This Pandemic is a Warm-Up Drill

This Pandemic is a Warm-Up Drill

As we all cope with the current challenge of the pandemic, I keep thinking about the post-pandemic world we’ll have to deal with when we emerge from this. I don’t want to miss the lessons we’re being hit with now because they’ll be crucial for surviving the next crisis, on climate, that’s a greater threat than COVID-19 and already bearing down on us.

Stripped down to the rivets by this pandemic, what did we get right? What did we get wrong? What are the weaknesses we’re finding in our institutions and in ourselves that have cost lives? Here are factors I know are broadly shared and much discussed:

It‘s folly to keep devaluing competent government. Ronald Reagan’s famous joke, “The nine most dangerous words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’” stands out in times like these less as a witty one-liner

and more as a cover for dangerous and ignorant derelictions of responsibility. Decades of conservative attacks on the idea that government can do anything good, combined today with a profound lack of leadership from the top, have crippled and delayed an effective nation-wide response to this pandemic, and made obvious the need for a well-staffed, well-lead and competent government capable of meeting inevitable challenges like pandemics and climate disasters.

“Advocates of a minimalist conception of government claim they are defenders of liberty,” began an April 9 editorial in the New York Times. “But theirs is a narrow and negative definition of freedom: the freedom from civic duty, from mutual obligation, from taxation.”

There’s a direct correlation between endemic GOP hostility to government and the fact that this government fumbles so badly in delivering even the aid Congress has approved. FEMA staff and budgets have been so gutted that the agency can’t handle the massive logistical challenges of getting supplies and equipment where they’re needed on time. Even before this crisis hit, the Trump administration, terrified of disloyalty from the “Deep State,” has decimated top leadership tiers, watchdog offices and planning teams in the bureaucracy, leaving huge vacuums in expertise, leadership, management and oversight. A White House team charged with planning for a pandemic…