Co-Vindicated

As I write this is seems like the world has changed. For those reading close to the time of publication this must look like a rather obvious fact. We are bound indoors, the economy has stopped, and it what seems but the blink of an eye we all discuss “flattening the curve”, “The R0 value” and containment strategies like the Doctors in epidemiology that we are, never mind that a month ago this would be foreign to most of us. However, in one thing I take solace: I was right all along.

The beauty in that statement is that it’s true no matter who reads it. For years people would say that they knew their ideology was right, “If only there was something, an event so blindingly obvious that would finally make the world wake up and see things like I do”. Well for all of us this has been it, the only problem being that none of us can actually agree on who exactly has been proven correct. 

Here, we’ll go through some examples. Democrats in America claim that this crisis has finally shown the superiority of single-payer healthcare, “a well-funded state system can better allocate resources at country wide levels, and better protects the poor”, to which a republican might answer pointing out the failings of governments like the one in Spain which failed to acquire appropriate PPE and tests, or the very British government delivering faulty tests to our NHS. They can also point out the myriad initiatives by local communities to deliver what they can to hospitals - sit back and rejoice that “the market did it again folks”. You may think of counter-counter arguments and so on, and of course, they are all valid. You are right.

Not often do we see people clamouring openly for a more authoritarian state, with the scars of autocrats past still vividly present. Nonetheless they seem to have taken to this opportunity and point to China and how the lock down of Wuhan and the quarantine of most of the country produced an almost miraculous result. Furthermore, almost every government seems to have followed suit, with stay at home orders and other measured designed to curtail contact. However, in those exceptions such as Sweden or South Korea or Japan, liberals gather and argue for a different way of doing things with the government doing as little as possible. Though as I am sure many will point out this is still government intervention and that the people who often praise those countries would be opposed to the large-scale government tracking that made the more surgical measures possible. There are many arguments and nuances that I have left out. The message remains that people have been proven correct all over the political spectrum.

How can this be? Well, it could be that there are many ways out of a crisis, with not a singular “best way”. This sounds like the answer given at the end of an essay, where you try to hop on the fence so as to provide something satisfactory for everybody; but not something that anyone will be ecstatic about. So, let me try and present another option, that Covid - at least in the world of politics - changes nothing. It’s a new set dressing for a play written long ago. We are having the same arguments, with the same points. Is government efficient? What rights would you give up for security?

We disagreed about this before and we still do. We will be proven right whatever happens. Not even because we will apply our bias to the information we receive. It’s deeper than that. People will fundamentally value different things. Some people are mistrustful of government and others believe in the power that it has to co-ordinate a response. If you want to convince someone to change ideology you must address the key issues, not the particular circumstances in which they manifest, because if you don’t even when successful as soon as circumstances change so will that person become un-convinced.

I do think that there is a difference in how governments have responded that does matter, it’s what I would like to file under “crisis management”. This is a skill that isn’t really valued in the electoral process. We pretend it is of course, candidates tend to beef up their resumés, Hilary explaining how she was in the situation room during the raid that ended with the death of Bin-Laden comes to mind. It can also be claimed that this is selected for implicitly. During a campaign there is bound to be crisis and if you survive well enough to get the top job you must have done pretty well.

Ultimately, I think those arguments don’t hold much water, some places you place your vote in a party, which although led by an individual, is more of a complex machine with many interests. You are more probably voting for policies or ideology. Where you do vote for a person this is still much the same; with what that person claims to be being much more important than what they actually are. As for an implicit filter I would agree that a campaign is a messy thing but precisely for that reason it is not a guarantee that it will provide for good crisis leaders, with other qualities able to supersede that.

Voters put little value in this skill, probably because it is not something we often think about or is particularly enjoyable to ponder. We take whatever situation the country is in at the time of voting and pick whoever we think will do best with the pieces as they are, and when the board changes leaders have to adapt as best they can.

The natural question is what to do about it. Well, voting is complex, with many competing factors at play. So here I will take the easy out and say that so long as next time round when candidates are selected and it’s your turn to cast a ballot. just think about who you would like to be manning the guns if, instead of calm waters, all hell breaks loose.

Juan Dávila (Social Secretary) is a first year reading Engineering Science at St. John’s College