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What will politics look like after Covid? Eoin Ó Broin reviews two books with very different takes

The Sinn Féin TD reviews left- and right-wing books on Covid’s lasting influence

Bruno Maçães argues against scientists and environmental experts who say Covid-19 is an extreme example of a zoonotic disease caused by humans’ increasing encroachment into and destruction of the natural habitats of other species. Photograph: Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Eoin Ó Broin
Thu Mar 17 2022 - 06:00

As we approach the end of our second year struggling with the pandemic, there are times when it feels like politics has been paused. Media and parliamentary debates continue to be saturated by Covid-19 coverage. Public health restrictions have limited street politics to an enormous degree. While there is no clear exit from the pandemic in sight, debate is gradually turning to the post-pandemic moment. What will politics look like after Covid? Two recent books, one from the political right and the other from the left, address this intriguing question.

The central thesis of Paolo Gerbaudo's The Great Recoil: Politics After Populism and Pandemic (Verso, 288pp, £16.99) is that the rise of both left- and right-wing populism is part of a great recoil against the inequities and limitations of neoliberalism.

The overbearing presence of market dynamics in every aspect of our lives alongside the hollowing out of local and national democracy have produced a blowback. To the right this has brought to power Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Donald Trump in the US and Boris Johnson in the UK. To the left it has led to more mixed fortunes in and out of government, with Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

For Gerbaudo, a sociologist at Kings College London, these diametrically opposed populist movements represent “radically alternative solutions to the neo-liberal impasse”. In opposition to the inequality and disempowerment that has accompanied neoliberalism, he sees in populism a return of politics based on ideas of sovereignty, protection and control. The author is a vehement opponent of racist and reactionary right-wing populism. He is also a critic of cosmopolitan neoliberalism.

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To ensure that left-wing populism wins the day, Gerbaudo makes the case for a left-wing strategy infusing the politics of sovereignty, protection and control with a progressive content. He calls for a relocalisation of political commitments through a form of provincial socialism to reignite democratic participation. Alongside this he urges a return to universal public service provision. To address the looming climate catastrophe he calls for a new commitment to environmental protection to accompany the left’s traditional defence of social protection.

Gerbaudo’s aim is to “neutralise the narrative of the nationalist right” while at the same time channelling “the social fear and political anxiety of the Great Recoil” in pursuit of what he believes can be “a safer and more egalitarian future”.

Bruno Maçães, a former right-wing politician, offers a sharply contrasting analysis in Geopolitics for the End Time: From the Pandemic to the Climate Crisis (Hurst, 240pp, £16.55). Maçães served in the pro-austerity Portuguese governments of Pedro Passos Coelho from 2011-2015, first as an adviser to the prime minister and then as secretary of state for European affairs. He was a senior fellow in the Washington-based Hudson Institute, part of the ecosystem of think tanks created with funding from the Rand Corporation. More recently the Guardian newspaper has linked it to industry efforts to thwart action on climate change.

The book’s central thesis is that man is at war with nature. Covid-19 is described as “nature interrupting into normal life”. Maçães’s argument is a challenge to the scientists and environmental experts who have argued that Covid is an extreme example of a zoonotic disease caused by humans’ increasing encroachment into and destruction of the natural habitats of other species.

Instead of blaming human behaviour for creating the conditions that bred the pandemic, Maçães blames “a dangerous and inhospitable environment”. For the former politician, Covid-19 is just another “biological threat taking advantage of the inconvenient fact that we too are part of the biological world”. Unsurprisingly, his solution is for “a sustained effort to escape our mortal coil and build a human world protected from natural threats”.

Maçães goes on to apply his analysis of the pandemic to the issue of climate change. Again, the challenge is to reassert human mastery over nature. What does this mastery look like? Greater use of air conditioning, building defensive infrastructure and weather modification are his “solutions” to the catastrophic climate events that will come with ever greater frequency. For Maçães, we may be approaching the end of the world “but every end contains a new beginning”.

To readers whose tastes gravitate to the political centre, neither Gerbaudo nor Maçães will satisfy their consciously temperate appetites. For this reviewer, Maçães’ book will hopefully be consigned to the dustbin of crackpottery where it rightly belongs. Gerbaudo, on the other hand, asks interesting questions for those looking to navigate a pathway between right-wing populism and liberal cosmopolitanism.

Eoin Ó Broin is a Sinn Féin TD