by Daniel Gauss

COVID-19 revealed something terrifying about modern democracies: they are especially vulnerable to ambiguous threats, which can become magnified into national disasters. A virus that was neither mild enough to ignore nor lethal enough to unify a response managed to throw the United States into prolonged disarray causing unnecessary and severe harm.

If COVID-19 had been a super deadly, super-virus, we would have reached a quick consensus on how to fight it, out of necessity. Throughout our history our nearly always divided nation has regularly rallied around the flag and united political divisions to meet major crises. On the other hand, if the virus had been super weak, we could have completely ignored it.

It was its position in the murky middle, neither trivial nor catastrophic, that proved most damaging: a Goldilocks zone where uncertainty overwhelmed coordination. The most insidious thing about COVID-19 was that it did not demand an unambiguous response. By its very nature, the virus thwarted decisive action in the largest democracies. There could never be a clear consensus in a fractious democracy on how to treat it or even how to talk about it. It engendered anxiety and undermined unequivocal action.

If you had wanted to develop a perfect virus to afflict a troubled democracy – one already splintered by culture wars, plagued by distrust in institutions and weakened by an over-saturated information environment – it would have been COVID-19. The pandemic for us, therefore, was a political, psychological and social crisis, one that exposed the fragility of decision-making in democratic systems. Read more »