Alternative Editorial: The question of protection

Ege Souyer/NYT

By A/UK co-initiator Pat Kane

“Who will protect us?” That’s a perennial cry down the ages from the weak and the vulnerable, whether their attacker be microbial, torrential, conflagrational or human-shaped. 

One of the questions opened up in Week 29 of the Shift (as we’ve come to call it here) is how we distribute those responsibilities. “You must protect yourself” looms as large as “they must protect us” - never mind, in the discussion about social mask-wearing, “in protecting myself, I protect you”. 

Yet as the second wave of Covid contagion begins to rise among us in the UK, amidst the wreckage of all our administrations’ open-ups and lock-downs, it’s worth dwelling a while on the emotional force of the call for protection. Some political entrepreneur will plug into it directly - and it matters who gets there first. 

One should always admit, at the beginning, the sheer difficulty of managing the Covid situation. A powerfully contagious (and potentially lethal bug) crashes into a society and economy that has been built, from the start, on a precarious flexibility. 

Just-in-time global supply chains, operated by insecure low-wage workers, themselves stressed by increasing debts and wasteful (ad-driven) expenditure, subject to ever more control and acceleration in their jobs… 

It wouldn’t have taken much of a wrecking ball to reduce this system to matchwood. As it is, Covid swings through an economy largely based on branded retail services. Our populations (whether worker or consumer) have been brutally unplugged from this matrix, by the way the pandemic makes public space problematic. 

No wonder feelings are high and febrile. An entire modern identity has been repeatedly thwacked with a bat. 

Isn’t this where political and governmental leadership steps in? Isn’t it their job to put citizens at the centre of a new collective story about decent and best behaviour, supporting the necessary restrictions that the epidemiologists demand? 

Judge for yourself how well that job’s gone. The tricky issue is: faced with a profoundly disrupted nature, how well could anyone do?

I was struck this week by a piece on a progressive website that suggested how we might “break the Covid doom loop”. The experts bemoaned the disorderly patterns of lockdown measures. They take us to the brink of mass infection, in order to allow for some normal economic activity - then sharply retreat. And then the loop starts up again. 

The “circuit breaker” meme, abroad at the moment in our public sphere, enters here. What the experts in Open Democracy wanted was circuit breaking/lockdown happening on a regular fortnightly basis, for several months. The alternating fortnight (opening-up) would allow “small but risky activities like essential workplace meetings, haircuts, and small social gatherings”. 

The experts’ maths tells them that this rhythm would “drive rates towards zero, without a continuous and interminable moderate lockdown”. Would the public buy it? They conclude optimistically: 

It isn’t hard to explain: if you’re born in November, you can have your small birthday event – but only after the 14th. This may actually increase compliance, because of the psychological appeal of regular social “rewards" for committing to strict measures. 

It also allows affected businesses to plan for these intermittent cycles, coordinating staffing and stock far more effectively than the current unpredictable parade of rule changes…Coordinated sacrifice beats uncoordinated sacrifice.

Read it - it’s a plausible proposal. But it’s hard to imagine a national administration on these islands having the authority and credibility (possibly Scotland?) to “coordinate” such “sacrifice”. 

Something better than mild green populisms

Could cities, regions or districts rally the population’s commitment more effectively? It was dramatic to see the Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, this week tell the world that “the North (of England) is fed up of being pushed around”. Yet, as the Open Democracy writers admit, it all falls apart if there is too much mobility across the borders of the particular areas that might adopt (and enforce, or at least strongly advocate) their plan. 

Does the Mayor (and his fellow Mayors) think they have the narrative power among their constituencies to guarantee agreement and compliance? Maybe we’re about to find out.

So until the wheels of pharma grind out a reliable vaccine for Covid, must we endure this unnerving spectacle? Reactive, ad hoc governments miscommunicating to bemused, unsure, and increasingly impoverished localities? 

Not necessarily. There are two political alternatives that could be tried out. And they both depend on the importance of “who protects us best?”

One is a rising discussion - which you can join in with at a Zoom event next week - about whether this is the moment for a “green populism” to arise. This would be in the manner of the Podemos and Sanders model: parties and campaigns forges a range of interests into a very broad “We” or “Us”, angrily condemning the current “la Casta” (elites/oligarchy). 

The condemnation from green populism would be that these elites have failed to “protect” us, that they aren’t bringing us “security”, from the lethal effects of a disrupted nature. 

The trick for green populistsn is to create a conceptual bridge—between being ill-protected from Covid, to being ill-protected by those who practice an endless and toxic model of growth. This growth no longer “protects” us by growing the economic cake—if that cake is laced with the poison of pollution that warms the planet, and causes us even more chaos.

One of green populism’s advocates, Chantal Mouffe, urges that this populism musn’t shy away from repurposing concepts like “nationalism” and (literally) “protectionism”. Doesn’t it fundamentally respect a Brexit or Trump vote, she argues, to share their complaint about a borderless world, living under the regime of foot-loose, consequence-free capital? Could the case for national democracy mesh with a post-capitalist, green-oriented vision of self-provision? 

Hmm. Noting the failures of even the mild green populisms of Corbyn, Cortez and Sanders, the frustrations of making yet another electoral run at the ramparts of national government are not ones we wish to experience much at A/UK (while wishing our friends bon chance!). 

Who will protect us? A stronger “us”

The second alternative is to go deeper into the realm of “self-protection”, which could easily blur with the project of greater local “self-determination”. 

What we want to open up is the question: how much can localities and areas begin to actively make real and concrete their adaptations not just to Covid, but to the baked-in climate disruptions to come? 

What are the daring “shifts” in working, commercial, domestic and lifestyle behaviour that could be made? Not just isolatedly and by ourselves, but in concert with a mobilised and ambitious assemblage of local forces (what we mean by our CANs, or community agency/citizen action networks)? 

We would want these social experiments to be supported by some external institutions - philanthropy, enlightened enterprise, local government. But their very point would be to introduce a shaft of social inventiveness into a murky, choked zone of possibilities. Meaning: no incorporation to the usual suspects.

For example, what would it mean for a community (or network of communities) to start consciously living according to the global “Decent Living Standards” measures, explored in one of our blogs this week? Certainly “the science” strongly undergirds this approach. This is a level of living that would seriously attack our carbon emission targets for the next few decades. 

But what would it be like for us to live joyously, meaningfully, satisfyingly, under these conditions and with these provisions? As Kate Soper asks in her recent book, how could we use these limitations as a spur to creativity about what we mean by pleasure, enjoyment, hedonism? 

This might even fit with the “alternating fortnight” approach of the Open Democracy experts. How might we use our info-networks to plan and imagine new ways of safely associating, in our “opened-up” fortnights? 

This need not happen massively and elaborately, but in small ways. Produce made at home could be brought out to others. Work meetings could be the climax of Zoom and virtual meetings, involving celebration and conviviality—not just a return to the “old” normal routine. Care activities for others could be scheduled and designed in the lockdown, and then executed in the open-up (which of course does not mean a free-for-all or status quo ante).

We don’t doubt the need for “protectors”, at whatever macro-level. But it seems a little futile to wish they were better, and could somehow magically redeem their endemic political brokenness, in the course of their grappling with these crises. 

We prefer to explore the idea that one of the better answers to the question “who will protect us?” is “strengthening yourselves and ourselves”. And if you adopt that spirit, you may find that there will always be an alternative.