Friday, January 1, 2021

Annus Horribilis

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, January 01, 2021

 

Even in a year marked by such dramatic political episodes as the waves of fire and blood that broke over American cities in the summer and President Donald Trump’s sniveling attempt to invalidate the presidential election he lost, 2020 will not be remembered for its politics per se — it will be remembered for the plague that cost 335,000 (and counting) Americans, and something on the order of 2 million people worldwide, their lives.

 

There has been a great deal of attention given to the question of how the coronavirus epidemic will affect our politics. More interesting is the question of what the coronavirus epidemic already has revealed about our politics.

 

How much better or how much worse the American experience might have been if government had done this or that differently is the subject of a great deal of motivated reasoning. Democrats point to the buffoonery of the whining incompetent Republicans made president in 2016 and say “See! See!” while Republicans emphasize that the federal response has been relatively effective compared to the efforts of, say, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York.

 

That kind of exercise is foolish for many reasons (as a practical matter, does a coronavirus death in Houston count against the Republicans who run the state or the Democrats who run the city?) and distracts from the single fact that should command our political imagination right now: The second wave of infections revealed that almost no Western government has been able to respond effectively to this epidemic. The United States has its problems, which are obvious enough, but the United Kingdom has hardly managed any better, the European Union has been divided by the issue, and Switzerland, arguably the best-governed country in the world, has tripped over its own skis so relentlessly that Geneva has one of Europe’s highest infection rates. Neither guidance from Brussels nor Sweden’s early laissez-faire approach nor Governor Cuomo’s authoritarian threat to board up the synagogues has proved effective.

 

“The Swiss way has a price,” Swiss health minister Alain Berset told Agence France-Presse. “It requires personal responsibility, reason, and foresight from everyone. If that doesn’t work, we have to tighten the measures. We did that.”

 

He might have said “the liberal-democratic way has a price.”

 

Social discipline and cooperation are necessary to the functioning of a decent and open society, and those come from one of two places: from the people themselves or from the state. Highly disciplined and cooperative societies often get by with remarkably libertarian government: One of the reasons Sweden’s national government did not order bars, restaurants, and other hospitality businesses to suspend operations while much of the rest of the world was locked down is because it did not believe that it had the authority to do so. The Swedish law empowering municipalities to enforce anti-coronavirus measures did not come into effect until late summer, and it expires on December 31, though it can be renewed. U.S. governments at all levels enjoy relatively broad discretionary emergency powers, informed by the high level of confidence in U.S. government during the post-war years, but what Washington and the states and the cities do not have is the ability to actually effectuate their crisis plans. A substantial share of the American population is ungovernable, as shown by everything from the summer riots to the ability of a Dallas salon owner not only to defy emergency orders but also to recruit such figures as Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton to her cause, in much the same way that hydroxychloroquine became a silly Kulturkampf issue. Mismatches between formal and informal power, between what is possible de jure and de facto, are a normal, usually harmless part of liberal-democratic life. But they can become deadly complications in an emergency. And so Americans and Europeans ended up performing slightly different versions of the same awkward little dance, jitterbugging from presumptive libertarianism to reactionary intervention.

 

Among the Western nations, New Zealand alone seems to have performed effectively. New Zealand is an interesting case, something like Switzerland reimagined as an Anglophone archipelago, protected by its seas and by distance, with Auckland being nearly as far from Sydney as Moscow is from Paris. Its geography cannot be replicated, and neither can its political culture.

 

But both New Zealand and its Asian Pacific neighbors may offer some lessons. For example, the relative success of Taiwan in controlling the virus suggests that while the Trump administration was criticized for suspending flights from China, the administration’s real mistake may have been not imposing much more severe travel restrictions — and imposing them sooner. The Trump administration suspended most travel from China effective February 2, 2020, making the United States the 46th nation to do so, and there were many exceptions; Taiwan had already closed its borders by that time, and it imposed such measures as strictly enforced quarantines and invasive contact-tracing that the United States did not. Taiwan had no locally transmitted coronavirus cases between April 12 and December 8, at which point it experienced . . . one, with a foreign pilot transmitting the virus to a local. After a traveler returning from the United Kingdom tested positive for the new highly infectious strain, Taiwan announced that it would be closed to non-resident foreigners, indefinitely, beginning today.

 

Singapore, too, has enjoyed a high level of success in dealing with the epidemic, employing similar measures.

 

Singapore, Taiwan, and New Zealand have implemented invasive and heavy-handed measures in response to the epidemic, but these are not authoritarian hellholes: Singapore and New Zealand are ranked No. 1 and No. 3, respectively, on the Heritage Economic Freedom Index, with Taiwan at No. 11. (The United States is ranked No. 17, between Lithuania and the United Arab Emirates, with anti-trade measures and reckless federal spending pointing the vector of change in the wrong direction.) What distinguishes their epidemic response from ours is the ability to distinguish between emergency and non-emergency situations — and to behave accordingly.

 

Ironically, the United States is in a permanent state of emergency and had been for years before the coronavirus arrived on our shores. Congress has long abandoned the “regular order” of constitutional lawmaking, with Washington lurching from crisis to crisis on the support of a series of continuing resolutions, last-minute omnibus-spending slop buckets, and other ad hoc measures. We have seen a steady series of emergency economic-stimulus and -stabilization packages passed in the past 20 years — the post-9/11 airline bailout and New York–oriented stimulus measures, the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (TARP), the subsequent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the unprecedented $2 trillion CARES Act, as well as a sustained Federal Reserve effort to keep interest rates in the neighborhood of 0.00 percent.

 

Having conducted itself as though in a state of emergency when it wasn’t, the U.S. government has shown itself unable to treat a genuine emergency as such. Instead, we have been carried forward on the shoulders of Amazon, FedEx, and UPS, as well as churches and community groups (the actual sources of resiliency in our country), and may yet be carried to safety by the hated pharmaceutical companies, with critical support from university-based researchers.

 

The New Year is traditionally a time for taking a personal inventory. We should be taking a national inventory this year, instead, asking: What works, and why does it work? And then we might wonder a little whether we wish to live in a world characterized by the thinking of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk or one characterized by the thinking — if it can really be called that — of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump. Because the real divide in American life is not between Ocasio-Cortez and Trump but between those who look to such figures for insight and leadership and those who know better.

 

Good riddance to 2020, annus horribilis. One year like this is quite enough. Let’s not inflict another on ourselves.

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