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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A remark that can still make me mad, five years on, is when some well-educated person confides that they had “a lovely pandemic”. They know it’s a guilty secret: they’re not entirely obtuse. But some members of the laptop class seem to have no idea how hard Covid-19 hit many of their fellow citizens — or how its ramifications may yet play out.
It’s natural to want to move on. Why dwell on something that was so dreadful? Partly because we might get another pandemic. And partly because we weren’t all in it together, and the pain and resentment has cast a long shadow. Until the vaccine arrived, policymakers struggled to cope with an unprecedented situation. The young sacrificed vital periods in their development. Social workers couldn’t visit homes where, some told me at the time, they feared abuse had increased. Essential workers risked their lives to keep vital services running, while most rulemakers sat ensconced on Zoom, watching their house prices rise. And outside, police officers in the park got heavy with citizens with nowhere else to go.
It would be surprising if there were no long-term consequences for public trust. In February, three-quarters of Americans thought the pandemic had accelerated the country’s divisions. In the UK, a record high of 45 per cent say they “almost never” trust governments of any stripe to put nation above party, 22 points higher than at the height of the pandemic. Trust in the police has also fallen sharply.
Could this partially explain the rightward drift of politics? Inflation, anti-incumbency and record immigration are all factors in the rise of populist parties in Europe and America. But the deep scepticism shared by many of these movements, about institutions and mainstream parties, as well as vaccines and climate change, may have been partly fuelled by Covid.
A fascinating study by the European Council on Foreign Relations in 2021 found that while majorities felt policymakers had tried to limit the virus, significant minorities saw lockdowns and other restrictions as motivated by a desire for control. This was especially true in southern and eastern European countries, where majorities reported being “personally affected” by Covid (two-thirds in Portugal, Poland, Spain and Hungary). Economic victims were the most likely to say that restrictions had been too severe, and to be more sceptical about governments’ intentions behind lockdowns. The same was true of the young, who were much more likely than the old to report being badly affected — and to say that governments were motivated by wanting to manipulate populations, or cover up failings.
Now, in a new book, Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that their tribe — the progressive academics — must take these sentiments much more seriously. They lament the enduring partisan divisions over pandemic management, despite the opportunity to learn from different approaches taken by individual US states. Red states were quicker to reopen schools and businesses than blue ones, for example. Public school pupils in Republican-leaning states got 60 per cent more in-person instruction during the 2020-21 school year than those in Democrat-leaning ones. Yet, the authors say, there was “no meaningful difference” in mortality rates between Democrat and Republican voters until the vaccine. After that, Republicans were much more likely to die from Covid — because of lower uptake.
Far from drawing the obvious conclusions — that Democrats were wrong to keep schools and businesses shuttered for so long, and that Republican vaccine scepticism was disastrous — each tribe has doubled down. Governors of both parties were happy to stand on their pandemic records, and were re-elected.
This strange tribalism fits with the social media bubbles into which our young were pushed by the enforced removal of physical socialising. Young men and women spent hours online alone, consuming largely separate content: could this have anything to do with the growing gulf in their political outlooks? The internet is a crucible for the conspiracies on which populists thrive. Their work was made easier by the way the authorities vilified anyone who even mildly questioned travel bans, school closures, or wondered if the virus might have resulted from a lab leak.
It would be wrong to ascribe the rise of Donald Trump to all of this — or any individual party. But we may be entering a new ideological phase, in which parties are combining nationalism with distrust of mainstream voices, suspicion of Big Tech and of science. Conspiracy theories flourish in times of uncertainty. Policymakers who had to keep changing their advice on Covid, in line with evidence, might have done better to have admitted, once it was safe, that they weren’t always completely right.
The reluctance to look back also overlooks two groups. Some bereaved family members who were forced to abandon loved ones in their last days have developed post-traumatic stress disorder, unable to shake the thought that their relatives gave up trying to live.
The other group is those suffering from long Covid. The debilitating condition is powerfully described by Kate Weinberg in her recent book There’s Nothing Wrong With Her. Weinberg’s decision to fictionalise her own ordeal feels like an indication of just how reluctant society is to hear about it.
Many of the consequences of Covid have been well rehearsed. The bereavements, the Zoom-ing, the missing children. But others are emerging all the time. We need to keep an eye on them, if we are to be ready for the next pandemic.