Democracy under COVID: How Elites Failed and Politics Was Derailed

• In Event: The Politics of Emergency

Abstract

Widely considered the greatest global crisis since World War II, the Covid-19 pandemic put most of the world’s societies on a war footing. Fundamental liberties were curtailed, including freedom of movement and worship. Economies were locked down and schools were closed. Granted that policy had to be made in the Spring of 2020 amidst fear and uncertainty, we still need to ask what, in hindsight, does the response to this crisis tell us about the health of liberal democratic institutions?
This paper pays special attention to what we might think of as the “truth-seeking” departments of liberal democracy, which include science and science journals, the academy, and the media more broadly, as well as the major medical associations, and public health officials. I argue that there is much room for criticism of these elite institutions. While the fundamental principles of liberalism, science, and democracy require openness to criticism, in the case of Covid reasonable dissenters advancing reasonable criticisms were too often dismissed and scorned, including by some university faculties, and censored by social media companies.
There were reasonable grounds for worrying about the costs of Covid lockdown policies which were borne disproportionately by schoolchildren and the less well off: those relatively disempowered in the democratic process. Little attention has been given to the international effects of the Covid economic lockdowns on poor and developing countries. Pre-Covid pandemic planning documents warned of the costs of such measures and their likely limited usefulness.
I argue that Covid policy provides a dispiriting window onto our degraded epistemic environment, in which political partisanship, media failure, and intolerance of dissent undermined the core commitments of science, liberalism, and democracy. Elite failures contributed to rising distrust in science and represent a deep form of democratic retrenchment. Too much authority was wielded by experts and there was far too little tolerance of disagreement and democratic deliberation. In line with the 2024 theme statement, I ask what reforms must be enacted to put us on a path of democratic renewal.

Author

• Stephen Macedo, Princeton University