Five years on from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is hard not to be struck by the oddity of some of the policies adopted by governments around the world. From restrictions on access to parks and beaches to the taping off of children’s playgrounds, authorities imposed measures that were hard to square with known patterns of viral transmission. Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee provide a catalogue of questionable decisions from the period, centered on the U.S. experience. As they convincingly argue, authorities not only implemented some counterproductive measures but often justified them with insincere reasons, producing deliberative failures that eroded public trust and whose consequences continue to bite. Flipflopping on masks in early 2020 is a case in point.

Whether all non-pharmaceutical interventions were equally misguided is debatable. Without the widespread closure of indoor public spaces in the spring of 2020, health care systems in many countries would most likely have been overwhelmed, which in turn would have led to outcomes worse than what actually occurred. In terms of viral transmission, social distancing measures may have simply delayed the inevitable, but delaying the inevitable meant buying some time, spreading the load on health care workers until the emergence of better medicine—vaccines, drugs, and standards of care. And it is the curse of the “preparedness paradox” that successful interventions, by heading off the worst, can put their own value in doubt. What justifies what, all things considered, can be exceptionally hard to assess, in retrospect just as at the time. But Macedo and Lee present a bracing skeptical case, highlighting the preexisting expert opinion and a range of missteps and hidden costs. Both on policy and method, there would seem to be questions to answer.

Macedo and Lee focus on the quality of public deliberation, in the name of restoring trust in government and preparing for the next crisis. But if that is the goal, deliberation among elites looks too narrow a focus. As one draws up the charge-sheet about pandemic policy, a key thing to remember is that some of the biggest failures of government long preceded the pandemic itself. How authorities handled the crisis was in large part a function of the capacities built up in the years before. It is easier to resist the lockdown temptation when a country’s hospitals have the resources to accept a spike in admissions. It is easier to keep schools open when there are the means to reduce class sizes and invest in ventilation. It is more feasible to keep an economy running if workers have sick pay and other rights to rely on, and less socially damaging to shut it down if the fiscal system is structured to make the wealthy bear the costs. When the resources of the state are kept in good shape, policymakers have more options in the exceptional moment and can better assuage hard choices between productivity and the safety of the vulnerable.

Much the same applies to methods of rule. It is easier to maintain norms of deliberation in an emergency if such norms were already robust. One reason the pandemic produced an unhealthy reliance on executive and expert discretion is that bad habits had formed over the course of the 2000s. First in the years after 9/11, then in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, leaders across the West sought to concentrate power in themselves and their closest advisors. Legislative debate about tradeoffs and choices was repeatedly bypassed in the name of speed and necessity. Indeed, for representatives uncertain of the allegiance of voters, embracing an all-action politics of doing—closing borders, issuing emergency budgets, putting police on the streets, talking up war at home and abroad—came to seem an attractive way to shore up their authority. And insofar as the roots of this inclination go back some way—to the stripping of public services, the embrace of neoliberalism, and the retreat from organs of representation—the failings have been spread over decades.

In short, the politics of the pandemic revealed a governing model that had been some time in the making. But it also conveyed some fundamental truths about society at large. In many countries, a standout feature of COVID-19 response was that it unfolded in a context of deep social division. While some segments of the population recoiled from the state’s measures, seeing a form of alarmism at work, others pressed governments to act even more decisively. Policy was guided not just by officials and experts but, among others, by worried parents and teachers. Different groups met the situation with different priorities, and interventions that to some looked overblown—mask mandates, work-from-home directives, the closure of bars and gyms—looked wholly inadequate to others.

In addition to contrasting views on freedom, security, and the state, these conflicts were rooted in differing interests—between the wealthy and the poor, the secure and the precarious, the healthy and the infirm, the young and old. In such deeply divided contexts, even the most well-intentioned and deliberative of public authorities will struggle to craft workable policy. It is doubtful that COVID-19 policymaking would have proved significantly less politically polarizing or divisive, or less socially disruptive, if deliberation had proceeded perfectly, however Macedo and Lee might specify that ideal. Political divisions existed before the pandemic, and controversy mostly unfolded along familiar lines. Moreover, these underlying political conflicts have not shown themselves very responsive to expert deliberation in other policy areas, including climate change.

Macedo and Lee seek to distill generalizable lessons from the pandemic experience—and in particular, they hope to detach the assessment of recent events from the distorting lens of partisan politics. But one may doubt how far such a learning process can proceed in the face of these deep divides. It is easier to speak of “mistakes” if there is a consensus on the ends that policymakers should be pursuing, but in most countries in 2020 this was not the case. Consider how, for those concerned about climate change and runaway capitalism, the pandemic shutdowns were a source of hope—a demonstration that economic business-as-usual can be interrupted if there is the political will. To avoid these interventions would have been something like a missed opportunity, while developments that others saw as the green shoots of post-pandemic recovery—a return to consumption, travel, and growth—were viewed as the escalation of a deeper emergency: global warming. What counts as a crisis and the appropriate response depends on what parts of the status quo one hopes to protect or cast off.

In the era of Trump 2.0, the “we” that might draw common lessons from yesterday’s policy decisions seems far away indeed. While it is tempting to examine the COVID-19 era for a set of policy failures one can learn from, arguably what the episode reveals most sharply is an interlocking set of problems that have been building for decades: dwindling resources of the state, shifting structures of power, and deep divides within the population. These features condition not just how officials handle a crisis but how they decide which crisis to handle. A full reckoning with the past must therefore extend to such factors.