fear. Among the paradoxes of the Covid-19 crisis was that it brought the world together as never before in a common experience of lockdowns and self-isolations — while fragmenting it as never before into wary states and nervous neighbors.
Not everything was bleak. Adults read more books, paid closer attention to their spouses and children, called their aging parents more often, made more careful choices with their money, thought more deeply about what they really wanted in life. In time, that kind of spiritual deepening will surely pay its own dividends.
For now, however, America awaits the inauguration of its 46th president, Michael Richard Pence.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
