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This is America.
Jeff Kowalsky/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The United States, with a five-day moving average as of July 20 of 65,701 new cases of Covid-19 has surpassed mid-June’s leader Brazil, now with 28,746. The second highest country, India, with a population four times that of the U.S., shows a five-day moving average of 38,125. Yet on July 7, President Donald Trump formally announced the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO, even as the U.S. continues to top the list of most affected countries in the midst of this global pandemic.
And, in America, one can nearly discern a person’s political party by the presence or absence of a mask as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia sues Atlanta authorities over a local order requiring masks in public—all despite the near-unanimous recommendation of epidemiologists that masks and social distancing reduce disease transmission. How is this possible?
No consensus on goals, or even the facts
For the past 30 years, the U.S. has undergone a process of political decay (Fukuyama 2014). More precisely, the U.S. has been drifting in the direction of a multipolar configuration of authority. This configuration reflects the degree to which a society’s powerful political actors have resolved a set of underlying collective-action problems (Olson 1971; Ferguson 2013) that accompany allocating decision-making positions and procedures and, concurrently, achieving a rough consensus on broad social goals (Ferguson 2020). There are two poles.
A unipolar configuration signifies coherent resolution and practice, whereas a multipolar configuration implies disjointed procedure, action, and response.
In the United States, the two main political parties now differ sharply on fundamentals such as state-market and state-religion relations and, perhaps more troubling, even on the relevance and interpretation of scientific evidence, as reflected in the divide on climate change.
Similar deep divisions—such as those on gun policy, birth control, racial profiling, police brutality, Confederate monuments, and racial inequity—also signify multipolarity.
Indeed, the depth of U.S. multipolarity manifests itself in the disjointed U.S. response to Covid-19. The president himself differs with the administration’s own CDC experts. Polarized opinions have politicized even the name of the disease (Covid-19 vs. Chinese flu), perceptions of its seriousness (“just the flu”), possible treatments (hydroxychloroquine?), and prospects for contagion (the Tulsa Trump rally).
State and local governments have reacted with different timing and degrees of lockdown and reopening, with mixed adherence to CDC recommendations. More dramatically, armed demonstrators, brandishing assault rifles, Confederate flags, and a few swastikas shut down the Michigan government for a day. These polarized responses have become elements in the so-called culture wars between conservatives and liberals.
U.S. is exceptional, but not in a good way
In stark contrast with the U.S., other countries have managed unified official responses to Covid-19.
New Zealand’s swift government response of closing early, closing hard, with widespread testing and universal access to health care, combined with extensive public adherence, cut the rate of new infections to zero. Despite the presence of competing political parties, this outcome implies a coherent, unipolar configuration of authority. They can move forward.
One might make a similar case for Iceland, to a somewhat lesser degree for Germany, and South Korea. Political coherence facilitates coordinated response.
The disjointed response of the U.S. has interfered with efforts to control the pandemic. In late May, a Columbia University study estimated that earlier lockdowns could have saved 36,000 lives. The multipolar state-level response has generated starkly different transmission patterns.
The March-May pattern, whereby the early lockdown states, mostly blue, many in the Northeast, initially suffered high rates of infection, has largely reversed. The highest rates of new infection now occur primarily in red states in the South, West, and portions of the Midwest. The U.S. total new cases for July 8 set an record.
The worst is yet to come
Accordingly, the U.S. economy suffers disproportionately. Treating Covid-19 is expensive. In addition to family grief, premature deaths deprive the economy of labor and human capital. Long-term cases, and there are many, undermine both physical and mental skills for extended periods.
Unemployment has reached its highest levels since the late 1930s. Many small businesses have closed, with the worst yet to come. Blacks, Hispanics, and low-income Americans have suffered disproportionately, both in terms of rates of infection and economic loss. Fortunately, concerted action by the Federal Reserve has avoided a financial meltdown, and the $1.8 trillion stimulus from the April CARES Act, despite its shortcomings, has staved off an increase in poverty; but many vulnerabilities, especially for low-income Americans, remain. And many of the benefits expire in July.
The current response is, again, multipolar. Trump has attacked the CDC recommendations on school closings and threatens states with funding cuts. The Democratic House, with three Republican votes, recently passed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package, to which the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, responded, “Naturally, this nonsense is not going anywhere in the Senate.” Some early reopening states, such as Texas and Florida, have reinstated lockdown provisions, while New York continues to reopen slowly.
The policy uncertainty manifested in these multipolar federal, state, and local responses exacerbate the deep uncertainty posed by the pandemic’s still mysterious properties and its opaque future path.
Vicious cycle of economic misery
Without concerted policy action, a vicious cycle of declining production and demand will follow. Household expenditures will remain low, leading businesses to dismiss workers. Many more businesses will fail, especially small ones. State governments, which must balance budgets despite sharp revenue declines, will lay off employees and cut expenditure on key items such as Medicaid. Employment and household finance will again suffer, continuing the spiral. The poor will suffer most.
Americans live in a society in which party positions on specific hot-button issues, such as climate, guns, racial inequity, and now Covid-19, nearly become an element of a person’s identity.
To address the pandemic, we in America must somehow confront our deep polarization. We must not only reach a shared understanding of the grave threat posed by this pandemic; we must also resolve the complex collective-action problems of generating a coordinated, yet flexible and adaptive, set of responses—with close attention to scientific evidence and particular emphasis on reducing the stark racial and economic inequities that the pandemic exacerbates.
William D. Ferguson is the Gertrude B. Austin Professor of Economics at Grinnell College. He is the author of “Collective Action and Exchange: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Contemporary Political Economy ” and “The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development.”
Suggested further reading
The American tragedy: A lousy economy and lots of COVID-19 infections
