The following essay is part of a group of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic that appear in Telos 191 (Summer 2020): Going Viral, which is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
As of this writing, the precise origin of the Chinese virus, SARS CoV-2, remains unclear. It is however known that cases predated the eruption in the “wet market” in Wuhan—which in the meantime has been reopened, suggesting at least that Chinese authorities do not believe it was the source of the pandemic. The alternative theory that the virus escaped from experiments in one of Wuhan’s virology laboratories therefore remains plausible. In any case, it is certain that Wuhan was the first epicenter and that state authorities used repressive power to delay alerting the world by possibly more than a month. With that additional time, the spread of the disease might have been contained, or its dissemination at least impeded, if China and the World Health Organization had acted with transparency and integrity. They did not.
Even prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, disappointment had been growing throughout the West that China’s integration into the world economic system had not led to any political liberalization: no free speech, no multiparty elections, and no independent judiciary. It was that lack of free speech that robbed the world of precious time to prepare for the onslaught of COVID. Mass death is the price the world has to pay for the repressive regime of “Xi Jinping Thought.” After SARS (2002), and now facing SARS-2, we are stuck waiting for the next plague that totalitarian Beijing will bequeath to the world.
What began in China traveled quickly to the West, where very different rules for politics and public debate might have allowed for a more effective response. Yet this has not been our finest hour, by any means, and certainly not in the American public sphere. The COVID crisis landed in the midst of an already highly polarized political landscape in the lead-up to the November election. There is surely plenty of blame to go around in the political and journalistic classes, as voices already hostile to President Trump have simply amplified their off-the-shelf attacks by instrumentalizing the public health crisis, often at the expense of the facts. Three particular accusations directed at the president can serve as examples of a much larger argumentative field: the alleged belatedness of the administration’s response, the claimed inattention to science, and the insinuation that the White House made insufficient use of presidential authority.
First, the president’s critics argue that his response came too late. To be sure, hindsight is 20-20, and more could have been done sooner, especially if Beijing had been forthcoming in a prompt manner—but in our partisan culture, attacking President Trump goes hand in hand with exculpating General Secretary Xi. In any case, the timing of Washington’s actions should be put in context. East Asian countries like South Korea and Japan acted more nimbly than did the United States, driven in part by their own memories of other pandemics that came from China, but also by relying on restrictions on civil liberties that would not be easily tolerated here, least of all by the president’s critics. More apt comparisons can be made with Western European liberal democracies, where however none took significant steps much earlier than did the Trump administration.
Moreover, in the relevant time frame, late January through February, some attention was probably still being paid to what the now largely discredited World Health Organization was saying: on January 14, WHO affirmed the Chinese claim that there was no human-to-human transfer, i.e., an epidemic could not ensue. That illusion was shattered by the announcement of the prohibition of travel out of Wuhan into the rest of China on January 23, a clear indication that human-to-human transfer was assumed (although China continued to allow for international travel, amplifying the export of the virus). Only four days later—rapid by Washington standards—Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a national public health emergency. As the fact of human-to-human transfer became undeniable, travelers arriving on flights from China were denied entry: by Italy on January 30, by the United States on January 31, and by Australia on February 1. (Former Vice President Biden attacked the decision as “xenophobic.”) Germany did not manage to ban arrivals from China until April 1. The United States was hardly slow to act, at least by this metric.
The misplaced accusation of White House belatedness should also be contextualized with reference to statements by other political leaders, public remarks that one could describe as risible if they were not, in retrospect and from the perspective of current habits of social distancing, in fact life-threatening. On March 6, French President Macron was still urging his compatriots to go out in the evenings to enjoy theater performances. Nearly a week later, on March 11, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio exhorted his public “to go out and to enjoy life and to go to restaurants,” even though by that point New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had already declared a state of emergency: a salient example of flawed coordination between Manhattan and Albany in the face of crisis. Yet the most egregious example of Democratic trivialization of the threat of infection came earlier, on February 23, when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi led a walking tour of media and local pols through San Francisco’s Chinatown in order to encourage tourism. By that date, mounting deaths in Italy had already led to lockdowns of numerous municipalities, and in the streets of San Francisco the public had already begun to act with caution on its own, without government directive, as is clear from a local TV news report that tourists and other shoppers had become rare out of concern for the virus. As a response to this spontaneous social distancing, Speaker Pelosi had come to ensure the public that all was safe, that there were no health concerns, and that they should all come out to shop. Indeed, her encouragement received a full-throated echo from the news reporter, who claimed that there were no active cases of COVID-19 in San Francisco, although given the incubation period and the frequency of asymptomatic cases, the reporter had no grounds to make that claim. However, the juxtaposition of the Speaker’s message and the journalist’s parroting repetition exemplifies the frequent lack of critical independence in the press.
A second criticism involves the insinuation that the president has been insufficiently engaged with science in his response to the crisis. At stake here is not the choreography of the news briefings—whether the medical professionals should have more of the limelight or not—but rather the claim that a single, clear, and unambiguous policy position based on scientific authority exists and that the president blithely disregards it. Yet anyone following the journalistic and scientific discussions during the past weeks concerning the shape of the curve, the prospects for herd immunity, and the timeline for a vaccine has to concede that there is considerable disagreement within the scientific community itself. This is not the place to review all these still ongoing debates, but by now it surely appears that the initial predictions of 2,200,000 COVID deaths in the United States were wildly off the mark—may that remain the case—while the numbers of hospital beds and ventilators did not turn out to be woefully insufficient, as had been forecast with lurid imagery. Indeed, even New York is now turning over excess ventilator capacity to other states more in need of them. What was the point of those scare tactics, whether on the part of scientific experts or their reporters? Was the goal to manipulate public opinion? Or might it have been that some scientists were simply incorrect in their modelings? Yet there is no shame in proving a hypothesis wrong. Recognition of fallibility is itself a key indicator of science, as opposed to dogma. However, if the possibility of error is epistemologically integral to the scientific method, it is only right and proper for a lay consumer of scientific claims—and in particular a political leader, such as the president, who has other competing desiderata to bear in mind—to at least countenance the consideration that a scientific hypothesis might be proven wrong. The politician has to listen to scientific counsel but also take other considerations into account. The ultimate responsibility to decide cannot be delegated.
For the wider public, the inconsistencies in scientific claims have likely generated a heightened degree of skepticism, not of science as such but of the habit of ascribing authority to media-promoted expertise. Such doubt directed at experts is a recognizably populist motif. What appears now as a consistent overhyping of the risk since the outset may be contributing unintentionally to a “cry wolf” effect, undermining the public’s readiness to accept scientific authority in the future: hence the protests against the lockdown. One wishes that the scientific community had communicated more clearly the fragility of its claims and models, and that the press had acted with professional responsibility and moderation in discussing the topic. One case in point: through late March and early April, the message was consistently disseminated that the public should not use masks, not only in order to leave the supply for medical professionals but also because, so it was claimed again and again, the masks themselves represented a risk. Masks do not afford protection, but they might tempt the wearers to adjust them repeatedly and therefore increase hand-to-face contact, a source of potential contamination. Yet by the third week in April, we began to face a proliferation of orders mandating mask-wearing in some American cities and in parts of Europe. Have masks suddenly become less of a threat? Which story is true? In retrospect it appears that at least on this point the experts have been less than forthright with the public. In contrast, the public itself has been quite disciplined in observing social distancing, while the experts, however, with a distrust of the public, have used scare tactics and otherwise communicated poorly, with the result that they have undermined their own authoritativeness. One might remember the William Buckley quip that he would rather be governed by the first one hundred names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.
A third criticism directed at the president complains that he has exercised insufficient authority. This stance is bizarre, especially if one remembers how critics of the Trump administration from the start portrayed him as an aspiring dictator, comparing the 2016 electoral outcome with Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, or likening the president to authoritarian leaders around the world—Putin, Xi, but also Modi, Erdoğan, Orbán, and others. The argument ultimately attempts to assimilate him into the model of “illiberal democracy.”
There is in fact an argument to be made that in political systems across the globe power has been accruing to executive authorities, but that description would hold as well, for example, for French President Macron, for former President Obama, or even German Chancellor Merkel, who has been able to eliminate most opposition and rarely faces a critical press. Yet leaving aside this hypothesis of a transformation of political power in the early twenty-first century, one cannot but be stunned by the political opportunism of those who once feared a dictator Trump now complaining that he is insufficiently forward-leaning in grabbing power, commandeering the economy, and intruding on civil liberties (e.g., through federal monitoring of infected patients’ movements). The matter came to a head in the exchanges around the question of who has authority to oversee the unwinding of the lockdown: when the president claimed it as his purview, Governor Cuomo and others attacked him on federalist grounds, but when he issued his plans for the unwinding, leaving significant authority in the hands of governors—effectively reversing his earlier position—his opponents denounced him for dodging responsibility and doing “nothing.” What that quick reversal demonstrates is that the substance of the indeed interesting federalist question, the relationship between Washington and the states, was of no real concern; what is at stake is seizing any opportunity to score political points, no matter how high the price in inconsistency or intellectual dishonesty.
These characteristics of political debate hardly make up the whole story of the pandemic and the American response to it. Yet there are some lessons. Above all, the root of all evil remains the mendacity of the Chinese Communist Party and its refusal to countenance free speech. The world needs a Gorbachev moment in Beijing. However, to be better than dictatorship, we need to recognize the flaws in our political debate, especially in the three dimensions examined here. First, of course, some steps might have been taken sooner or more effectively—a statement that probably holds universally—but by some metrics, the Trump administration’s response was as early as that of most Western governments and prescient in minimizing travel from China: most of the West followed suit, albeit slowly. Second, the advocates that government pay greater attention to science need to recognize the degree of debate within the scientific community and the integral status of fallibility to scientific thinking: it demands doubt and skepticism, not slavish submission. Reason in democracy does not mean surrender to a dictatorship of scientists, and certainly not to a scientific socialism. Third, there are always good grounds to be vigilant about any excessive accrual of power by the government, but it is difficult to see ominous power concentration as the distinguishing feature of the Trump administration. On the contrary, it has instead tended toward deregulation of the administrative state and a federalist recognition of the importance of subsidiarity through the role of the states. Yet those who criticize the administration on this point appear, by calling for a greater expansion of presidential authority, to be basically calling for the model of dictatorship that they opposed three years ago. Evidently intellectual or political consistency does not matter.
In the meantime, though, this partisanship distracts from the real challenge, confronting that genuine dictator who rules in Beijing. At the risk of making a prediction: American political debate in coming months and years will be asking which of our own political leaders, which of our foreign policy experts, which industries, and which universities have become so beholden to the Chinese Communist Party that they refuse to criticize Beijing and which, instead, stand for freedom, including liberty for the Chinese people as much as for the American people.
