Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus

By Danielle Allen

From a leading political thinker, this book is both an invaluable playbook for meeting our current moment and a stirring reflection on the future of democracy itself.
 
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated some of the strengths of our society, including the rapid development of vaccines. But the pandemic has also exposed its glaring weaknesses, such as the failure of our government to develop and quickly implement strategies for tracing and containing outbreaks as well as widespread public distrust of government prompted by often confusing and conflicting choices—to mask, or not to mask. Even worse is that over half a million deaths and the extensive economic devastation could have been avoided if the government had been prepared to undertake comprehensive, contextually-sensitive policies to stop the spread of the disease.
 
In Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus, leading political thinker Danielle Allen untangles the US government’s COVID-19 victories and failures to offer a plan for creating a more resilient democratic polity—one that can better respond to both the present pandemic and future crises. Looking to history, Allen also identifies the challenges faced by democracies in other times that required strong government action. In an analysis spanning from ancient Greece to the Reconstruction Amendments and the present day, Allen argues for the relative effectiveness of collaborative federalism over authoritarian compulsion and for the unifying power of a common cause. But for democracy to endure, we—as participatory citizens—must commit to that cause: a just and equal social contract and support for good governance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226815619

Danielle Allen

Danielle Allen is an indie romance author, a professor, and a life coach. Living authentically has been the key to her living her best life. With a background in social sciences, helping people better understand themselves so they can become the best version of themselves is one of her passions. She aims to write contemporary romance novels that change the status quo of the genre.

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Cover Page for Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus

Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus

THE RANDY L. AND MELVIN R. BERLIN FAMILY LECTURES

Democracy in the Time of Coronavirus

Danielle Allen

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Endowment toward the publication of this book.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by Democratic Knowledge, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81560-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81562-6 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81561-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226815619.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Allen, Danielle S., 1971–, author.

Title: Democracy in the time of coronavirus / Danielle Allen.

Other titles: Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin family lectures.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Series: Berlin family lectures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021024484 | ISBN 9780226815602 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226815626 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226815619 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020—Political aspects—United States. |Democracy—United States. | Crisis management in government—United States. | United States—Politics and government—2017–.

Classification: LCC RA644.C67 A47 2021 | DDC 362.1962/414—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024484

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dedicated to the more than six hundred thousand Americans dead from COVID-19

Contents

Preface

1. Democracy in Crisis

2. Pandemic Resilience

3. Federalism Is an Asset

4. A Transformed Peace: An Agenda for Healing Our Social Contract

Acknowledgments

References

Index

Footnotes

Preface

When the new coronavirus arrived in the United States in January 2020, it hit an economy, society, and constitutional democracy fundamentally unprepared. As the scale of the challenge became clear, the country simply could not deliver what was needed to confront it. There was a solution, one identified by scholars and policy experts as early as the middle of March and publicly disseminated by the middle of April. That solution was a large-scale program of rapid testing of patients, tracing and testing their contacts, and tracing and testing their contacts again in turn. Such testing also needed reinforcement from a culture of adherence to universal precautions such as mask-wearing, hand and bathroom hygiene, and robust practices of infection control. The massive, rapid buildup of such a public health campaign, as well as the necessary infrastructure to support it, would have interrupted transmission of the virus sufficiently to eliminate it even while keeping the economy open. But the country did not have the relevant infrastructure ready to go and was not able to deliver this mobilization.

Just as the 2008 financial crisis exposed blind spots in how countries had thought about integrated markets through the first stages of globalization, within the first two months of 2020, the spread of COVID-19 revealed that the United States had another gaping vulnerability to globalization. Like opaque securities, pandemics proved to be a dangerous feature of globally integrated markets. We learned that, given the modern structure of travel, transportation, and integrated economies, infectious pathogens travel as easily as the Davos elite.

The near-term challenge of January 2020 was identical to our long-term challenge: how to achieve pandemic resilience—the ability of our social and political institutions to process a major exogenous shock yet keep all essential functions operating, while simultaneously protecting lives, livelihoods, and liberties. The urgency of the crisis meant that we needed to deliver the durable infrastructure of resilience in the form of emergency response. But the near-term nature of the crisis situation by no means required that the response to it should consist only of transient initiatives. Emergencies have always provided opportunities for durable innovation.

Look back to antiquity. The Romans’ Appian Way, their first major road, was built in 312 BCE as a supply line during the Second Samnite War. A crisis response yielded durable infrastructure. Of course, the same kind of thing happened with penicillin and nuclear power in World War II (Conant 2017; Johnstone-Louis et al. 2020). A crisis will by its nature elicit reactive action of some kind. The question is only whether in its reactions a society lays down a foundation for a better future or expends its energies on changeable, flailing efforts. In our own situation, the effort to find a vaccine to protect against COVID-19 is another good example of an emergency yielding a permanent advance. The Moderna variant uses a technology, synthetic messenger RNA, that has never before been used for vaccine production (Garde and Saltzmann 2020). In all likelihood we will leave this crisis with an important new tool firmly entrenched in the health-care toolkit. We could have and should have done the same with the infrastructure of public health.

In this book, I hope to lay the foundation for a renewed social contract capable of delivering pandemic resilience—and, more generally, both justice and health for our constitutional democracy. I hope to offer a durable breakthrough in the form of a fresh vision of the public good.

What exactly is a social contract? A social contract is the set of rights and mutual responsibilities that we have among ourselves as citizens in a constitutional democracy. A social contract is both what’s asked of us as participants in a constitutional democracy and all that is made possible for us by virtue of our participation in that constitutional democracy. What’s asked of us and what we receive establish relations of reciprocity within the citizenry. This book seeks to reset that relationship for a healthy and just future.

The pandemic revealed that our social contract is fundamentally broken. Our society includes people who are being asked to follow the law and to pay taxes but who are not in return receiving the opportunity and security promised by our arrangement of mutual rights and responsibilities. The elderly and essential workers, for instance, have been left exposed to the pandemic. We have seen disparate impacts on communities of color, because underlying foundations of health have not been adequately established for low-income workers. When crisis hit, the society that promised to protect all did not in fact protect many of its members.

To repair our social contract, we need to understand the goals and responsibilities of public decision-makers and democratic citizens in a constitutional democracy in a time of crisis. We need to understand the vulnerabilities in our society that left us ill-equipped to fulfill those responsibilities. These are the subjects of chapter 1. We need to acknowledge what kind of public health strategy would have fulfilled those goals and responsibilities in response to this crisis, and we need to explore why we failed to adopt this strategy. These are the subjects of chapter 2. We need to learn how to use the machinery of our political institutions to deliver on those goals more effectively, if not now, in this crisis, then going forward. This is the subject of chapter 3. Once we take these steps, we will be able to sketch out the parameters of a transformed peace, a social contract that delivers pandemic resilience and, more generally, justice and health for our constitutional democracy on the foundation of a fair and flourishing economy. I offer that sketch in chapter 4.

Pandemic resilience requires public health infrastructure, of course, but also, and this will be my focus, a healthy social contract—good governance and bonds of solidarity and mutual commitment within the population, connected to love of country. Solidarity is the resource that enables people to make small sacrifices of liberty so as to avoid harm to others with whom they have a social bond. We convey our love of country through acts of solidarity to the other members of our polity. We have many reasons to want to benefit from a globally integrated economy and from the opportunities for human connection it brings. Yet we rightly wish to avoid being existentially vulnerable to its accompanying dangers. The goal is a framework for delivering a transformed peace, a postpandemic state in which, as a society, we would be less vulnerable to injury because we would be stronger as a society. We would have more civic strength by virtue of having a healthy social contract, supporting both good governance and solidarity.

1

Democracy in Crisis

The Problem to Be Solved

What goals of decision-making should guide a constitutional democracy in crisis? This chapter will answer that question but begins by sketching the nature of the emergency we confronted in January, February, and March 2020. The goal is to capture both how we saw the problem at the time of its emergence and how we ought to have seen the problem.

When the COVID-19 crisis hit, three kinds of problems quickly emerged: a health problem, an economic problem, and a political problem. The third, the political problem, is the focus of this book. In order to come to grips with it, though, it will be necessary to say something briefly about the two problems with which it interacts, the health and the economic problems. The job facing our political institutions in January 2020 was to solve those intersecting challenges. As I finished this book in March 2021, there were more than five hundred thousand Americans dead, we had the highest death toll in the world, the majority of the nation’s schools were still functioning remotely, and severe economic impacts were and still are visible in dramatic increases in food insecurity (GAO 2020), women who have dropped out of the workforce (Cohen 2020), and a rising tide of evictions (Badger 2020). Many would agree that the United States failed to meet the moment by mounting either a successful response to COVID-19 or achieving pandemic resilience.

To know how and why our institutions failed, we need to understand the task that lay before them at the start of 2020. A first issue here is whether constitutional democracies have what it takes to deliver a solution to health and economic problems of the kind presented by a rapidly moving pandemic. By now we know the answer is yes. New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Germany, and South Korea all