COVID and the Crisis of Democracy

• In Event: Democracy and Representation

Abstract

Widely called the greatest crisis since World War II and the Great Depression, the Covid-19 pandemic put most of the world’s societies on a war footing. The most fundamental liberties were curtailed, including the freedom to leave your home and move about freely, even in the name of religious 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, within states and internationally?
This paper argues that there is much room for criticism, including on the part of mainstream progressive political leaders and media institutions. While the fundamental principles of liberalism, science, and democracy require fairmindedness in response to criticism and a self-critical attitude, in the case of Covid reasonable dissenters advancing reasonable criticisms were too often dismissed and scorned, including by university faculties, and deplatformed by social media companies.
Ample evidence now suggests that 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, which were devastating for the African continent, where Covid policies seem to have had much more dire consequences than Covid itself.
I argue that Covid policy provides a dispiriting window onto our degraded epistemic environment, in which political partisanship, media failure, and intolerance of dissent undermine the core commitments associated with science, liberalism, and democracy.

Author

• Stephen Macedo, Princeton University