Preexisting Conditions: On the Structural Origins of America's Failed COVID Politics

Abstract Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that America's political response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a failure both of process and of outcomes. Procedurally, government officials failed to deliberate over the tradeoffs involved in alternative pandemic strategies because they were too busy indulging in demagoguery and partisan groupthink. Substantively, officials then embraced a policy regime of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), even though, at the time, there were good reasons to believe that NPIs would not be worth the jaw-dropping social and economic costs they entailed (a conclusion that appears, in retrospect, to have been borne out by the data). In diagnosing America's pandemic response as a failure, Macedo and Lee force us to ask if a pandemic response significantly different from the one we got was ever a real possibility, given the structural constraints that define the twenty-first century American state. This essay reconstructs Macedo and Lee's argument with a view to clarifying whether their diagnosis is based on reasonable expectations regarding the functionality of the American constitutional system as it currently exists.