Liberalism flirts with reality

I was struck by this passage in the New York Times article quoted by Steve in his “Liberalism Meets Reality” post:

More progressive and technocratic countries — with both center-left and center-right leaders, like Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea — were doing a better job containing the pandemic [than countries with populist, right-wing governments like Brazil, Britain, Russia and the U.S.].

What, exactly, does the Times mean by “more progressive and technocratic countries with both center-left and center-right leaders”? If a country has center-right leadership, can it be “progressive”? I guess it depends on the meaning of that term. But the Times would never refer to a center-right American leader as “progressive.”

My impression is that the Times is trying to carve out a nebulous category of countries it can cast as the antithesis of the U.S. — one that can be stretched to include nations with relatively low rates of death from the Wuhan coronavirus.

But the Times’ description of these countries, to the extent it carries meaning, also applies to countries that did not do “a better job containing the pandemic.” Belgium has the world’s highest per capita death rate from the virus, according to Worldometer. Its government is “progressive” under any fair definition.

France also has a high per capita death rate. It’s a progressive and technocratic country with a center-right leader, if there can be such a thing.

Note, too, that the Times wants to label the U.S. and Britain in such a way as to place them with Russia and Brazil. That’s absurd.

In 2020, under President Trump, we were much more like the “progressive and technocratic” nations the Times lists than we were like Russia and Brazil. Moreover, our response to the pandemic — lockdowns in most of the country — closely resembled the approach of those progressive and technocratic countries.

The Times is on firmer ground when it compares progressive and conservative states within the U.S. And, as Steve noted, the Times was forced to admit that, so far, the former are doing a worse job than the latter in getting people vaccinated.

The Times didn’t bother to compare the performance of progressive and conservative states in dealing with the pandemic in 2020. The omission seems significant, given that the first half of its article is devoted to arguing that progressive nations did better than “populist” ones in this regard.

What about progressive vs. populist states?

If one goes by deaths per capita, states run by progressive did no better than states run by conservatives and/or populists. In fact, no state did worse than New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, by this measure.

Measuring the performance of states based on per capita deaths can be quite misleading, given demographic and other relevant considerations. But the same is true of measuring the performance of nations in this way. Yet, that seems to be how the Times measured performance when it concluded, dubiously, that “progressive and technocratic” countries outperformed “populist” ones in limiting the health effects of the pandemic.

My take is this: nations (and states) were largely, though certainly not entirely, helpless in stopping the Wuhan coronavirus from killing people. Form of government and type of leader didn’t matter much. As a friend put it to me, the virus was like an alien invader with vastly superior technology to ours. We had no answer.

But now that we have developed “technology” that seemingly can effectively combat the invader, form of government and type of leader seems to matter in how well we deploy it. And that shouldn’t be surprising.

One would expect that some ways of organizing and/or leading a government are better than others when it comes to the task of organizing a mass vaccine program. And one would expect that, when everyone is operating in the dark against a new virus, form of government and type of leadership may be less important than luck.