https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/07/how-covid-changed-politics
Rage, waste and corruption: how Covid changed politics
Four years on from the start of the pandemic, the drama may have subsided but the lingering effects go on. Are we suffering from political long Covid?
by David Runciman
Thu 7 Mar 2024 05.00 GMT
Like many people, I have had Covid and I have had long Covid. They are
very different experiences. I first caught the disease at the start of
the pandemic in March 2020, when its effects were relatively unknown. It
was unnerving and highly unpredictable. I did not get particularly sick,
but I probably gave the virus to my father, who did. Back then, Covid
appeared to be the great divider – the old were far more at risk than
the young, and those with pre-existing vulnerabilities most at risk of
all – and the great equaliser. Almost everyone experienced the shock and
the fear of discovering a novel killer among us. We soon acquired a
shared language and a sense of common purpose: to get through this
together – whatever /this/ turned out to be.
I developed long Covid last year, six months after I had caught
glandular fever. The fresh bout of the Covid virus made the effects of
the glandular fever far worse: more debilitating and much harder to
shake. Some mornings it was a struggle to get out of bed, never mind
leave the house. It was as though Covid latched on to what was already
wrong with me and gave it extra teeth. The experience was unpredictable
in a very different way from the drama of getting sick in 2020: not a
cosmic lottery, but a drawn-out bout of low-level, private misery. Good
days were followed by bad days for no obvious reason, hopes of having
recovered were snuffed out just when it seemed like the worst was past.
Long Covid is less isolating than being locked down, but it is also a
lonelier business than getting ill at the peak of the pandemic was, if
only because other people have moved on.
The physical and psychological effects of these different versions of
Covid – the short and the long – are oddly parallel to its political
consequences. The disease turns out to be its own metaphor. We are all
suffering from political long Covid now. The early drama is over. A
series of lingering misfortunes has replaced it. As with long Covid,
different countries are suffering in different ways, trapped in their
own private miseries. The shock of the new has gone, to be replaced by
an enduring sense of fatigue.
When the pandemic hit, its effects on politics were intensely felt and
hard to predict. In some ways, it seemed like the ultimate stress test.
Different political systems – and leaders – were exposed in different
ways. Those with longstanding vulnerabilities seemed destined to fail.
At the same time, the advent of Covid appeared to open up the prospect
of new kinds of political solidarity. We were in this together. Covid’s
global impact was a reminder of what it is that we all have in common.
An acute awareness of our shared vulnerability might create the
conditions for a renewed sense of purpose in tackling global problems,
including the climate emergency. Maybe a pandemic was just what we
needed to remember what was at stake, and to remind some of us how lucky
we are.
Four years on, the picture looks very different. The immediate
experience of the pandemic feels more and more remote, even though
public inquiries are now under way, trying to establish just what really
happened and who was to blame for what went wrong. Part of the reason
for the remoteness is that much of what once looked like high-stakes
decision-making has come out in the wash: many outcomes were similar,
regardless of the political choices that were made. Maybe it was in the
lap of the gods after all.
At the same time, the more pernicious but harder to recognise political
consequences of Covid are all around us. The immediacy of the threat has
passed, but the lingering signs of the damage it did to the body politic
are everywhere. The pandemic and its consequences – lockdowns, economic
dislocation, inflation, growing frustration with political elites – have
found out pre-existing weaknesses in our politics and made them worse.
It has given what ails us extra teeth.
The early days of Covid gave reason to hope that the massive disruption
it entailed might also shift the direction of travel of global politics.
That hope turned out to be illusory. In the first phase of the pandemic,
it looked to have exposed populist grandstanding for what it was:
bleach, it turned out, was no sort of viral disinfectant. But populism
remains on the rise around the world, feeding off the many discontents
of the lockdown years, and of the years that preceded them.
Likewise, Covid did not start any major wars – 2020 and 2021 were two of
the most peaceful years for international conflict on record. But a
post-Covid world is now as militarily dangerous as at any time since the
cold war.
Covid did not exacerbate climate breakdown: for a short while, carbon
emissions fell as economies shut down. But the world is still getting
warmer and the hope that tackling the virus would provide a model for
more urgent climate action turns out to have been a pipe dream.
The pandemic wormed its way into the weak spots in our political life,
just as long Covid finds weaknesses in the human body. It no longer
galvanises us, nor is it capable of destroying us. Instead, its symptoms
are erratic and hard to fathom, appearing in surprising and seemingly
unrelated places. Political long Covid is neither the great divider nor
the great equaliser. It’s the great destabiliser.
During 2020, when the pandemic forced governments around the world to
improvise their responses at breakneck speed, it looked as though it
would expose some basic truths about the strengths and weaknesses of
different political systems. The biggest and most immediate contrast was
between autocratic China and the democratic west. Ruthlessness and
decisiveness – which the Chinese political system appeared to possess in
abundance – were the order of the day. The democracies struggled to keep up.
In March of that year, after Italy became the first European country to
grapple with the question of how to keep its population from infecting
one another, the Chinese sent a group of health officials to help advise. The Italians were concerned by the fact that, despite putting draconian lockdowns in place, the virus was still spreading. The Chinese explained the problem. These weren’t actually lockdowns as they understood them. People could still leave their homes for emergencies, enforcement was sporadic, and punishment was relatively light. Meanwhile, in Wuhan, the very centre of the Covid outbreak, armed guards stood outside apartment blocks, curfews were brutally enforced and those with the virus could be barricaded inside their homes. Within a matter of weeks, Italy’s death toll was more than double that of China’s.
The biggest contrast with China was the US, where a federal system of
executive decision-making, a widespread suspicion of government mandates
and an incompetent president meant that Covid soon killed far more
people than anywhere else. If the US was the flagship for democracy,
then it looked like democracy was failing to answer the call.
However, it quickly became clear that the global picture was more
complicated than any hastily assembled political morality tale might
suggest. New Zealand – democratic, liberal and with a robustly
independent population – for a long time kept the virus almost
completely at bay. The country had the advantage of
being an island state that was able to shut its borders. But Britain is
also an island, and that made no difference to the government’s ability
– or inability – to act. Vietnam, which is not an island, did almost as
well as New Zealand. Russia did almost as badly as the US. Some of the
worst death tolls were in the countries of eastern Europe, such as
Bulgaria and Serbia, which had a mixed legacy of authoritarianism and
democracy. Dividing the world up by regime types proved little.
Demography turned out to be as important as politics: elderly, unhealthy
populations suffered more. Equally, any geopolitical morality tales
concealed a more complex set of tradeoffs. A zero-Covid policy,
ruthlessly enforced as in China, turned out to be storing up trouble for
the future. Even
with the advent of effective vaccines – and China’s homegrown versions
turned out to be less effective than elsewhere – too many of China’s
population remained unprotected from the virus and the much-delayed
economic opening left them exposed. China has also displayed a
longstanding weakness of autocratic systems: an absence of transparency
means we don’t know the ultimate death toll there, because they are not
telling. It is simply not possible to compare it with other countries.
The wider tradeoffs – the toll that lockdowns have taken on mental
health, on treatment for other illnesses, on educational prospects for
the children worst affected – make it hard to draw any clear political
lessons. Sweden, which was heralded – and viciously derided – for
providing a real-time experiment in the efficacy of non-lockdown
policies, now presents as mixed a picture as anywhere else: more Covid-
related deaths than its Scandinavian neighbours (2,576 deaths per
million, compared with Denmark’s 1,630
and Norway’s 1,054) but similar or even lower overall excess mortality
rates from all causes, and less educational and economic disruption,
though no readily quantifiable economic benefits. Covid was not just a
political stress test. It was a series of impossible choices.
Four years on, it is also clear that many of the lasting political
consequences of the virus have little to do with the relative
performance of individual governments. In the UK, the long-term
incumbent parties north and south of the border are suffering serious
Covid fallout despite adopting opposed approaches to the pandemic. The
Tories in Westminster were reluctant lockdowners, the SNP in Edinburgh
far more enthusiastic ones. It made little odds for the final outcomes:
overall mortality rates were relatively consistent for the UK as a whole and
variations had more to do with the underlying population profiles in
different parts of the country than with the policy preferences of
elected politicians.
What lingers is something more familiar: the whiff of corruption and the
stench of hypocrisy. Although Rishi Sunak, as chancellor, was
responsible for one of the more hare-brained schemes of 2020, “eat out
to help out” – which gave diners discounts for getting back into pubs
and restaurants, at a time when the virus was still widespread in the
population and about to surge back – that is not the reason why he is in
such deep political trouble. Instead, the Covid legacy that haunts the
Tories stems almost entirely from the parties held in Downing Street
during Boris Johnson’s premiership, when the rest of the country was
still locked down. Ultimately it is not the contrast between the public
performance of different administrations that has come to matter
politically, but the contrast between public pronouncements and private
practice: not how many died in the end, but how many died while the wine
was flowing in Downing Street. Hypocrisy is the political killer.
The same is true for the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon, who once appeared caring
and decisive in her nightly news conference, now seems sanctimonious and
evasive, her WhatsApp messages long deleted, her personal grievances
exposed. The harsh light of a public inquiry has revealed the SNP to
have been as motivated by petty point-scoring and score-settling as any
other self-interested political party.
Politics everywhere – in whatever form – takes its toll on its
practitioners. The scars accumulate, especially for longstanding
administrations. Covid, initially, appeared to be something else: an
unprecedented governmental challenge, requiring a new kind of skill set.
But in the end, it found a way to expose the regime fatigue that had set
in regardless. As Johnson and Sturgeon have discovered, long political
Covid is a lonelier business than the exposure they faced in the white
heat of the initial outbreak. It works its way through to latch on to
personal vulnerabilities and makes them far harder to shake off.
What happened to the sense of solidarity that the arrival of Covid
appeared to have engendered? In the early days of the pandemic, many
governments – including in the UK – were worried that people would soon
tire of restrictions on their freedom of movement. Some behavioural
models had indicated that widespread disobedience would become the norm
after a matter of weeks. Those models turned out to be wrong. Most
citizens around the world did as they were told for far longer than
might have been expected.
This gave rise to a hope that concerted action on an equivalent scale
might be possible in other areas, too. If, in the face of a serious
threat, the public was willing to act in the common interest, even if
that meant making significant personal sacrifices, then perhaps other
collective action problems – from mass migration to the climate crisis –
might be amenable to a similar spirit of cooperation. Maybe we were more
public-spirited than we had given ourselves credit for.
Yet no such dividend has been delivered. On the most contentious
political questions, we remain as far apart as ever. Environmental
policies – particularly when tied to net zero targets – still provoke
deep divisions and can stoke widespread anger. A voting public that was
so furious with Johnson over breaking his own Covid rules that it
effectively helped turf him out of office nonetheless elected a Tory in
his Uxbridge and Ruislip constituency when the party turned the issue of
the Ulez traffic levy being introduced by the mayor of London, Sadiq
Khan, into a symbol of bureaucratic meddling in the affairs of local
communities. Lockdown was one thing. But environmental protections are
something else: readily weaponised as evidence of elite interference
in ordinary people’s lives.
Anti-immigrant sentiment, including among many of the older voters who
most dutifully complied with Covid restrictions, continues to fuel
populism around the developed world. Geert Wilders won the popular vote
in last year’s Dutch general election on a platform that combined
migrant-bashing with net zero
scepticism. But unlike some other far-right politicians, Wilders is no
Covid sceptic. He had also been one of the first Dutch politicians to
complain about his country’s slow rollout of its Covid vaccination
programme.
Why does Covid solidarity not translate to other areas? In part, it is
the lack of any comparable sense of urgency. Net zero targets are there
to stave off long-heralded but also long-distant threats of catastrophe.
At its height, Covid threatened to crash public health systems in a
matter of days. But there is another difference. Public support for
government restrictions during Covid was about controlling collective
behaviour when it threatened our personal safety. The danger was other
people: keep them in to keep us safe. Climate action is so much harder
to sell because it seems to represent an infringement of personal
freedom for the sake of some far less immediate collective benefit. In
that sense, Covid compliance has more in common with anti-immigrant
sentiment. Keep them out to keep us safe.
Throughout the pandemic, public opinion in the UK tended to be critical
of the government for being too eager to lift restrictions rather than
too keen to impose them. In a pandemic the majority of British people
want other people to be told what to do, even if it means being told
what to do themselves.
This has not been the case everywhere. In large parts of the US, the
public proved deeply resistant to the many varieties of mandated
behaviour, particularly when it came to mask-wearing, which became a
proxy for a whole host of other resentments and frustrations. The pandemic latched
on to what unites us and what divides us. It did nothing to change the
contours of those divisions.
The truth is that public cooperation during Covid did not reveal civic
capabilities of which we had been unaware. Publics obeyed the
injunctions of democratic politicians because those politicians were
already doing their best to respond to the choices of the public.
Successfully observed lockdowns were as much a reflection of ongoing
behaviour as they were a constraint upon it. Likewise, when lockdowns
failed, it was often because political leaders, themselves pandering to
perceived public opinion, failed to endorse them wholeheartedly.
Covid didn’t generate the political response required to change the way
we live. In most cases, it gave us the political response that we asked for.
The area where Covid made the biggest immediate political difference was
in public finance. Politicians suddenly found the money that was needed
to stave off disaster, conjuring it up any way they could. The magic
money tree turned out to exist after all. In a genuine crisis, despite
everything that had been said about the insurmountable limits on public
spending, there proved to be both a will and a way to surmount them.
As chancellor in 2020, Sunak launched a furlough scheme that guaranteed
80% subsidies to almost everyone in employment: the closest the UK has
ever come to instituting a kind of universal basic income. In the US, a
rolling series of extensive relief and stimulus packages included direct
cash payments to all households, mortgage relief, tax holidays and giant
subsidies to businesses. As a result, people stayed in work and
businesses stayed afloat, while public debt in both countries soared. At
the same time, governments around the world spent heavily to support
vaccine development programmes. Conventional practice in the
pharmaceutical industry meant there was invariably a multi-year gap
between finding a new treatment and bringing it to market. But again,
these constraints turned out to be dispensable. Effective vaccines
arrived within a year of the outbreak.
Was this, then, the model for an alternative political future, in which
vastly accelerated public spending can drive innovation while protecting
citizens from disruption? Could it be the means of tackling the climate
crisis?
In reality, the response to Covid was less like a trial run for a new
climate politics and more like the response to a war. The emergency
measures were put in place for the attritional phase of the pandemic,
when the threat of collapse was real. They have been steadily wound down
ever since. Meanwhile, the spending on vaccine research was only a part
of wider government programmes that tended to be far less efficient and
highly wasteful. As in any actual war, successful weapons programmes are
the exception, not the norm. Most of the money gets siphoned off by
schemes that go nowhere.
As a result, the legacy of government action on Covid has been lingering
dissatisfaction rather than a new sense of political possibility. The
symptoms of political long Covid include public frustration with the
bill that has to be paid. Part of the cause for that frustration is
widespread inflation, stoked by looser public finances, which has
fuelled anger with governments around the world and created electoral
volatility. Javier Milei might not be president of Argentina without
Covid-fuelled inflation. Donald Trump might not be making a comeback without it, either.
At the same time, stories of the waste and corruption that inevitably
went along with unfettered government spending continue to surface. In
the UK, the face of government pandemic spending is not Kate Bingham,
the head of the highly effective UK vaccines taskforce, but the Tory
peer Michelle Mone,
who is accused of having used a VIP fast-lane to bypass standard
procurement processes and secure government contracts for a company to
supply PPE worth more than £200m, much of which apparently turned out to
be useless (though the company denies this).**The price of sidelining
politics as normal is that when politics as normal resumes, the corner-
cutting doesn’t look so good.
In the aftermath of the first and second world wars, when government
spending among the belligerents was colossal, and waste and corruption
were widespread, lasting social transformation nonetheless followed in
their wake. The foundations of a new kind of welfare state were laid by
the scale of wartime public investment, along with a sense that public
sacrifices needed to be repaid.
The pandemic has not been the same. In part, it is a question of scale.
The $12bn the US federal government spent supporting vaccine research is
a drop in the ocean of public spending. Even the trillions of dollars
the US government made available in various forms of aid pales compared
with the legacy of pre-existing programmes such as Medicare and
Medicaid. The levels of US public debt in 2024 are similar as a
percentage of GDP to what they were in 1945, in the immediate aftermath
of second world war. But that has more to do with the long-term burdens
of welfare programmes and defence spending than with the response to Covid.
In a war, the young fight and give up their lives to keep the old safe,
who in return pledge to make life better for the those who are being
asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. It is part of what creates a sense
of mutual obligation between the generations. In Covid, it was the old
who lost their lives, but it was still the young who made many of the
sacrifices, in lost employment and educational opportunities. That makes
the tradeoff more complicated. Its legacy has not been a new
intergenerational compact. If anything, political differences between
the generations are wider than ever, and Covid has exacerbated them. The
young have not been repaid for their sacrifice with the kinds of
promises that tend to follow an actual war: better housing, greater
educational access, full employment. This is in part because the price
paid by the younger generation has proved far harder to quantify than
the physical toll the disease took on the old. Who owes whom for what?
This was a war with no obvious winners.
Except, perhaps, those politicians who saw what might come next. In
October 2022, as his invasion of Ukraine was stalling, Vladimir Putin
told his government coordination council in Moscow that the lesson was
clear: Russia needed to translate Covid urgency into military urgency.
“We faced certain difficulties and the need to upgrade our work, give it
a new momentum and a new character when we were responding to the
coronavirus pandemic,” he said. Those lessons had to be taken forward in
prosecuting the war. “We need to get rid of those archaic procedures
that are preventing us from moving forward at the pace the country
needs.” As a first step, Putin declared martial law in the four regions
controlled by Russian forces.
Covid was not an actual war, though it often felt like one. Nor was
Covid a dry run for how to deal with the challenge of the climate
crisis, though it occasionally felt like that too. Now we know that
Covid was, for some politicians, a dry run for war itself.
Covid did not fundamentally change the way we live. The French writer
Michel Houellebecq, when asked what
impact Covid would have on the future, said: “The same, but worse.” That
is perhaps too bleak. It is not all worse. In some respects, life has
returned to its previous patterns, for better and for worse. The drivers
of change remain the same, even if some of them have accelerated.
The pandemic dramatically accelerated some social transformations that
were already under way. Working from home was something being
facilitated by new technology long before 2020. The pandemic did not
create hybrid working, nor did it begin the steady hollowing out of
downtown office space. But it brought them forward by about a decade.
Politics, too, is similar enough to what went before that it seems
unlikely future historians will see 2020-21 as representing a sea-change
in world affairs. The US and China are more hostile to each other than
they were, though the hostility had been growing for more than a decade
before 2020. The Middle East is more unstable than it was, electoral
politics more fractious, authoritarians more assertive, the planet
hotter, the disparities greater. This is somewhat different. But none of
it is new. And there is no vaccine for political long Covid, any more
than there is for the longer form of the disease itself. Its effects are
too sporadic and its triggers still too poorly understood for that.
But in one respect, the political consequences of Covid in 2024 might
yet come to look decisive in the history of the 21st century. The
politician who paid the highest electoral price for the pandemic was
Donald Trump. At the start of 2020 he was well set for re-election: the
US economy was relatively strong, his base was relatively happy (above
all with his nominations to the supreme court), and the Democrats were
unable to agree on a candidate to oppose him. Covid changed all that.
Trump handled it badly – he never got his message straight – and even
some of his supporters noticed. The economy suffered. The Democrats
rallied behind Joe Biden, who did not have to suffer the physical
stresses of a full campaign because most forms of campaigning were
impossible. Trump lost, but only narrowly – without Covid he would
almost certainly had won.
For the many people inside and outside the US who found Trump beyond the
pale, his removal from office looked like one of the few blessings of
the pandemic. Yet had Trump won in 2020 he would have been, like most
second-term US presidents, something of a lame duck. He had achieved
little by way of serious reform in his first term: a second term would
have likely been even more underwhelming, since Trump runs on
resentment, which re-election would have done much to defuse. Now, in
2024, we would be looking at the back of Trump, and at a new generation
of candidates, some of whom might have been offering something new.
Instead, a narrow defeat in 2020 – coupled with his insistence that he
had been robbed – has given Trump all the resentment he needs. It is
Biden who has inherited the problems of a post-Covid world and the
challenge of defending his administration from the resentments that have
built up. A second Trump term coming after an interlude of four years,
during which time he and his supporters have been making sure they won’t
get fooled again, and his opponents have been looking for ways to have
him jailed, is a far more serious prospect. The stakes are much higher.
The damage could be far greater.
This year is the busiest year around the world in the history of
electoral democracy: more than 4 billion people are entitled to vote in
elections from India to Ireland to Mexico. It is one sign that Covid,
which put so many democratic freedoms on hold, did not do so
permanently. But the US presidential election in November still has the
potential to outweigh all that. Trump is by no means certain to win. Yet
if he does, and if he decides this time to make good on his promise to
change the way the US is governed, by hollowing out the administrative
state and by withdrawing US support for Ukraine and for Nato, then Covid
will have had a truly lasting impact on global politics. At that point,
political long Covid will be hard for any of us to escape.