Screwed By the Pandemic for Years

Stop Looking on the Bright Side: We’ll Be Screwed By the Pandemic for Years to Come

Unfortunately, the history of the past generation justifies pessimism about the next one.

By JOHN F. HARRIS

The headline certainly sounded grave and full of portent: “Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How.”

Those words, emblazoned atop a POLITICO Magazine story last month in the opening days of the global shutdown, were intriguing enough to set a new record. The article, a compilation of “34 big thinkers’ predictions for what’s to come,” within days had been read by many millions of people, the highest traffic of any piece in the 13-year history of this publication.

It was one of those moments—the right idea at the right time—that hit the journalistic sweet spot. I plunged in with curiosity, which turned gradually to unease, finally to irritation.

Given the drumbeat of the news at the time, I was expecting apocalyptic prophesy. A majority of the predictions, however, sound not just tolerable but affirmatively good. “Science reigns again.” “A return to faith in serious experts.” “A decline in polarization.” “A new kind of patriotism.” “New kinds of reform.” “A healthier digital lifestyle.” “A revival of parks.” And so on.

Hmmm ... on the one hand: Count me in for the congenial future that awaits once we get past this nasty virus. On the other hand: Are we sure these predictions are in response to the pandemic, and not simply ideas the writers have been evangelizing for long before Covid-19?

Nothing wrong, of course, with looking on the bright side, and recall that the commentary ran in mid-March when a vision of Americans knit together against the virus was arguably still a realistic prospect. I know and respect several of the writers. So it wasn’t initially clear why this sunny-side-up view of the post-pandemic future should leave me sullen and scornful.

Partly this reflects the mood of the moment. Bossed around by the authorities, claustrophobic in a shutdown of indeterminate length, I ruefully find myself with a gag impulse toward people greeting the plague with more idealism and good cheer than I can muster. Reading some of the big thinkers was like getting a suppertime knock on the door from Ned Flanders, Homer Simpson’s peppy, pious neighbor.

More fundamentally, my wariness toward seeing the glass half-full is grounded in the experience of the past generation. Unfortunately, that experience offers ample reason to be pessimistic about the next one. People who feel that the pandemic is going to “break the fever” of the last couple decades—that it will finally drain public life of its malice, its addiction to remorseless conflict and conspiracy theory, its devil-take-the-hindmost nihilism—carry the burden of proof. I’d like to buy it but can’t yet.

What if instead of ushering in a new era of respect for science—including the obvious truth that most policy questions around science involve mixed evidence and relative probabilities rather than absolute certainties—the next several years are marked by a distorted, dishonest, told-you-so debate over the pandemic? What if instead of launching a new season of public interest, a weak economy leaves little money or political will to solve long-deferred problems like climate change? What if this cataclysm makes us even more selfish and short-term in our thinking?

In short: What if we’re screwed?

None of this is a prediction. Nor is it a generational lament. Unlike some younger friend —who feel they came of age with events conspiring against their life prospects and are aggrieved about it—I was already in my thirties at the turn of the century and my basic worldview was pretty well set. That view was that the tides of modern life were moving unevenly but inexorably toward liberal democracy; that politics often could be distorted by corruption or fanaticism but was more rational than irrational; that public life was contentious and chaotic but more on the level than not.

So, like many of the thinkers commissioned by POLITICO, my impulse was to respond to the succession of astounding, can-this-really-be-happening events of the past 20 years by assuming they might somehow be occasions to hit the reset button, to get back to normal. Maybe a bizarre election in which George W. Bush became president under disputed circumstances will cause him to transcend ideological warfare and find common ground. Maybe the horror of 9/11 will be a great unifying event in the United States and for civilized people around the world. Maybe Hurricane Katrina will focus useful attention on climate change and the need to invest in improved national infrastructure. Maybe the 2008 financial crash will bring pressure to bear on income inequality. Maybe Donald Trump surprised even himself with his 2016 victory and will actually prove to be an effective post-partisan dealmaker.

And, yes, maybe the pandemic “will promote more constructive patterns in our cultural and political discourse,” in the words of Columbia University psychology professor Peter T. Coleman, who participated in the POLITICO Magazine article. Who wouldn’t join writer and critic Michiko Kakutani in wishing for a revival of “a reasoned policy process” that is “predicated on evidence-based science and historical and geopolitical knowledge”?

Could happen.

More than that, should happen. The rehabilitation of public discourse and decision-making is the political and moral imperative of the next generation. Shallow pessimism is less appealing even than shallow optimism. Perhaps realism will save us. In the spirit of engagement with the POLITICO Magazine predictors, I’d offer a handful of questions on which the outcome of this astonishing chapter of history caused by coronavirus will hinge:

Do we have confidence in economics?

The discipline is the most influential of the social sciences because so many people regard its practitioners like physicians—in possession of almost god-like insight into subjects laypeople can barely understand, and able to cure what ails us.

The country would be in full despair, rather than partial, if we did not basically believe that economic understanding can save us—that we can use stimulus measures, and monetary policy, to halt the freefall of national shutdown and with relative speed restore prosperity.

But, just as physicians don’t always know how to save patients, economists are improvising in the midst of a crisis without a precise precedent. What if the old dicta about how to stimulate growth don’t work this time (recalling how slowly and unevenly they worked in the first few years following the 2008 crash)?

Austan Goolsbee, who formerly served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, in a video interview with POLITICO’s Ben White on Wednesday noted that the usual rule is that a growing economy can shave a point or point and a half off the unemployment rate each year. If true this time, that could mean a decade before employment returns fully to where it was before the pandemic shutdown. Goolsbee, who calls himself a “grim optimist,” predicted the country would do better than that in this recovery.

As for the trillions that the government is taking on to restart the economy, Goolsbee said the country has plenty of capacity to safely take on debt but also cautioned, “The problem with deficits and debt is that you have to pay back the money.”

In short, the economic reverberations of this moment will be echoing for many years.

Do we have confidence in liberal democracy?

Authoritarians were already in the ascendancy in multiple venues around the world before the pandemic. In the contest of values between free societies and autocracies, the stumbling performance of the Trump administration in failing to limit the spread of disease with timely action is hardly encouraging.

Nor are the actions of despots from Russia to Turkey to Venezuela to accelerate their attacks on freedom and dissent. As Michael Abramowitz and Arch Puddington of Freedom House wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “The pandemic provides a particularly convincing cover under which autocrats can pursue their agendas.”

Do we have confidence in each other?

It has been a month since New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg predicted that the pandemic will “force us to reconsider who we are and what we value.”

There are encouraging signs of what he hopes for in the ways that governors of both parties are winning praise for their appeals for common sacrifice for common gain, and even in the individual courtesies people show to each other behind masks and plastic shields at the grocery store.

There’s plenty of the opposite on display, too, in the scolding of people who aren’t following the lockdown rules and, above all, the mutual incomprehension expressed by people who view the nature of the threat differently. Do you not see how important it is to stay home and save lives? Do you not see how many businesses, and the livelihoods they sustain, are soon to be gone for good?

Yet, Klinenberg and the other writers are right that, fundamentally, we are all in this together. Let’s hope he’s right also about his pandemic prediction: “In the long run, it could help us rediscover the better version of ourselves.”