Three Fingers Pointing Back
Terrorismn. Fascism. Communism. Socialism. Authoritarianism. Dystopianism. These are classifications familiar to us and for decades they all had one thing in common - they were elsewhere, from other parts of the world that were hotbeds of turmoil. We did what came naturally to all nations: honoured our own virtues while belittling others who were different from us.
COVID-19 has proved the great equalizer. It turns out that many of those other countries we spent our time looking down our noses at have actually handled the pandemic better than many Western nations. Our sense of moral superiority doesn’t seem as moral or superior now, as countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, even China, have more effectively dealt with the virus that places like America and Britain. We might not have been truly aware of this, but we did know that Japan, Germany, New Zealand and, yes, Canada, were developing effective responses to protect their citizens.
It’s turning out that both Britain and the United States, the significant architects of the post-World War Two order, have turned out to be emperors with no clothes – nor adequate health systems. These were the same two juggernauts that spent most of their time preaching to the other failing nations about their shortcomings and their need for Western style democracy and capitalism. Their pandemic response has been so bad that they have little ethical weight remaining to cast around. They have failed their citizens and the world at such fundamental levels on this pandemic that no one is looking to them from any sort of leadership in a world so desperately in need of it.
But the capacity of these two nations is much lower than just their response to an unseen virus. While places like Canada, France, Germany and Japan were wrestling with how to keep low-grade capitalism from overrunning their economies, Great Britain and America went full out on abandoning industries, low-value employment and constantly eroding health systems.
Some impressively objective and seasoned writers in both nations have taken to labelling them “failed states,” and reason that this hasn’t been a sudden failure but a series of policy blunders that have been occurring for decades. The countries embraced globalization because they were quite capable of shaping it to their own advantage, especially for the wealth classes.
It should now be no surprise to conservative free-market politicians in both countries that citizen voters feel that such financial and cultural elitism can no longer be trusted to provide either social or health security. They have stripped away at such capacity for decades and now look more racist than reformers, more despots than doctors. They are watching as even their sacred free market agendas fall apart in the face of an unseen virus. They look weak, ineffective, and in both Britain and America, have foolishly placed their fate in the hands of two political egos who can only fathom a future with them in charge.
The idea that government was an evil has been perpetuated by decades of ideology and political gamesmanship. Prominent free market thinkers delighted in telling audiences that governments were the problem and just needed to get out of the way so that primate industry could do its thing. Well, governments largely followed that advice, permitted billions to flow unregulated overseas and to continually cut back on the very systems now so essential to us all – better healthcare systems, child care, meaningful employment, gender equity, climate change.
This is a far cry from how governments looked at the world in 1945, with the end of World War Two. The globe was a mess and political leaders accepted the fact that government needed to intervene in numerous sectors to not only get their economies going but to stabilize a formerly out of control world. They did, and the middle-class was born.
It has frequently been said that we shouldn’t be pointing our finger at others, since that leaves three more pointing back at us. We are now in such a moment. The ills we exposed in other nations – racism, rampant poverty, violence, disease, authoritarianism, corruption, poor governance – are now among us, thriving in societies frozen in a pandemic.
And, here perhaps, is the worst part. Millions of citizens, not just in the US or Britain, are falling prey to the times. Feeling confined and victimized by systems that just weren’t there for them, they have opted to head to the beach, the BBQ, the concert, the political rally – anyplace where their freedom can be enjoyed and expressed once more. And it’s turning out that it could be the death of them.
This is the time to revitalize our politics, our citizenship, or corporatism, our institutions, since at all of these levels our societies have proved vulnerable. Darker forces are waiting to infiltrate those public spaces we vacate and, if successful, will obliterate any chance we have for an effective post-COVID future.