Populism and Pandemics

TLDR: Go home and stay there

Why are Eastern democracies working better than Western ones?

It’s striking that East Asian democracies have responded to the pandemic with alacrity, whereas Western democracies have foundered. It’s too soon to say whether the East Asian democracies have truly been spared. It’s difficult to make cross-country comparisons at all, at this stage, because testing protocols vary so widely, and rates of infection may yet rise. But so far, East Asian democracies have not experienced the kind of catastrophe we’re seeing in Italy, Spain, France, and which will soon overtake the UK and the US: outbreaks of such severity that they overwhelm health care resources.

The conventional wisdom is that East Asia was better prepared because of its recent experience with SARS. This is surely correct. But I wonder if it’s the whole story? South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan took the warnings seriously and acted when there was still time to pursue what we now know is the right strategy. They quickly implemented expansive and well-organized testing programs, isolated the infected, did rigorous contact tracing, and isolated the contacts.

So far, it seems that diagnostic capacity and contact tracing, at scale, is the key to controlling this epidemic. It seems that if you do this quickly enough, you can avoid the lockdown; and we know that if you don’t do it quickly enough, the lockdown—and total economic destruction—is inevitable. What we don’t yet know is whether the kind of lockdown Italy and France are now trying—lockdown-lite, in which people may still leave their homes to go to essential jobs and buy food—is sufficient to bring the death rate down to acceptable levels. The virus is so demonically contagious that I fear the doctors from Wuhan are right: It won’t be.

It’s possible that once the virus has spread as widely as it has in the West, the only remedy is a Draconian, Wuhan-style lockdown, in which food is delivered, by state officials wearing protective gear, to a population that is not allowed out for any reason whatsoever, and in which violators face punishments that frighten them more than the prospect of dying from the virus.

Perhaps there’s something in between. But whatever it is, if you’re not doing it now, you should be.

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I’d like to see two maps, side-by-side: an infection map and a populism map. I’d like to know whether countries that have put populists in power, or elected an unusual number of them to government, are more likely to delay and bungle their response to the coronavirus. It seems to me they are, although I’d need to see those two maps to be sure—and it’s easy to imagine why.

We shouldn’t confuse correlation and causation. It’s possible populists have gained purchase in response to the kinds of social and political deficits that make a country prone to bungle its response to a pandemic. But common sense suggests that by definition, populists would not be as capable of mounting an intelligent response to an outbreak of epidemic disease.

Their whole sales pitch, their raison d’être, revolves around their promise to ignore experts and alienate elites. They’ve billed their inexperience of government as an asset. They’re outsiders—“real people.” That means they don’t fully understand how all the levers of government work, and are incapable of using them efficiently in an emergency. They’re fantasists and magical-thinkers, not plodding, detail-oriented technocrats, and prone to the kinds of cognitive blunder that makes it hard to see what’s coming. They’re apt to believe that epidemics only happen in shithole countries, or that journalists are only going apeshit about this Chinese flu because they’re enemies of the people who are determined to make you look bad.

They gut bureaucracies like the State Department and the intelligence agencies. I really don’t need the Washington Post to tell me that Trump ignored the intelligence community’s warnings: I ignored the warnings, and they were right on the front page of The New York Times. None of us needed a classified briefing to know this was coming. Anyone paying close attention to that news could have seen it.

It would have been overwhelmingly obvious to bureaucrats stationed anywhere in Asia. I have no doubt that our intelligence agencies were indeed reporting, no later than January 15, that an extraordinarily virulent epidemic posed a danger to the United States and its allies. They would have described, too, the measures other countries in Asia were taking to combat it. Much of this was reported in the good old New York Times.

I dismissed their reporting as hysteria. But had I taken the time to look at it carefully and think about it, I wouldn’t have. I’m sure our demoralized State and intelligence officials were in close contact with their counterparts in Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Hong Kong, who would have freely shared all the information they had about this disease. Of course they were reporting on the situation with growing alarm. The CDC was sounding the alarm, too. A normal president would have listened to them and taken them seriously.

There’s plenty of blame to go around. Everyone in our government, on both sides of the aisle, could have seen this coming. So could every one of our citizens. It just wasn’t a secret. I didn’t have the discipline to sit down, look at the numbers, study the literature, and draw the appropriate inferences. I assume my representatives didn’t, either. Hillary Clinton, too, could have figured it out from The New York Times and sounded the alarm. She didn’t. So a normal president might very well have botched the response—probably would have, in fact—but not this badly.

A normal president would surely, by this point, be hanging on the experts’ every word. But populists, by definition, don’t trust or listen to experts and bureaucrat. Trump is convinced the bureaucrats are all just plotting to screw him over. So he’s flying blind.

Populists create and thrive on chaos. When they should be paying attention to their jobs, they’re busy purging their enemies and plotting revenge. The reaction will now be further botched because populists divide the public to the point that action becomes impossible. This is the premise of populism, not an incidental feature. Us versus them. Real people versus the cabal of elites, billionaires, academics, globalists, media, and Jews who have screwed them over for years. (You can substitute any other minority, it doesn’t have to be Jews. That’s just a traditional favorite.)

This worldview is precisely what makes them populists. Public rancor and polarization aren’t incidental to the ideology but the ideology in action. They take pride in ripping apart the social fabric of a society. The hatred they engender is proof, to their supporters, that they’re keeping their promises and really making the elites cry. When at last it dawns on them that the epidemic is real—and they need the public to be united, and they need its trust—they realize, too late, that they’ve lost control of the demons they set loose.

So by the time populist realizes, at last, that yes, the virus is real; and no, the stories are not a plot hatched against his person in the bowels of the mainstream media, he presides over a society that can no longer react appropriately to danger. Half the country no longer trusts the mainstream media—and the alternative media’s off its rocker; the other half no longer trusts the President. This severely slows reaction time.

The only instinct that works in the populist’s favor is xenophobia. The impulse to ban travel from other countries is the right one. You can’t do that too soon, in this situation—although you can screw it up royally, as the Trump Administration did, rendering the effort not merely pointless but actively counterproductive. No, he does not deserve “credit” for his instinct to implement a travel ban. This isn’t sixth grade. He undid any benefit that might have accrued by turning our airports into a case study that will fascinate and horrify scholars of infectious disease for the next thousand years. They will discuss the tragedy of the airport fiasco much as we do the Justinian plague and the Roman Empire. The virus is not a person. You get no extra credit for effort.

It’s too soon to say, but if I had to bet, I’d predict, a priori, that countries led by populists—or with a large populist presence in their government—will fare worse in this pandemic than those led by bland, sober technocrats who graduated from elite universities. We’ll see. Or some of us will.

I can tell you, directly from your future, that populists will use this opportunity for a naked power grab. What’s worse, it will be justified by the circumstances. Yes, we’ll have to suspend habeus corpus. No, holding an election’s not a terrific idea. So I have no idea what advice to give you.

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Will lockdown-lite even work?

Lockdown-lite has not worked yet in Italy. It may: these measures take a while to work their way through. But I suspect the problem is that the number of people who refuse to comply with sanitary advice and the lockdown order remains absurdly high. I figure this will be true throughout the Western democracies.

The UK’s scientific advisory board estimates that 25 percent of the population is too stupid or too craven to understand and follow lockdown orders. This may be what led Johnson to champion the “herd immunity” strategy, which he had to revise when word got out about how many would die.

That 25-percent figure probably comes from studies of other populations during epidemics. So when the UK government insisted that their advice was based on “the best scientific evidence,” they may have been telling the truth: This may be an evidence-based statistic that’s well-known to epidemiologists. They just failed to mention the forecast of millions of deaths, which is also based on “the best scientific evidence.”

So the political problem—and problems don’t go away because there’s a pandemic—comes when the other 75 percent figures out what the death forecast looks like. Actually, let’s say the other 25 percent. Probably, the middle 50 percent just thinks whatever people around them do and never looks at the evidence. That 25 percent doesn’t think that number of deaths would be acceptable, so they start clamoring for a lockdown—and the government is damned if they do, damned if they don’t. They know, or suspect, the lockdown won’t work, because 25 percent of the population can’t hack it. So why tank the economy? But they also know they’ll be blamed for not ordering a lockdown when millions of their citizens die.

I don’t envy policy makers right now.

Other numbers that are, I’m sure, right now being entered into models and used for forecasting include “number of days you can keep people in lockdown before they riot, revolt, and decapitate you,” and “number of days you can keep people out of lockdown—and endure an exponentially mounting death toll—before people riot, revolt and decapitate you.” These are figures that can be extrapolated from other countries’ experiences, although no one is sure how similar the sociology will be in Western democracies. But Central Europe is on a knife edge right now, because government planners think the first number might be quite low.

Italy is tightening its lockdown rules daily, but the number of Italians violating the orders rises with every day of confinement. According to the Italian Interior Ministry, police have stopped and checked 1,858,697 Italians since the lockdown order came down and pressed charges against 82,041, including a priest in Campania who was caught conducting a funeral and the relatives of the deceased.

They’re now threatening Italian violators with prison, although I suspect this is an empty threat: The great majority of the public wishes to see violators punished, but they’re probably not yet ready to see cruel and unusual punishments; confining the miscreants would ensure they all become infected—that would serve them right—but it would be cruel and unusual. Unless they’re prepared to confine them for life, their contamination would only increase the risk to the public at large: At some point, they’ll be released.

Do you think the American public will be better at following hygienic instructions than Italy or France? I kind of don’t think so. So far, New Yorkers are flunking. Cuomo’s already got that Interior-Minister-Castaner tone in his voice:

Cuomo expressed exasperation Sunday that people were still ignoring orders to stay away from one another. Under his order, people need to stay at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) apart when they are outside. Public transit will keep running, but people besides essential workers should only use it when absolutely necessary.

“It’s insensitive. It’s arrogant. It’s self-destructive. It’s disrespectful to other people,” Cuomo said. “It has to stop and it has to stop now.”

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Most people, mind you, will take this very seriously, as they should—I think the US has now got to this stage—and they will be maddened, just driven out of their minds, by the non-compliant 25 percent.

This phenomenon caused the video below to go viral in France. The joke is in the subtitles, which don’t correspond to what Putin’s really saying. My friend Piero—who’s locked up in Italy, and even more frantic than I am to persuade the rest of the world how serious this is—tried to re-subtitle it in English, but it didn’t seem to work. So I’ve just translated it, below.

That’s another thing to expect, by the way. Your frustration and fury with people who aren’t getting it will also increase exponentially. So you won’t go, say, from five to six on the “I despair for my fellow citizens” scale. You’ll experience a frustration you never knew possible. It’s partly that around you people are dying like flies and partly sheer boredom. Please be considerate of my emotional state before sending me emails telling me I shouldn’t worry because chloroquine cures the virus. Or that it’s racist and offensive to say that China has a lot of experience with repressing millions of people. Or that I shouldn’t offend you by criticizing Trump, because that will make you less likely to stay at home.

Translation: Message from Putin to the French.

Hey there, imbeciles. Apparently, last week Manu told you to be careful, stop getting together and shaking hands and spitting everywhere.

And since he has all the authority and charisma of a bottle of dishwashing liquid, you were all out in the parks on Sunday. Or out by the banks of the Saint-Martin canal, drinking rosé from the bottle.

Your alcohol for schoolboys—it disgusts me.

That’s not even counting holding municipal elections in the meantime. I told you, it’s imbecility, this business with elections.

So I’ve got to step in and get control of this situation.

Enough fucking around. From now on, we’re going into confinement mode. And not, as they say on BFMTV, “Italian-style confinement.” Russian-style.

Basically: If anyone’s hanging out on the street during the cease-fire, I will hunt them down. I will find them. I will kill them. And I will enjoy it.

Our country has found a particularly effective vaccine against the coronavirus. It’s called a Kalashnikov AK-12 with a laser pointer. Damn, it’s a blast to use these motherfuckers. You just have to think, “I’m beginning to get a hard-on.”

Of course, certain exemptions will be made. You will have to present a document to the authorities demonstrating that your activity is of an essential nature. Here is an example:

The Russian national anthem plays as we see the document everyone in France must now have on his person when he goes outside. But the list of acceptable justifications now reads:

1. Going out to get munitions;

2. Walking my domestic bear;

3. Lynching my political opponent;

4. Annexing a neighboring country.

There you go. I hope that is clear.

Failing that, wash your hands, blow your nose in your elbow, and do your best.

If I have to intervene again, it could be very fucking unpleasant.

Until next time.

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The reality of Russia’s response to the epidemic is less amusing; I commend to your attention Andrzej Kozlowski’s perspective; it is, I suspect, correct:

It is clear, unfortunately, what the real course taken by Russia is—the toughest option, in which most of the population is infected. The one who dies, dies; the one who survives, survives.

Coronavirus mainly affects the elderly and the sick, not the young and healthy. And, in fact, from the point of view of the Kremlin, what is the problem? Old people and patients will die out quickly—a big help to the budget. Listen, do you really think that that people who have just reset the ruble will seriously be bothered by the fact that the elderly and the sick will die?

Meanwhile, Russia’s bots, bless their hearts, are working overtime to spread misinformation about the virus in the West. Why? Because they’re psychopaths. The virus kills Russians exactly as it does Westerners. It’s hardly in their interest to propagate a raging, uncontained epidemic in the West.

It’s reminiscent of the joke about the Russian peasant and the magical fish. The fish offers to grant him a wish, but says that whatever he gets, his neighbor will get, doubled. The peasant thinks for a bit, then says, “Make me blind in one eye.”

I have some more bad news about the prospect of maintaining a liberal democracy in this epidemic and, indeed, the future of liberal democracy worldwide. Also, America’s superpower days look pretty numbered to me.

But let’s focus today on getting our fellow citizens to go inside and stay there.

That’s priority number one. We can figure out the rest tomorrow.