Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze

In late April as the medical emergency on the East and West Coasts of the United States eased, agreement on how to meet the pandemic collapsed. Americans blamed one another. They blamed China. Then, as the ugliest legacy of America’s national history was once more exposed, they returned to the still-contentious history of slavery and the Civil War, before beginning once again to argue about the crises facing them in 2020. Congress, which had acted so swiftly in March, deadlocked. And rather than resolving the impasse, the election unleashed a spectacular process of political decomposition. As became clear, if one political wing in a contentious democracy departed radically from conventional standards of truth—if it could not agree even on the reality of a pandemic—there was no reason to expect that an election, an act of collective counting, would suffice to settle the question of who governed.