Will the coronavirus cost Trump a second term? Will it kill neoliberalism? Tread carefully when turning to history for answers

In the desperation to try and understand the pandemic, there’s been an outbreak of people making startling historical claims. During a crisis, what little predictive power the social sciences have tends to evaporate. Perhaps this is why we’ve seen the Covid-19 crisis compared to the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Or, at the other end of the extreme, like philosopher Jean Baudrillard and the Gulf War, it has been asserted that the Covid-19 pandemic is not happening. The uncertainty is also a consequence of the fact that, alongside just-in-time supply chains, one of the defining features of the 21st century is communication technology. Social media facilitates the sharing of X-rays of fibrotic lungs, photos of mass graves and decontextualised infographics. It encourages an atmosphere of constant low-level panic. This leaves people struggling to understand how the world is changing and what their response should be. As historians, we’re interested in how historical analogies can be used in scenario planning in the widest and most ambitious sense. We suggest that we can help build an analysis of the future by stitching together composite stories from the past. To find practical responses to the pandemic, politicians, policymakers and commentators have already turned to the archives. Although it wasn’t called that, “social distancing” was a policy implemented during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1920. The Brazilian drink caipirinha was also popularised as “medicine” at the time, although unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have been revived as enthusiastically yet. But, while we might draw some practical lessons from past pandemics, the lessons learned will always be partial. For example, doctors during the Spanish flu observed it was safer to be outside, while now we’re advised to stay indoors. The Spanish flu analogy is of even more limited use in understanding what happens next politically and economically. The calamity of 1918 has to be understood in the context of World War I; Covid-19 will be confronted largely on 21st-century terms. It is counterintuitive, but perhaps the best starting point is to imagine Covid-19 as part of a continuation of the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, rather than a rupture with it. Ironically, that crisis was understood with reference to the Great Depression. As a result, policymakers prioritised protecting the financial system and avoiding the mass unemployment of the 1930s. Ten years on and the unintended consequences of those polices have been to push asset prices up and increase both debt and inequality to levels that threaten political stability. If the effect of Covid-19 is to amplify these pre-existing patterns, then the future does not look very pretty. Yet even the laziest historical analogy between now and the years that followed the Great Depression would also show that the demand for order and security we reflexively associate with the 1930s can coexist with the live-for-the-moment decadence associated with the Weimar Republic. Not only are multiple futures possible, multiple futures will coexist. Will pandemic spur 2nd Great Depression? China’s central bank warns of risk This makes it imperative that we question our own assumptions. Conventional wisdom is solidifying around ideas like “there will be no rapid V-shaped economic recovery”, “neoliberalism will die”, “Donald Trump will lose the US election” and “countries will follow a phased exit strategy”. But even drawing only from the most obvious and immediate historical toolboxes at hand, we can see these “common sense” assumptions are open to challenge. While the Black Death overturned the intellectual, economic and social order of the 14th century, Covid-19 is by measures of magnitude considerably less deadly. This makes us sceptical about the claim that one victim of this pandemic may be neoliberal ideology – the belief that society should be aggressively reordered around market systems. History shows that neoliberals are in fact very comfortable with state power: it is an ethos about the centralisation of state power as much as “the free market”. While the pandemic could lead to the adoption of novel economic policies such as a universal basic income, debt jubilees or modern monetary theory, the social ends they’re pointed at may remain unchanged. Neoliberal ideology undermines US biodefence The Spanish flu made a negligible impression on the elections held in Britain and United States immediately after the 1918 pandemic. For incumbents to be punished, voters need to believe that there were obviously better ways to ameliorate the crisis than the ones followed by their leaders. Considering the current contentions of understanding, that’s a high bar. Meanwhile, the military provenance of the term “exit strategy” is immediately obvious and historically suggestive. Every A-level student zooming into their Cold War history classes would find the use of this term suspicious. What was the “exit strategy” for the Korean war? American troops are very clearly still in South Korea, Japan and western Europe, not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia. Wars often do not have clear beginnings and endings and the current “war” on Covid-19 may be no different. Using historical analogies to deliberately question our assumptions forces us to confront our lack of knowledge. Contrary to conventional wisdom, short-term economic and political stasis, accompanied by ongoing logistical and organisational difficulties, is a more likely prognosis of the immediate future. By testing fashionable ideas against past examples, you prevent “the lessons of history” becoming just another way to validate pre-existing beliefs. It is also crucial because we live in an era defined by global technologies that paradoxically encourage us to find refuge in homogenous, magical, one-size-fits-all solutions. Complex problems ultimately require imaginative bricolage solutions and it’s here that history has a role to play. It’s important that we reflect more deeply and widely on what kind of crisis this actually is, so we know what the real potentialities of the future might be. Scott Anthony runs the Public and Applied History programme at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Benjamin Choo is a lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences Help us understand what you are interested in so that we can improve SCMP and provide a better experience for you. We would like to invite you to take this five-minute survey on how you engage with SCMP and the news.