Letter from Wellington
[Editor’s Note: The author of this piece, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Professor of Criminology John Pratt, believes the end of Donald Trump and his neo-fascist populism may have been written a year before his failed attempt to overthrow his own government, with the arrival of Covid-19. If it sounds like it starts in the middle of something, well, it does start in the middle of something. It is an excerpt from Professor Pratt’s new book: “Law, Insecurity and Risk Control: Neo-Liberal Governance and the Populist Revolt,” hailed as a master work by one of criminology’s finest scholars.]
Covid-19 and the Immobilisation of Nations
However, if developments such as these signal the onward march of populism, the unexpected arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020 might yet provide a different ending to this story. This is one that could involve the end of populism as a political force. The strategy of immobilisation intended to protect the enterprising and the risk takers from the risky has been dramatically extended as nations have responded to the virus. The indefinite (in most cases) immobilisation of entire populations now, rather than risky individuals, is intended to protect whole societies from it. For citizens already consumed by, preoccupied with, vulnerable to and apprehensive of all kinds of risks, the virus and all the uncertainty associated with it have come to dominate every aspect of existence. All other risks — real or imagined — seem to have been shut out of everyday discourse: risks of paedophiles, predators, terrorists and the like have suddenly vanished from it since such people, like everyone else, have been immobilised as the virus has moved around the world. While its dimensions are still unknowable, the likelihood of infection is rated very high — Angela Merkel has estimated that around seventy per cent of the German population may become so.
Here, then, is a new enemy for the heroes of populism to put to the sword. This one, though, is microbial in form: it cannot be cowed into silence by a Twitter outburst; it cannot be held back by a wall, however “big” and “beautiful” it might be; it cannot be publicly scapegoated and shamed out of existence; it cannot be driven out of communities by local vigilante groups; it is, though, an enemy capable of causing unquantifiable, irreparable harm, both to individuals and societies. While some of its victims seem to suffer virtually no harmful effects at all from it, the virus has proved fatal for many others. Who are the most vulnerable? Originally this was those who were aged over eighty; it then came down to seventy-plus; then it came down again to those who are sixty-plus; thereafter, there are reports that some of its forty-plus victims have had to be put on ventilators. Teenagers have died from it, as have infants. After largely ignoring it as it gained force, the levels of national immobilisation have kept intensifying: borders are closed; returning citizens must self-isolate if they return beyond a certain date; then retrospective self-isolation is imposed for those who managed to return before the due date; then bars and restaurants are closed; then schools and universities; then all except emergency movement from home is prohibited — “enjoy your living room,” President Trump has said.
However, while the virus is a risk to all, the exact nature of the risk remains uncertain and indeterminable. This in itself continues to feed rumour, speculation and anecdote that in turn add to its mystery and power: is fourteen days of isolation really enough for those who have been in contact with its victims? What if it reoccurs in those who have already had it? And so on and so on — the uncertainties grow. Because there is no limit to the risk, it is the infinite dimensions of its worst possibilities that most governments have tried to give protection against. But because its worst possibilities seem limitless, so the protective levels of control exponentially increase and, in turn, only seem to intensify the risk. By imposing a lockdown on the whole of New Zealand for four weeks, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has claimed that, by so doing, she would be saving “thousands of lives.” The next day, she claimed this would be saving “tens of thousands of lives.” Two days later, a news organisation claimed that, without the lockdown, 80,000 New Zealand lives would be lost.
Even when the virus does make its retreat from the world, the likely global recession that will follow as a result of the attempts to control it will continue to immobilise new sections of these societies. Those that had hitherto appeared to be thriving most in the era of neo-liberal governance — those working in tourism and leisure industries, for example, providing all the thrills and excitement that the mobile and the enterprising had come to expect as of right — found that their market had evaporated in the course of a few days in the middle of March 2020. And mobility, as both the means to win all the prizes on offer in casino economies and one of the prizes itself, has screeched to a halt.
Truth is truth
However, a further consequence of the level of anxiety brought about by the virus has been a resurgence of interest in and support for — amongst much of the public at least — public broadcasting organisations and their regular news bulletins. “Truth” — not “alternative facts,” not “different impressions of truth” — but “the truth” about the virus and a longing to know what this new risk that has enveloped the whole world actually means for them and their well-being, is back in fashion. Where is truth to be found? In public broadcasting. People listen and watch these outlets to hear and see the truth about the virus and how their risk standing in relation to it might be changing. Most of them have no interest in hearing about snake oil cures and other such forms of genuinely “fake news.” Truth is truth after all. And in pursuit of the truth, they no longer seem to “have had enough of experts.” On the contrary, they anxiously wait on the words and opinions of a variety of epidemiologists, public health professors, virologists, immunologists and so on. Notwithstanding some differences in their perspectives, these experts in their respective fields have been brought into sudden and unexpected public prominence. They saturate news programmes as new kinds of celebrities, famous not for their wealth, or their appearance or their physical endowments or other exotic qualities but because of their knowledge and analytical and diagnostic capabilities. Even the most flamboyant and narcissistic of populist politicians finds it difficult not to share the stage with them. Writing of the UK, John Harris has made the point that “only weeks ago, people close to Boris Johnson were declaring war on the civil service and the BBC; now, both institutions are surely at the heart of however we collectively proceed . . . Johnson is now at pains to be seen deferring to the chief medical officer and the government’s chief scientific adviser.”
This desire for truth in news broadcasting and the reappearance of respect for expert opinion may also reflect a yearning for strong, central government again; a yearning for government that can give clear, direct, accurate information about the virus and its dangers; a yearning for government to provide extensive public health care facilities rather than indulging in expensive vanity projects or simply stepping aside and allowing the private sector to redevelop urban society as it sees fit; as well as a yearning for government that will work with others in the form of a united, global response that will ultimately put an end to the virus. Here, then, governments can once again be “the solution” and not “the problem.” Citizens want, expect, their governments to perform their essential task of protecting the public against this particularly noxious enemy. And this protective obligation extends to all citizens, not just those who can purchase an appropriate level of security, or those who swarm around the latest cluster of enemies thought to put them at risk and demand that they be immobilised while their own mobility is allowed to continue unimpeded. Now, if all are not protected, this is only likely to lead to more infection.
In these respects, as mobility has ceased, so it seems that social cohesion — however temporarily — may be increasing. Retired doctors and nurses rush back to health services. Volunteers assist with relaying provisions to the elderly and the infirm. The special vulnerability of the homeless has led to hotel doors being thrown open to them free of charge, along with a sudden insistence by central government that the local state must now resolve within days the problem of homelessness that had become a taken for granted feature of urban life. Rather than risk-taking entrepreneurs, those working in health care, pharmacies, supermarkets, taxi services, what remains of public transport and the like have become the heroes of the Covid-19 crisis.
“We’ll all die one day”
Nonetheless, these pictures of caring populations and central governments embracing all their citizens within a protective cocoon are not universal. In some societies, or sections of them, populist distrust of the central state, of expertise and of science remains deeply embedded. In Trump’s America, where gun stores are allowed to stay open as an “essential service” and where the homeless in Las Vegas are allowed to sleep in a vacant parking lot spaced six feet from each other (despite there being 150,000-plus empty hotel rooms there), the virus in its early stages was variously dismissed as “a fake Democrat plot,” or a “fake North Korea plot” or a “Chinese plot.” Trump’s administration had anyway closed down the National Security Council office responsible for coordinating the response to pandemics in 2018 (when later asked about this, Trump said he “didn’t know anything about it”). This had been at one with his administration’s strategy of “draining the swamp” of central government professionalism and expertise — that is, of those individuals and organisations that provide “inconvenient” public information, such as “who has really been helped by his tax cuts, how climate change might affect agriculture or how his trade wars hurt farmers.” Instead, listeners, viewers, and all Trump supporters were advised to ignore dire warnings about the virus from “the mainstream media” (it was “a plot to discredit the president”) and continue their lives as normal.
However, growing public alarm at the irrefutable presence of the virus and its menacing capabilities has since prompted levels of “doublespeak” that George Orwell, writing in Nineteen Eighty-Four mode, would have been proud of. Trump himself provides some of the best illustrations of this. At the end of January 2020, after the existence of the virus had become well known for several weeks, Trump stated in a speech in Michigan that “we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at the moment — five [cases]. And those people are all recuperating successfully;” on January 31, “Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China. We have a tremendous relationship with China, which is a very positive thing. Getting along with China, getting along with Russia, getting along with these countries;” on February 10, “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away;” on February 19: “I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along;” on February 23: “we had 12 [cases], at one point. And now they’ve gotten very much better;” on February 27: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear;” in an interview on March 4, with Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel, in response to WHO estimate that 3.4 per cent of those infected would die: “Well, I think [this] is really a false number. Now, this is just my hunch, but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people who do this . . . personally, I would say the number is way under one per cent;” on March 6, “I like this stuff [medical science]. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Everyone of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ May be I have a natural ability. May be I should have done that instead of running for president.” On March 17, he then made the claim that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” As at April 2, 2020, the US had 216,515 recorded cases and 5,119 deaths from the virus.
It remains, though, that in this rewriting of history,
What is unchanging are the meta-themes that run through all [Fox News] coverage: The world is frightening and dangerous. Things were better in the past. White people are besieged and put-upon, while ungrateful minorities have all the advantages. The non-conservative media always lie and so can never be trusted; only what we here at Fox News and other conservative outlets tell you is true.
(Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman 17 March 2020)
Rather than helping to build a national consensus to fight the virus, these populist forces exaggerate existing divisions and thrive on the dissent, confusion and turbulence they are able to create. There have thus been new denunciations of the mainstream media — primarily because one of its tasks in democratic society is to bring to public attention the differences between what governments say they are doing and what they are manifestly not doing. Its journalists accordingly raise questions about the potency of Trump’s “hunches” and his self-proclaimed “natural ability.” When asked by an NBC reporter what he would say to Americans who were at home watching and scared, Trump was steamed and snapped, “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say.”
By the same token, the origins of the virus in China provide the opportunity for new outbursts of race hatred: “amid criticism that repeated use of the phrase ‘China virus’ to refer to coronavirus by Mr. Trump and some of his top officials was racist, activists said they had seen violent attacks on Asian Americans increase in ‘leaps and bound’ over the last three weeks.” In the UK, two teenagers were arrested on suspicion of attacking a student who was told: “We don’t want your coronavirus in our country.” BBC News reported that “Jonathan Mok, 23, was attacked as he walked down Oxford Street at about 21:15 GMT on 24 February when a group of four males began shouting. Mr Mok, from Singapore, said the group beat him up when he confronted them;” and the British Independent’s Louis Staples reported “an [Asian] nurse has been assaulted and racially abused as she walked to work for an overtime shift.”
Not only this, but Trump seems to be revelling in what he sees as his new assignation of “wartime president,” enjoying the public attention that his regular pronouncements and press conferences on the virus give him. What might lie behind this, here and elsewhere, is the realisation that the emergency powers that governments have invoked to combat the virus raise all kinds of new possibilities for extending the rule of would-be autocrats: President Orbán in Hungary seems to be leading the way here, with plans to govern by presidential decree. Nonetheless; nonetheless: the expectation in the Western democracies remains that governments cannot simply stand by as their citizens die in the streets, or that the nation’s leader should simply say, as President Bolsonaro has done in Brazil, “we’ll all die one day,” as a justification for their non-response. For these reasons, the virus may ultimately bring an end to populism as a political force since the Trump administration in particular, despite all the snake oil promises of a swift recovery, all the lies and pretence that the problem was under control, has manifestly failed in this most basic of governmental obligations. Bravado and bluster might work against “caravans” of Latin American refugees supposedly massing at the Mexican border, but not against microbes.
Populism, though, can never concede defeat. This would mean relinquishing political power (something that only happens in effete democracies). It would also bring accountability. Instead, the failure of its magic, the exposure of its pitiful incompetence in governing, only provokes frenzied attempts to pinpoint new enemies that can be made to take responsibility for all its shortcomings. The reason why there is a shortage of face masks in New York hospitals, Trump implies, is because healthcare workers have been stealing them (“the masks have been going out the back door”) or “using them in an inappropriate manner.” At the same time, Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, who has regularly shared news briefings on the virus with Trump, publicly contradicting him on occasions and demonstrating his own very different understanding and assessment of the problem, has provoked intense suspicion and hostility from this strongman’s supporters. After he counselled against Trump’s sudden enthusiasm for untested experimental drugs to counter the virus, Lou Dobbs, Fox Business Network host, stated “the president was right and frankly Fauci was wrong.” Thereafter, an analysis by the New York Times found “over 70 accounts on Twitter that have promoted the hashtag #FauciFraud, with some tweeting as frequently as 795 times a day.”
And so populism’s suspicion of scientific expertise that undermines the magic of strongmen leaders, and its hunt for such enemies, gathers familiar steam and momentum. There are screams that Fauci, precisely because of his knowledge, experience, and qualifications (which mean that he has little regard for policy based on “hunches,” is ipso facto only “a deep-state Hillary Clinton-loving stooge.” Thereafter, CNN reported that Fauci “is facing threats to his personal safety and now requires personal security from law enforcement at all times, including at his home.” As for the virus itself and all its damage, then blame the Democrats because of their impeachment proceedings against Trump that “distracted” the Republican administration. Blame Obama; blame Nancy Pelosi; blame journalists; blame judges; blame the FBI; blame the Establishment; blame the New York elite; blame hospital workers; blame the Governor of the Federal Reserve; blame state governors; blame the WHO; blame Europe; blame Iran; blame China . . .
Let us leave behind all this screaming, screeching, shrieking noise, all this chaos, all this uncertainty, all the failed magic, all the empty bravado, all the specious promises. Let us instead hear and listen to and remember the words of Joe Biden, Democrat presidential contender 2020: “We’ll lead with science. We’ll listen to the experts. We’ll heed their advice. We’ll build American leadership and rebuild it, to rally the world to meet the global threats that we’re likely to face again. And I’ll always tell you the truth. This is the responsibility of a president.”
Indeed, perhaps these words will be heard, and listened to, and remembered beyond the US and all around those societies that, after allowing themselves to be seduced by risk have been tempted to look to clowns masquerading as strongmen to lead them along a fantasy road to renewed glories. As should now be evident, the place for clowns is the circus, not government. Meanwhile, if words such as Biden’s are indeed heard, and listened to, and remembered, then the ultimate triumph of science and expertise over the virus may lead to the re-establishment and respect for such capabilities in other areas of government as well, such as the economy and climate change; they may even find their way back to guiding penal policy, which had been the first port of call for the populist resurgence. But if this is not so, then it truly is the end.