Pandemic legacies
From the United States to New Zealand, the pandemic has seen the rejection of incumbents on both the Left and the Right. But what will Covid-19's longer political legacies be?
Do pandemics change history? Following Trump’s stunning victory two weeks ago, there has been much talk of how Covid-19 shifted the balance against incumbents, regardless of their political colours.
From the United Kingdom, where in July the Conservatives were turfed out of office after 14 years of uninterrupted rule, to New Zealand, where in October 2023 voters delivered a stunning rebuke to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party, the pandemic has been fatal to incumbents at either end of the political spectrum. The notable exception is Mexico where in June the governing Morena party won two thirds of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and Claudia Sheinbaum, a close supporter of the outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was elected president with the highest percentage of the popular vote since Mexico’s transition to democracy in 2021.
Of course, in each country where incumbents were defeated, a different constellation of factors was involved but the consistent theme was voter dissatisfaction with the rising cost of living and insipid economic growth. Though inflation cannot be blamed on the pandemic alone – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the energy crisis that followed also contributed - the 2020 economic downturn and the falls in GDP that followed were a direct consequence of the pandemic lockdowns and the huge surge in public borrowing that accompanied those unprecedented measures. Unprecedented because even during the 1918-1919 Spanish influenza pandemic, there was no social distancing and no economies were locked down. And though government debt soared, this was a consequence of the war rather than the furloughing of workers.
Nonetheless, like Covid-19, the Spanish flu depressed economic growth by removing millions of productive adults from the labour market (unlike Covid-19 which proved most fatal to the elderly and those with underlying health conditions, most casualties of the Spanish flu were young adults in the prime of life). It has also been argued that by sickening the then US President, Woodrow Wilson, at a critical juncture in the Versailles peace talks, the influenza resulted in the Allies demanding far greater reparations from Germany than would otherwise have been the case – a burden that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and seeded grievances that fuelled the ascent of the Nazis.
However, the further out you go from 1918 the harder it becomes to detect the ripples of the pandemic and make a case for its influence. For instance, while in 1920-21 the US suffered one of the deepest recessions on record, manufacturing quickly rebounded fuelled by higher wages and greater consumer spending. The result was that come the “roaring twenties” no one spoke about the pandemic anymore, much less thought to commemorate it. This was in marked contrast to the war which everywhere saw grand monuments erected to the fallen of Flanders and other European battlefields.
Perhaps the best example of a pandemic that changed history was the 14th century Black Death. Although estimates of the mortality due to the recurrent waves of bubonic plague vary – some scholars say it reduced Europe’s population by 50 million, others by 75 million - there is little doubt that it represented a massive exogenous shock to medieval society and that, together with the famines that preceded it, contributed to a declining or stagnant population in Europe for almost 150 years. A smaller population meant less demand for grain, putting downward pressure on the price of wheat. At the same time, a diminished population fuelled competition for labour, exerting upward pressure on wages and challenging the villeinage system that underpinned the feudal order. The result was a wave of popular uprisings, including the Jacquerie in France in 1358, the revolt of the Florentine wool carders in Italy in 1378-82 and the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England that upended the old feudal hierarchies and shifted the balance in favour of workers and the new bourgeoisie.
Through its destabilizing economic and cultural effects, the pandemic of Covid-19 also sparked waves of protest and popular uprisings. In the case of Black Lives Matter (BLM), these effects were instantaneous. There had been many killings of unarmed Black men in police custody prior to the pandemic but when the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into the neck of George Floyd for eight minutes, choking him to death, the images could not help but resonate with the wider injustice of a virus that was killing blacks and Asians at two to three times the rate of whites.
The footage of Floyd’s death caught the attention of millions of people who were locked down at home with little do but surf the internet, igniting protests from Los Angeles, to London, Paris and Berlin. But once people returned to work and no longer had as much discretionary time available, the protests abated. And although in some cities and towns, politicians redirected money from the police to social programmes, BLM’s call to “defund the police” soon faltered. Interestingly, while 73 percent of white progressive Democrats favoured cutting the size and scope of police forces, only 37 percent of black Americans agreed, according to the Financial Times’s data editor, John Burn-Murdoch. This helps explain why, having been a vocal supporter of reforming police departments, Kamala Harris abruptly shifted her position when she became the Democrats’ choice to replace Biden. With crime surging in many U.S cities and immigration running at record levels, defunding the police had become a political albatross. Instead, Harris emphasized her record as a prosecutor and someone who was “tough on crime”.
By contrast, the anti-lockdown protests that marked Trump’s first term as president seem to have birthed a more durable and popular coalition of interests, one that four years later was to help sweep him to power. This coalition included not only long-standing conspiracy groups, such as QAnon and other opponents of the “deep state” but anti-vaxxers and libertarians opposed to the pandemic restrictions on free movement and public assemblies. Whereas prior to Covid-19, these groups had operated alongside each another in separate but parallel silos, the outcry at stay-at-home orders and the shuttering of businesses brought them out onto the streets where, like the virus, they were free to mix and exchange conspiracy memes.
The clearest example of this phenomenon was in Germany where, following the anti-lockdown protests in Berlin and other cities, in December 2022 Federal police arrested a network of far-right conspirators who were planning to attack the Bundestag and overthrow the government by installing a minor aristocrat as head of state. The group, known as the Alliance, was motivated by the QAnon-like belief that the German government had been captured by “deep state” actors who operated secret military bases where children were sacrificed and used to produce a rejuvenating elixir (a modern version of the 12th century Jewish “blood libel”).
But perhaps most shocking of all was that the conspirators included middle class property developers as well as neo-Nazis and former members of the German military. Though apparently more organised than the “Stop the Steal” protestors who stormed the U.S. capitol in January 2020, like the January 6th protestors the German conspirators were a product of widespread popular discontent with the postwar liberal political order – discontent which seems to have contributed to the collapse two weeks ago of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-Left coalition.
Four years out from the biggest pandemic in 102 years, it is too early to say precisely how – and in what ways – Covid-19 will affect history. Clearly, voters in advanced democracies have been keen to punish politicians of all parties for the economic consequences of the lockdowns. However, perhaps the pandemic’s most enduring legacy will be the way it exacerbated pre-existing political and cultural divisions and united groups with similar dispositions and outlooks. The difference in the case of right-wing populist movements is that prior to the pandemic they had spent decades organising and fomenting for change in networks that, if not invisible to mainstream media, were dismissed as fringe or politically inconsequential. By contrast, movements like BLM and “me too” were celebrated by Progressives and lionised by the liberal establishment. However, although these movements resulted in significant cultural and social changes they did not lead to fundamental structural change or birth wider constituencies capable of upending the political order.
The coalition that returned Trump to the White House appears to be different, however. Indeed, looking back on the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the surprise is that, despite contributing to the deaths of 385,000 Americans through his chaotic and incompetent response to Covid-19, Trump very nearly beat Biden four years ago by railing against stay-at-home orders and distancing himself from the advice of his own medical experts. However, should Trump succeed in installing the arch vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Junior as his head of health, he will not have this excuse next time. As Kennedy told delegates at a conference in Georgia last year of his Children’s Health Defense, the U.S.’s largest anti-vaccine organization: “I’m gonna say to NIH [National Institute of Health] scientists, God bless you all, thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
No one, least of all me, wishes to see another pandemic but perhaps that it is the only thing that will bring Americans – and the world - to its senses.