How Socialism Made America Great Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway

It’s the week after Easter and week 51 of The Shift – do you have a new story to tell? Following the Good Friday editorial we trained our eye on what could be left behind and what might be reborn in our shared narrative. We ran into a mixed bag of stories but also the possibility of significant new framings.

Over the holiday weekend we picked up an abundance of headlines ‘cautiously welcoming’ the UK’s move out of lockdown. Easter Sunday was the first chance for families to meet in groups of six outdoors for over a year. Socially distanced egg-hunts took place (see pics) in parks everywhere.

Yet there was little to celebrate. Only recently, Britain claimed the European top spot for rates of infection and death per capita - so it’s too soon or pride from any quarter. Add to that the sad story of the UK government’s geopolitical fall-out with Europe and beyond, which has left so many countries with a lack of vaccines – whoever the culprit.

Some Europeans have openly expressed their admiration for aspects of UK’s new autonomy – ‘our’ freedom to put ‘ourselves’ first. But can that be celebrated when the future only holds challenges that cannot be met by any country going it alone? The outstanding achievement that those scientists working on the vaccine acclaim as a triumph of collaboration has been badly betrayed by national leaders reverting to type.

Even so, there was plenty of evidence over this fortnight that the feeling of something moving on and passing over was occurring, beyond the vaccine story. In the US, a COVID-responsive budget signaled the end of the Trump era as clearly as possible. Biden’s proposals didn’t simply address the pandemic itself – clarity around masks, gatherings, mutual aid and an increase in support for every citizen. It also faced the causes of the multiple crises the pandemic is revealing. Poverty, inequality, lack of access to medical care and information were all targeted with the most “socialist” budget (to cite the Republican swear word) in America’s recent history.

The budget will lift one third of children out of poverty, provide universal broadband and replace lead piping – a major cause of ill-health throughout the country. UK voters will recognize that plan as similar to one (from the Corbyn manifesto of 2019) that our media judged to be completely unrealistic for the UK – which comprises less than a fifth of the US population.

Will these massive investments return the USA to its former position as the only global superpower? According to observers outside of the Western hemisphere, that’s unlikely. In this episode of The Briefing Room, journalists from South Korea, Singapore, Mexico and India tell the story of how countries in the Southern hemisphere responded to the Covid pandemic. It’s a mixed story that nevertheless helps reveal the patterns of behaviour that led to better or worse outcomes for the pandemic. It also shows the West in a new light.

With hindsight from the MERS and earlier SARS outbreaks South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam’s swift and strong response to the earliest signs of the pandemic meant that they quickly and easily dealt with the contagion, never experiencing any significant economic collapse. These countries were testing and tracing assiduously, knowing that the disease was being spread by people without any obvious symptoms. However, in each case the capacity of the authorities to surveil the citizens’ behaviour and directly intervene in their decisions on a daily basis was core to their success.

Mexico suffered high death rates with a leadership unwilling to take any such measures for fear of affecting the economy, preferring to encourage people to ‘keep smiling’ and carry on. India’s leadership on the other hand closed the cities down with only four hours’ notice, leaving hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with no choice but to walk back long distances to their villages, many dying on the way. In both cases the lack of social infrastructure or means of engagement with the citizens themselves caused untold misery and death.

In the Briefing Room studio, Oxford University’s Dr Thomas Hale, who compiled a Covid 19 Government Response Tracker, noted how the ability to take speedy, engaged action was the key factor in keeping the pandemic contained. This was obviously true in New Zealand, Australia, China, all of whom suppressed the first wave through rapid testing and contact tracing and closing their borders early. But there were also countries in Eastern Europe with similar success, such as Romania, Hungary, and Czech Republic.

On the other hand, Hale identified what he called “roller coaster countries” – those who took a long time to get to taking action, but once they did had quick results. Yet an inability to consolidate the gains made during moments of respite led to continuous spikes and falls and a failure to make overall progress.

Both the US and UK fall into this category. After the first lockdown in the UK, we rolled back too quickly – actively encouraging people to go out and eat together. In addition, we failed to use the period of lockdown to put better testing and contact tracing in place.

Professor Martin McKee (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) indicated a strong link between health infrastructure and outcomes. Not only because long-term attention to the ‘health’ of a hospital means you won’t run out of essential items such as PPE in an emergency. But when you know hospitals are unlikely to be overwhelmed, you have more room for creative responses to unexpected events.

In the UK, our health system has been teetering on the brink of collapse for over a decade with most hospitals working at 98% occupancy and the lowest beds per capita in the whole of Europe. There was even a spike in deaths in 2015 when the system fell over briefly.

Italy was in a similar situation to the UK and modelled early the worst effects of unpreparedness to a watching world, with Covid victims on trolleys in hospital corridors, unable to get attention. German hospitals on the other hand were in good shape for beds, so they could focus straight away on ramping up their testing.

Hale and McKee were both invited to consider the strength of government intervention as a factor. Evidence shows that some authoritarian regimes China, Vietnam have done particularly well, but also some democracies – Finland, New Zealand, Uruguay. Their conclusion was that the more egalitarian a society – the stronger the communities and social safety nets - the easier it is for a government to engage effectively with the citizens.

There is a set of countries led by populist leaders who talk unilaterally to citizens through social media. And they have borne the consequences of playing to the crowd more than listening to the scientists. Brazil now has the highest death and infection rate in the world, largely due to the uninformed decisions of President Bolsonaro.

And should anyone feel tempted to detach from this phenomenon, Bolsonaro’s behaviour also has consequences for the globe. If a virus is left to intensely rage in any one country the possibility of the mutations spreading all over the world is constant. What do the rest of us do, when the actions of single politicians affect us all?

The last guest in The Briefing Room was Kishore Mahbubani of the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore and Ambassador to UN in 1998. His assessment was that the world cooperated badly on the pandemic. “The US and China should have pressed the pause button on their dual political contest to beat Covid19. Instead, the opposite happened: they missed lots of opportunities for cooperation and lives could have been saved.

“From the Singapore vantage point”, Mahbubani continued, “it has accelerated the arrival of the Asian century. It was coming anyway but it’s arriving faster because we are shocked by the incompetence of the Western governments at handling the crisis. Asian countries see themselves as more competent for the first time and this indicates that the power shift will accelerate.

“The prioritising of personal liberty and individualism in the West does not go well with measures against the pandemic. In the 1998, 50th anniversary celebrations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Helmut Schmidt said we need a Declaration of Responsibilities too, but that was rejected. Being able to see that individual and social are both important is emerging as competitive advantage in Asia. In fact, there is a belief amongst us that taking care of the collective precedes taking care of the individual.

“In geopolitical terms, this has shifted the likelihood of China becoming the no1 power in the world sooner than later”, concluded Mahbubani. “Whereas earlier, there was a natural deference to the West and a continued emphasis on acceptance of Western culture, this period has given the Chinese an explosion of confidence.”

But herein lies the rub. David Aaranovitch, the host of the Briefing Room, followed the familiar line taken by mediators and leaders in the Western, liberal-democratic, party-political sphere claiming that it would be hard to achieve that collectivism over here. ‘We are a nation of individualists, we cherish our autonomy’ he explained.

At A/UK, we’d question whether that’s really the case. Wouldn’t any community leader or organiser, social entrepreneur or care worker, family or friendship networker know what Maububani says to be the truth? Wouldn’t most women who have found themselves building relational networks from their early years? That the individual AND the social are interdependent and we can’t sacrifice one for the other? If the long-standing leaders of society and their media echo chambers cannot see that, maybe it’s time to stop depending on them to be the collaborators we so clearly need.

Much of the future depends upon a better understanding between the East and West of what matters and how that might be best served. The need for radical cooperation in the face not only of future pandemics, but the wider and deeper problems of climate change and technological advance are upon us. What would it take? Should we have international delegations of women and RegenA speaking only to their counterparts in each country?

Looking back at Easter, is it time to let go of the old culture of inevitable othering, opposition and violent conflict and move into the possibility of a deliberately evolved and collective future?

Alternative Editorial: Early Signs Of A Global Shift