WILL THE U.S TAKE THE PATH TO RADICAL CHANGE POST-PANDEMIC? / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

Will the US take the path to radical change post-pandemic?

A mix of pre-existing discontent, a bad case of Covid-19 and a looming election could prove revolutionary

Simon Kuper


© Harry Haysom


In March 1917, Vladimir Lenin was living in Zurich, in smelly rooms rented from a shoemaker, spending his days in the library. When a neighbour told him there had been a revolution in Russia, he could hardly believe it.

The Germans put the obscure troublemaker on a train to Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed) in the hope of disrupting Russia, their enemy in the Great War. Lenin arrived in Petrograd with that rare asset at a time of flux: a plan.

He promised to make peace with Germany, give land to the peasants and hand “all power to the Soviets”, the newly formed councils of workers, soldiers and peasants. In October the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace.

Nothing about their triumph was historically inevitable. Alexander Kerensky, head of the provisional liberal government, who would die almost forgotten in New York in 1970, might have prevailed.

Lenin won because he was lucky, but also because he had a story of hope, a sense that the moment had come to bet his life’s work without compromise, and a project — communism — that he had elaborated in the library. It was a disastrous project, but then it’s not the best ideas that win in times of flux. It’s the ones that are ready.

There are lessons here for today’s moment of flux.

People are speculating about how the pandemic might change the world.

In fact, as in Russia in 1917, everything is up for grabs.

Each country will take its own path, largely because, as in 1917, there is almost no international co-ordination.

This isn’t like the period of flux after the second world war, which produced multinational bodies such as the UN, the IMF and the EEC. Rather, there are four main scenarios that will play out differently in different countries:

1. The status quo prevails.

That’s most likely if the pandemic proves brief. In that case, governments will turn the carbon tap back on, and preserve the existing economy, like after the financial crisis of 2008. This is their easiest option, because few governments have big ideas.

To expect a career politician to have a project for societal change is like expecting a stand-up comedian to build a moon rocket.

Yet, saving the status quo would not assuage the anti-system anger on right and left that was deafening even before the pandemic/depression. And with so many people now broke or housebound, there’s almost no demand for carbon.

2. Nativist change.

In this scenario, governments curtail immigration, trade and global supply chains. Italy and perhaps others leave the EU.

Donald Trump might have chosen this route had he still had Steve Bannon feeding him ideas.

But without a plan, and obsessed with the stock market, he is pushing the economic status quo.

3. A crackdown on democracy.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban is currently ruling by decree, though the government now says those powers will lapse on June 20. Meanwhile, China is tightening the leash on Hong Kong.

4. Progressive change.

This would take the form of “green new deals”, higher government spending, and redistribution, partly through wealth taxes and crackdowns on tax dodging. It wouldn’t only be implemented by leftwing governments.

Britain’s Tories have passed the country’s biggest fiscal stimulus since 1992. Most governments still deny that they can print money with impunity, as advocated by modern monetary theory, but what matters is that they are doing it.

Moreover, so many trillions have been spent that the thought of spending more on, say, a universal basic income, now seems conceivable. An economist who is advising a major western government on its response says that all the usual fiscal constraints have suddenly become flexible.

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The one option that seems almost inconceivable is revolution.

No major democracy today would offer revolutionaries worthwhile help (even the EU is pretending not to notice Orban’s power grab), and digital surveillance would catch plotters before they got anywhere near the palace.

The decline of terrorism in the west since about 2017 and the decline of revolutions since 2011 are two sides of the same coin — the end of privacy.

Which democracy seems ripest for change?

The country with a killer combination of strong pre-existing discontent (as we’re seeing now), a bad case of Covid-19 and a looming election is the US.

Moreover, the Democrats will enter the election with their most radical programme since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Joe Biden, long derided as a no-change centrist, said in May: “From this crisis, we have an opportunity not just to rebuild the economy but to transform it.”

With a proposed federal minimum wage of $15 an hour, big green ambitions, write-offs of student debt and expanded Medicare, he aims to combine Ronald Reagan’s persona with Bernie Sanders’ programme.

Nobody would call Biden an ideas person steeped in libraries, but his campaign is listening to people who are, such as the progressive economist Jared Bernstein, Elizabeth Warren and several Sanders advisers including Stephanie Kelton, mother of modern monetary theory.

Radical change in the US has never seemed less improbable.