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.
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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