Our collective jeopardy, by a pandemic or anything else, offers us the chance to reimagine the world; to consider how we might change the present and avert similar threats and mistakes in the future. At such moments, hypotheticals are often as useful as facts. If, for instance, the United States had single payer health insurance, wouldn’t it face the current crisis differently? Alternatively, imagine what might happen if, instead of bailing out the hotel, cruise, casino and airline industries, or mailing millions of cheques to its citizens, the US government chose to establish a Universal Basic Income as its economic stimulus. What would happen if sanctions on Iran were temporarily suspended? Wouldn’t that save lives? Or what will happen if China’s quick recovery and its generosity towards other nations – medical supplies donated to France, Italy and Spain – increase its ‘soft power’ to the point at which the US, or the EU, become merely regional actors?
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the fragility of a globalized world. In eight weeks, a local disruption in China has sent cascading shocks through international supply chains, set in motion events that have rattled our interconnected economies and pushed us to the edge of a worldwide recession. A lot of naked emperors have been revealed. As Simon Tisdall writes in the Guardian, “many countries such as the US, are chronically under-resourced and unprepared. Confusion reigns, fuelled by conflicting official advice in different countries about public gatherings, travel and self-isolation.”
Uncoordinated responses within the EU have fuelled scepticism about the benefits of its bureaucratic oversight. And amid the current hodge-podge of local solutions, Tisdall notes “the danger of governments taking so-called temporary emergency powers and imposing sweeping, illiberal constraints on citizens, journalists and social media that subsequently become permanent.” Similar power grabs have exposed the toothlessness of multinational institutions and raised serious questions about our vulnerability to governments which use national security arguments to advance partisan interests.
More than ever it is clear that many politicians treat the duties and responsibilities of office with a cynicism that beggars belief. Two US senators appear to have used classified briefings to get ahead of the stock markets by selling of their private holdings. The American president himself – whose lack of transparency about emoluments is all too well established – has delivered a masterclass in incompetence and self-dealing. After weeks of denial and dithering, he tried to solve the crisis not through government but with corporate partnerships and a hasty stimulus. (Intriguingly the same Republicans who revolted against President Obama’s far more modest economic remedies, in 2008, have barely blinked at the numbers which the current administration has put forward.) Meanwhile, despite many self-congratulatory daily briefings, basic needs have not been addressed, leaving the US dangerously unprepared for the imminent surge of Covid-19 cases, including a lack of medical supplies and intensive care facilities.
In his 2003 book “The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History”, the military historian Philip Bobbitt cites one of the principles of the Royal Dutch Shell Corporation, which pioneered the use of “scenario planning” for exactly the type of crisis we now face: “By considering alternative futures,” Shell argued, “we begin to see that the future is shaped not only by the past but by what we think is possible and by the choices we make.”
What has made Trump’s lack of political leadership so galling is his near complete failure to grasp what is possible. Consider for example that the US government has already run detailed scenario planning exercises which correctly identified everything that is currently in short supply. With retrospect these exercises seem to have catered for everything, except for the deeply incompetent leaders who are now in control. Men who dismiss credible threats, mismanage every possible aspect of the national response, accept no responsibility for obvious failures and lead their credulous supporters straight towards the abyss.
On the other hand, for every Trump, Pence, Azar and Kushner there are a dozen governors or senators – like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, or Senator Elizabeth Warren – who are equal to the unglamorous work of actual governance. Their capacity to face difficult challenges, to perform in difficult circumstances, suggests that democracy is still capable of addressing hard questions and moving, however gradually, towards better alternatives.
