Pandemics Change History. Covid Was No Different.

You may remember that a pandemic began five years ago, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting. The world moved on.

History is full of examples of societies quickly returning to business as usual after a plague. But history also reveals that the aftershocks of pandemics can linger for far longer than five years. Signs suggest our global economy and politics are suffering their own form of long Covid, and we may still be in the chaos phase of a pandemic cycle. The good news is that if we fully recover, it should feel much better than this.

Pandemics can fundamentally alter the course of history. One of the earliest recorded pandemics was a plague that struck Athens in 430 B.C. The resulting death and disorder contributed to Athens’s defeat in the war against Sparta. The decline of Athenian democracy helped pave the way for the authoritarian utopianism of Plato that influenced political thought for millenniums.

Still, there appears to be a link between the scale of an infectious threat in a country or community and increased support for conformism and authoritarianism. While Covid-19, for all of the needless and tragic deaths, was nothing on the scale of earlier plagues, there’s still evidence of a similar effect.

Global surveys suggest there’s been declining support for representative democracy since the Covid pandemic. In Britain, the proportion of people who viewed it as a very good way to govern was down to 31 percent in 2023 from 43 percent in 2017. In Germany, the figure dropped to 37 percent from 46 percent over the same period. The world appears still in a febrile political period, as incumbents around the globe continue to be ousted from office.

This might be because there’s nothing quite like a pandemic to reveal the raw power of state control: markets and schools shuttered, movement restrained. Government responses to pandemics, both legitimate and misguided, can create lasting mistrust in state authority. During the Great Plague of London, dog massacres did little to reassure people about the efficacy of public health intervention. Contradictory government advice over masks and presidential advocacy for anti-malarial medications may have done something similar for Covid.