William Brangham:
that new book is called “In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us.”
And it looks back at how critical American institutions, the government, academia, and the press among them, performed during the pandemic, and how their response inflamed distrust, cracked down on dissent, and cost the country tremendously.
Its authors are two political scientists from Princeton University, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee. And they join us now.
Welcome to you both.
One of the main themes of this book, as it seems to me, is that, in the early, crazy days of this pandemic, as our leaders were debating lockdowns, how to respond, that any dissent over or real debate about the costs and benefits of those actions was squelched.
Stephen Macedo, Co-Author, “In COVID’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us”: Well, it’s interesting.
In March 2020, as the lockdowns were being enacted in the United States and across many Western countries, there were dissenters who spoke up in March. Some very well-known people warned that these measures were unlikely to be successful and would be very costly.
And then consensus seemed to develop in April and May that these kinds of strategies enacted by the Chinese and that had been implemented in Italy, national lockdown and across much of the United States, that that was the correct strategy, that everyone needed to be on board for it, that there needed to be a sense of vital unity, that government, the academy, science, journalism all needed to pull together, and that this was what we were going to do and that this is what we needed to do.
And, indeed, at that point, voices of dissent became scarce. Social media companies began removing some postings that were at odds with government messaging, and dissent dwindled over the summer and into the fall.
