JF

Britain and the US may have performed egregiously with respect to spread of the virus, testing, tracking, PPE, and a dozen other metrics of pandemic response, but on vaccine development, manufacture, and distribution, one has to concede that the pair have performed very well.

And yet neoliberal hollowing out of state capacity has affected these two nations as much as any other Western country.

Indeed, it is precisely this collapse in state capacity in the United States and UK that is primarily responsible for the failure with respect to these other pandemic response metrics.

What this contradiction tells us is that the withering away of state capacity is not an inevitability. It can be reversed.

A much-reviled Tory health minister and a hard-right, none-too-bright Republican president surprised everyone by pulling off a pair of extremely interventionist vaccine strategies straight out of the wartime and postwar étatiste playbook — an Apollo Program, but for a pandemic.

The reversibility of neoliberal state failure is most clear with respect to East Asia, which has experienced the greatest success in suppressing the virus.

Many commentators have credited authoritarianism in the region with East Asia’s COVID-19 suppression victories, arguing that we Westerners with our open societies could never suffer such infringements of civil liberties.

The immediate response to this is that of course civil liberties, in particular freedom of association and freedom of movement, have been eviscerated across the West via the spectrum of lockdown measures anyway.