Making Sense of the Pandemic

The pandemic was the major event of the early 2020s – but I wrote about it only 3 times in 2020 (here, here and here) and only once in 2023. The UK is almost unique setting up a public inquiry into Covid and the lessons learned during the period of emergency. The inquiry was established in the summer of 2022 - so has now been going for 3 years. It’s reached the seventh of its ten stages, after each producing a “module”. After 3 years, it’s hardly surprising that the public as a whole seems to have lost interest in the notion of learning anything from the experience. We each have our prejudices about what worked – and what didn’t. And it will be very difficult to get us to budge from such positions!

Yascha Mounk is not one of my favourite people – given that he was, for a period, Director of the Tony Bliar Institute. But he does an important podcast which gave us a fascinating conversation between him and the authors of what appears to be a very useful book In Covid’s Wake – how our politics failed us by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee (2022) which explores how well our institutions fared during Covid

Johns Hopkins University over the summer of 2019, asked questions about the whole range of non-pharmaceutical interventions and found that there was very weak evidence to support the effectiveness of all of these non-pharmaceutical measures that would soon become familiar, including contact tracing, masking, social distancing measures of various sorts, school closures, business closures, and so on. Indeed, if they had waited a few months, they would have found that in November 2019, the World Health Organization would have issued yet another planning document surveying these non-pharmaceutical interventions in much the same way. And they would have found there too that the World Health Organization found that the evidence to support the effectiveness of all of these measures was quite weak.

In fact, they would have read that the World Health Organization 

said that there were some things that were not recommended under 

any circumstances, including contact tracing, border closures, 

quarantine of exposed individuals. They would have found 

emphatic statements that these measures would be costly, that 

they would impose costs, especially school closures, on children,

 and the less well-off. If they had looked further back, to the 

George W. Bush administration, they would have found debates with 

mathematical modelers who were more optimistic about these measures 

based on their models—which involved a lot of speculation about 

behavioral changes—and they would have found that these modelers 

were much more hopeful about targeted layered interventions of 

various sorts. If we could just pile them all on top of each other, 

then maybe they would work.
But they would also have found in the Institute of Medicine a 

letter reporting on the empirical evidence behind those optimistic 

accounts, warning that the evidence for these measures was not 

good, the costs would be high, and finally that political leaders 

would be tempted to implement these measures regardless, 

in order to show that in a crisis they were in charge and 

that they had things under control. 

Not everyone agreed with the measures – indeed it brought disputes 

to many families and professions eg the evidence epidemiologist Mark 

Woolhouse put to the Scottish part of the inquiry The Year the World Went Mad 

(to which the link gives excerpts) gives a flavour.

The disputes caused trouble within political parties with this article being a prime 

example, referring to a book The Covid Consensus – the global assault on democracy 

and the poor; a view from the left by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi (2023) which, 

at 496 pages, was 4 times the size of an earlier version which Green (an African 

specialist) had published in 2021 - The Covid Consensus – the new politics of 

global inequality. Indeed, there seems to be a trend of some fair-minded people 

like John Campbell changing their minds about the treatment of Covid  other 

examples being David Booth with these 2 articles -

• Too Busy to check it out

• Covid as a structural deep event

Recommended Reading

https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-did-we-fare-on-covid-19/

Pandemic Societies – a critical public health perspective Alan Peterson 2024
The New Futures of Exclusion – life in the Covid19 aftermath D Briggs et al (2023)
Both books look to throw important light on the issue
https://sandrogalea.substack.com/p/why-i-wrote-within-reason Sandro Galea 2023
The Covid Consensus – the new politics of global inequality Toby Green 2021

Shooting the Rapids – COVID19 and the long crisis of globalisation A Evans and D Steven 2020

The Psychology of Rebellion – and Martyrdom

Rebellion comes naturally to most of us – particularly to late teenagers. As we get older, we want to make our mark in the world, to demonstrate our distinctiveness to our academic peers. So I can understand why David Betz feels it necessary to show that his coat is made from different material than that of other academic military historians such as Colin Grey or Lawrence Freedman.

Our reputations – let alone social media - require us to try to find an appropriate niche into which people can put us. Betz developed his view further in this article published in late 2023 The Future of War is civil war which is worth reading IN FULL

I personally am convinced of the inevitability of outright, active, and wide-scale civil war in North America and Western Europe. The best that can be hoped for, I think, is to diminish the period of horror. Some readers may be more optimistic; none, though, can objectively deny that there are strong and well-understood indicators showing that our current societal arrangements are failing at an accelerating rate.

This last section of the paper is based in part on approximately ten years of lurking on the darker corners of the internet listening to what incipient revolutionaries, neo-anarchists, and want-to-be militiamen think and talk about….

I shall not conclude with thoughts on what might be done to prevent the occurrence of the civil wars that are coming because there is nothing that can be done about it. The unfortunate reality is that society has already passed the tipping point after which prevention of the eruption of violent civil conflict is impossible.

You can almost see this guy rubbing his hands and saying “I told you so”!

How Likely is Civil Strife in Britain?

I had a bit of a nightmare last night – caused undoubtedly by my viewing “The coming UK Civil War” in which war academic David Betz discusses the reasons he finds this a near certainty – at one stage he suggests this coming summer as a possibility. Listening to him gives me the sense that he would actually relish this – although other academics in this field (such as Lawrence Freedman or Paul Rogers) don’t give me that sense. This recent article in the Military Strategy Magazine gives a sense of his arguments

The major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today emanates from its own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and, in my view, elite pusillanimity. Some academics have begun to sound the alarm, notably Barbara Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start—and How to Stop Them”, which is concerned primarily with the dwindling domestic stability of the United States.[ii] To judge from President Biden’s September 2022 speech in which he declared ‘MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’ governments are beginning to take heed, albeit cautiously and awkwardly.[iii]

The field of strategic studies, however, is largely silent on the issue, which is strange because it ought to be something of concern. Why is it correct to perceive the increasing danger of violent internal conflict erupting in the West? What are the strategies and tactics likely to be employed in the civil wars to come in the West and by whom? These are the questions which I shall address in this essay……

and concludes

Moreover, it is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid. In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict. Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly. The result, society-wise, is a reinforcing spiral calling to mind the opening lines of Yeats’ famous ‘The Second Coming’.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…

The fact of the matter is that the tools of revolt in the form of various appurtenances of modern life are just lying around, knowledge of how to employ them is widespread, targets are obvious and undefended, and more and more formerly regular citizens seem minded to take the shot.

So we are warned! Given polarisation, social media, general distrust of most institutions (not least the police), the indifference developed by the newspapers to migrants and other “scum of the earth” (to use the title of a famous 1941 Arthur Koestler book), anger and fear seem to have become the main features of many British people.

But the David Betzs of this world seem determined to inflame these feelings. Betz developed his view further in this article published in late 2023 The Future of War is civil war

I personally am convinced of the inevitability of outright, active, and wide-scale civil war in North America and Western Europe. The best that can be hoped for, I think, is to diminish the period of horror. Some readers may be more optimistic; none, though, can objectively deny that there are strong and well-understood indicators showing that our current societal arrangements are failing at an accelerating rate.

The second part will briefly address the strengths and weaknesses of the extant future war literature, focusing mainly upon influential works of fiction rather than the quasi-rigorous outpourings of the ‘futurology’ discipline. For the purposes of analysis, I divide these into three groups: military futurism, social futurism, and ‘the unmentionables’. My argument, in a nutshell, is that we focus too much on the first, too little on the second, and especially not enough on the third, which is where most of the important contemporary ideas are to be found.

In the third part, I will attempt to describe the shape or character of the wars to come which, in short form, I expect to prominently exhibit the following: a distinctive rural verses urban dimension; jarring societal splits along the fracture lines of multiculturalism; a ‘hi-lo’ mix of weapons featuring extensive innovative reuse of civil tech for military purpose, particularly attacks on infrastructure; and a ‘shock of the old’ reversion-mutation to savage tactics, notably the use of famine and destruction of shelter as tools of coercion.

This last section of the paper is based in part on approximately ten years of lurking on the darker corners of the internet listening to what incipient revolutionaries, neo-anarchists, and want-to-be militiamen think and talk about….

I shall not conclude with thoughts on what might be done to prevent the occurrence of the civil wars that are coming because there is nothing that can be done about it. The unfortunate reality is that society has already passed the tipping point after which prevention of the eruption of violent civil conflict is impossible.

I’ve taken all day to do this post – it involved a fair amount of background reading eg the statistics on policing or the UK debate on racialism – not least the dispute on whether “institutional racism” exists.

You can almost see this guy rubbing his hands and saying “I told you so”!

You can also see him in this discussion - Civil War is Coming and a new interview on 13 June

Further Reading/viewing

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/

https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/

View from the Danube (includes Goodwin input)

The coming civil war https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG_5dFaTje8

The mad Dominic Cummings supports the notion 

Perceptions of Policing - a review of research (Ukgov 2023)

Policing Surveys (2023)

Guardian article about trust in police (2024)

2023 https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-09/police-activism-impartiality-research-tables-ipsos-2024.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence#The_Macpherson_Inquiry

Institutional Racism – fact or fiction? 2000

Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics N Dennis et al Civitas 2000 

On the Cusp of Revolutionary Change?

A great post from one William Finnegan who has a substack entitled The Long Memo whose post yesterday was quite outstanding

Entitled “The US election didn’t matter”, this was its main argument -

There was a time when electoral outcomes shaped policy, governance, and the global order. That time is over. What we’re witnessing—what you likely feel, whether you can name it or not—is the collapse of coherence.

We got Trump. We rolled craps. Accelerationism. Nihilism. A full-speed explosion of the rule of law. The car’s already off the cliff. He just cut the brake lines and floored it. So yes, many people blame him. But it’s not him—not entirely. He’s the maniac behind the wheel, sure.
But the road was already washed out. The chaos was baked in.

Stochastic Anarchy

• The world still looks like a system of nation-states, but under the hood, it’s glitching. The assumptions that held it together—about rational actors, enforceable rules, and coordinated outcomes—are breaking down.

  • The state still exists. But its capacity is hollowed out.

  • Laws still exist. But enforcement is arbitrary, delayed, or nonexistent.

  • Institutions still exist. But trust, legitimacy, and effectiveness have evaporated.

Stochastic, because outcomes are now governed by what feels like 

randomness, shock, and probabilistic influence—not deliberate policy.
Anarchy, because there’s no longer a coherent sovereign authority at any level. 

Just fragments of control, flickering in and out of relevance.

Let me make this concrete. We now live in a system where:

A U.S. president can ignore a Supreme Court ruling, say he’s 
complying, and the system shrugs.
A tech billionaire can unilaterally reshape space policy, financial markets, 
and speech law.
The EU can claim a defense policy—while relying entirely on NATO and 
outsourcing deterrence to the United States.
Multinational corporations can override national regulations more effectively 
than most foreign governments.

This is not chaos. This is something worse. It’s a system that still performs 

the rituals of governance—elections, treaties, laws—but no longer produces 

results. It’s signal without coordination. Authority without follow-through. 

Motion without meaning.
Outcomes still occur. But they no longer emerge from rules, norms, or strategy.

They emerge from noise, reaction, and memetic acceleration. You may vote. 

You may appeal. You may sue. But the result? That depends on a stochastic 

blend of:

• legal ambiguity,

• social media pressure,

• algorithmic timing,

• institutional inertia,

• and who happens to be in the room.

That’s been building for decades. One might argue since 1960, but for me, I can 

definitely trace from 1980 to now. I’ve written about it multiple times here at TLM, 

but for those who need a refresher, here’s the quick map:

1980s–90s: Market Uber Alles

Deregulation, globalization, and privatization have become bipartisan 

gospel. Neoliberalism hollows out the public sector. The state retreats, 

voluntarily, from economic stewardship and infrastructure ownership.

→ Structural capacity begins to decay.

1990s–2000s: Capture and Complexity

Policy becomes so complex that lobbyists effectively write it. Financial 

institutions self-regulate into crisis. Tech and capital start outpacing 

law.

→ Governance shifts from institutions to markets.

Post-9/11: Security State Expansion

Massive growth of the national security apparatus under opaque executive 

authority. The War on Terror rewires legal norms, increases secrecy, and 

trains institutions to treat oversight as optional.

→ The rule of law becomes situational.

2008–09: The Bailout and the Bluff

The global financial crisis exposed that the state can no longer regulate 

or contain capital—only absorb its failures. Wall Street gets bailed out, 

and Main Street gets austerity.

→ Legitimacy hemorrhages.

2010s: The Platform Takeover

Algorithms begin to mediate truth. Facebook shapes elections: Google, Amazon, 

and Apple scale beyond sovereign reach. States become lagging indicators, not 

rule-setters.

→ Narrative control slips from public hands.

2016–2020: Trump as Beta Test

The first Trump administration broke norms, but revealed they were only norms. 

Checks and balances failed. Congress claimed oversight but could not enforce it.

→ Stress test fails. System reveals hollowness.

2020–2024: Pandemic and Permissionless Collapse

COVID-19 exposed total institutional brittleness: Health agencies, courts,

legislatures, and Fragmentation accelerates.

present: Phase Shift
The second Trump administration doesn’t break the system. It inherits a 

broken one—and simply refuses to pretend anymore. The rituals continue. 

The functions are gone.

CCCompare this,  for example, with The Future of Change – how technology shapes 

social revolutions by Ray Brescia (2020), one of several books I’ve now included in 

e compendium A Note on Change - an annotated list of the 130 books I’ve been 

able to find on the subject. Other books I added yesterday were 

• The Gutenberg Galaxy – the making of typographic man Marshall McLuhan (1962)  

• The Gutenberg Elegies – the fate of reading in an electronic world Sven Birkerts (1994)

US Democracy in action

Some 30 years ago, Robert Reich was, for some 4 years, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State for Labor. He’s now left politics and academia behind to become a successful blogger.

Every Saturday morning, he holds, with Heather Lofthouse, a wonderful “Coffee Klatch” or conversation. This morning’s was particularly inspiring since it brought in, at 35 minutes, a woman (Emily Finer) who had gone to a Town Hall meeting to ask her Republican Congressman a question. There was a massive police presence outside and everyone had to sign off/agree to a range of questions about their behaviour. Needless to say, the Congressman didn’t answer her question and when, she repeated it, she was ejected from the meeting – despite the protests of the audience who clearly supported her right to ask the question. The whole scene is a vivid illustration of the depths US democracy has reached – effectively to deny the right of protest.

What on earth were the mayor’s “storm-troopers” doing to carry her out???

SNIPPETS

Robert Kaplan and Michael Lewis are two US journalists who epitomise the best of journalism – keen-eyed, they see what most of us miss.

Kaplan first came to my notice in an article about “the coming anarchy” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1994, using the title in a book he published in 2000 when he also produced Eastward to Tartary – travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus Robert Kaplan (2000)

He showed great sensitivity and insight with In Europe's Shadow - two cold wars and a thirty year trip to Romania and beyond Robert Kaplan (2016) which I reviewed when it first came out.

And his most recent book is Wasteland - a world in permanent crisis Robert Kaplan (2025) about which he was interviewed recently on “The Rest is Politics” (Leading)

Lewis is probably better known for his treatment of the global financial crisis – both as a book The Big Short – inside the doom machine (2010) and in a subsequent film. He has now produced Who is Government? The untold story of public service Michael Lewis (2025) which focuses on the individuals who are proud to serve the public.

And, on the very day that Cardinals assemble in Rome to elect a new Pope, let’s 

not forget the legacy of Francis who gave us an important Encyclical 

about the COMMON GOOD Fratelli Tutti (2020) - although the new Pope, in 

choosing the name LEO, seems to be reaching back to the last Pope who bore 

this name and who gave us the one about SOLIDARITY 

Rerum Novarum (1891 Vatican Library)