[ADRN Issue Briefing] The Pandemic Exposes and Exacerbates Existing Problems of Inequality and Polarization

Five Divisive and Inequal Democracies Hit by the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on public health in most countries, but it has had especially severe effects on five major democracies: the United States, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These states have five of the highest death tolls and caseloads from COVID-19 of any countries, and all have struggled to control the pandemic. Democracy itself is not the reason for their public health failures. Other democracies, such as Australia and Canada, have not only produced effective public health responses but also taken robust measures to mitigate the pandemic’s effect on inequality.

Instead, the vast social and economic inequalities in these five ethnically and racially diverse countries have made the pandemic harder to control. These states have failed to handle the novel coronavirus in part because they have never addressed their historical internal divides, which COVID-19 has brutally revealed. In addition, leaders in these states who have attacked political systems and social cohesion have hindered the pandemic response.

Today, all five states are extremely economically unequal. The United States is the most economically unequal of the seven developed states in the Group of Seven and has the fourth worst income inequality in the world. Brazil is the most economically unequal country in Latin America, despite efforts by a succession of Brazilian governments to use cash transfers and other programs to combat inequality, and the Philippines also has high income inequality.[1] Indonesia and India both face sharply rising income inequality.[2]

The deep economic and social inequality in the United States, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines has undermined how these states have responded to the pandemic. Beyond revealing inequalities and devastating public health, the pandemic has made socioeconomic inequality worse, and also added to democratic backsliding. In these five states, caseloads and death tolls of the novel coronavirus are falling hardest on racial, ethnic, and sometimes religious minorities and on the poor; poor and minority communities significantly overlap, and many of these same citizens have the preexisting conditions that make them more susceptible to getting extremely sick or dying from COVID-19.

Furthermore, as often has happened during past major emergencies, political leaders have taken advantage of the emergency to corrode democratic norms and institutions—in these five democracies and across the globe.

Populist Leaders Undermine Public Health Responses

Politicians often have only made inequality worse, which further hampered efforts to control the virus. Indeed, the five recent leaders’ rhetoric and policies, combined with their states’ histories of inequality, have ensured the pandemic hits minorities and the poor harder than middle-class, wealthy, and racial, religious, and ethnic majority citizens. In many ways, COVID-19 also has deepened inequality in these countries.

The Donald J. Trump administration, for instance, repeatedly sought to undermine the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which has helped expand access to health insurance, particularly among minorities and the poor. In the end, the Supreme Court rejected overturning the ACA. Overturning the ACA would have resulted in over twenty-one million, mostly lower-income Americans, losing health insurance.[3] The Trump administration also took a hard-line approach to policing and voting rights, refusing to countenance police reforms and trying to undermine voting rights in numerous ways. The effects of this voter suppression fell hardest on the poor and minorities. [4]

Recently, leaders in these large democracies also used public rhetoric to divide and polarize societies, often further harming minority groups. On Twitter, former President Trump routinely claimed that politicians of color such as Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were unqualified for office and should be feared; he also routinely demonized immigrants and other minorities as dangers to the United States.[5] Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has claimed that indigenous Brazilians are only now “evolving [into] humans” and complained that Brazilian cavalry had not wiped out more indigenous peoples during the conquest of the Brazilian interior.[6] Bolsonaro’s demonization of indigenous people and evisceration of protections for the Amazon Rainforest have contributed to a wave of illegal mining and foresting and a spike in violence against indigenous people in the Amazon basin.[7]

These policies exacerbated inequality and added to the pandemic. The Trump administration’s campaign against the ACA, for instance, combined with some Republican-led states’ refusal to expand Medicaid to allow their poorer citizens to access the ACA, kept the number of uninsured Americans high and hindered the pandemic response. [8]

Historical inequality is also hindering the vaccine rollout in many of these countries, even though vaccination campaigns are now the best weapon for ultimately controlling the pandemic. Many minority populations in the United States harbor deep distrust of government public health efforts, due to the lasting effects of systemic racism and a history of the U.S. government conducting illegal experiments on minorities (such as the Tuskegee study, which infected Black men with syphilis to study its effects when left untreated) and demonstrating disinterest in issues that damage minorities’ public health (such as the water crisis in Flint, Michigan). A study on views of vaccination conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found massive skepticism of the COVID-19 vaccine among Black Americans, with nearly 50 percent saying they will not get vaccinated “even if scientists deem it safe and it is available for free to anyone who wants it.” [9]

The populist leaders have also taken anti-science positions in general. Trump repeatedly mocked scientific consensus on effective measures to control the pandemic, adding chaos and confusion to the response effort and polarizing the public in ways that made it harder to develop anti–COVID-19 public health campaigns.[10] Bolsonaro, Jokowi, and Duterte also have denigrated scientific expertise throughout the pandemic, polarizing the response and undermining public health efforts.

These leaders often also have used the pandemic to boost their powers. For example, Modi has used the pandemic to further clamp down on the press, political opponents, and activists. Duterte has used the pandemic, and lockdowns, to clamp down on opponents as well. Meanwhile, the Trump administration stepped up its campaign against nominally independent inspector generals within government agencies during the pandemic and increasingly kept cabinet heads in their positions without congressional approval and against the law, among other efforts.[11] Although the new Joe Biden administration has promised to restore institutions and norms, whether it can fix much of the damage remains unclear.

These five large democracies are part of a global democratic regression. The 2021 version of Freedom in the World, the flagship publication of the monitoring organization Freedom House, was entitled “Democracy Under Siege” and noted that “democracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny. Incumbent leaders increasingly used force to crush opponents and settle scores, sometimes in the name of public health.”

The Way Forward

Without a doubt, the five large democracies of the United States, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines are plagued by massive political, economic, and social problems. These challenges have been exacerbated by polarizing and often ineffective top leadership, both before and during the pandemic. The enormity and deep roots of these problems mean they cannot be solved rapidly or easily. Any list of ideas for progress can only be a jumping-off point. Some U.S. politics experts, for instance, believe political polarization, socioeconomic inequality, and the breakdown of social cohesion have become so bad that the country’s politics are unsalvageable and the United States has essentially become ungovernable. [12]

Yet effective governance has both policy and political rewards, even for highly polarizing leaders as it bolsters leaders’ popularity and potentially their election prospects. The severe effects of the crisis, meanwhile, offer an opportunity for leaders to go big in response and push major reforms to address their countries’ deep economic and political challenges. Many of these reforms should create a policy agenda focused on what Zia Qureshi of the Brookings Institution calls “predistribution”—putting measures in place that address inequality and making growth more inclusive from the bottom up. [13]

Even in these five large and highly polarized democracies, polling suggests that a significant percentage of people want to overcome polarization in dealing with COVID-19—and possibly in combating broader issues of inequality as well. For example, despite the United States’ seemingly bitter COVID-19–related partisanship, polling has shown that Americans generally want to work together to address the virus and that a significant majority of Americans share views about the best ways to address COVID-19.[14] More broadly, research by the organization More in Common suggests that, across multiple countries, “the pandemic has created a new sense of togetherness” and some common desire to work together to solve problems and rebuild public trust, which is essential to government functioning, in a pandemic or in normal times. [15]

During this difficult time, leaders should push for systemic, democratizing reforms of political and electoral systems, and punish actors who aggressively promote polarization. This could include promoting ranked-choice voting, public financing of campaigns, and the drawing of fair, representative districts for state and federal elections, among other measures. The Biden administration has embraced comprehensive governance reforms designed to bolster voting rights and curtail partisan gerrymandering, which tends to dilute the power of minority voters.[16] Ultimately, as in the 2022 Philippine presidential election, voters will have the final say.■

[1] Schaeffer, “6 Facts About Economic Inequality in the U.S.”; Juzhong Zhuang, “The Recent Trend of Income Inequality in Asia and How Policy Should Respond,” Group of 24 and Freidrich-Ebert-Stiftung New York, October 2018, http://g24.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Rising_income_inequality_in_Asia.pdf; Tjoe, “Two Decades of Economic Growth Benefited Only the Richest 20%.”; “Income Inequality in India Continues to Rise: Report,” Wire, November 19, 2020, http://thewire.in/economy/income-inequality-india-china-report.

[2] Reed Abelson and Abby Goodnough, “If the Supreme Court Ends Obamacare, Here’s What It Would Mean,” New York Times, February 10, 2021, http://nytimes.com/article/supreme-court-obamacare-case.html; Andrew Keshner，“奥巴马医改正在缩小贫富、黑白之间的覆盖差距”，MarketWatch，2019年8月20日， http://marketwatch.com/story/obamacare-is-closing-the-coverage-divide-between-rich-and-poor-black-and-white-2019-08-19。

[3] Chris Megerian 和 Noah Bierman，“特朗普无视警察改革呼吁”，Los Angeles Times，2020年6月4日， http://latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-04/trump-ignores-calls-for-police-reforms; Joel Shannon，“今日美国民意调查：美国人希望进行重大警察改革，更关注严重犯罪”，USA Today，2020年6月29日， http://usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/29/us-police-reform-poll-finds-support-more-training-transparency/3259628001; Perry Bacon Jr.，“特朗普和共和党官员破坏选举程序的五种方式”，FiveThirtyEight，2020年8月11日， http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/five-ways-trump-and-gop-officials-are-undermining-the-election-process; Theodore R. Johnson，“新的选民压制”，布伦南司法中心，2020年1月16日， http://brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression。

[4] Katherine Schaeffer，“美国经济不平等的6个事实”，皮尤研究中心，2020年2月7日，http://pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/07/6-facts-about-economic-inequality-in-the-u-s; Valentina，“巴西是拉丁美洲收入分配最不平等国家”，Brazil Reports，2019年1月21日， https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/inequality-and-social-unrest-latin-america-tocqueville-paradox-revisited; Anakwa Dwamena，“雅伊尔·博索纳罗和冠状病毒如何暴露了巴西的系统性种族主义”，New Yorker，2020年7月9日， http://newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-jair-bolsonaro-and-the-coronavirus-put-brazils-systemic-racism-on-display。

[5] Eugene Robinson，“特朗普煽动对少数族裔的怨恨。共和党人只是微笑。”Washington Post，2018年11月5日， http://washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-stokes-resentment-toward-minorities-republicans-just-smile/2018/11/05/10e059e0-e13b-11e8-8f5f-a55347f48762_story.html; Eugene Scott，“特朗普最侮辱性——也是最暴力——的语言常常是针对移民的”，Washington Post，2019年10月2日， http://washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/02/trumps-most-insulting-violent-language-is-often-reserved-immigrants。

[6] Fiona Watson，“博索纳罗当选对巴西原住民部落是灾难性消息”，Guardian，2018年10月31日， http://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/31/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-indigenous-tribes-mining-logging; “巴西原住民将起诉博索纳罗，因其称他们‘正在进化’”，路透社，2020年1月24日， http://reuters.com/article/us-brazil-indigenous/brazils-indigenous-to-sue-bolsonaro-for-saying-theyre-evolving-idUSKBN1ZN1TD; Katy Watson，“否认种族主义的巴西黑人权利辩护者”，BBC，2020年2月15日， http://bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-51501111。

[7] Letícia Casado 和 Ernesto Londoño，“在巴西极右翼领导人领导下，亚马逊保护措施被削减，森林被砍伐”，New York Times，2019年7月28日， http://nytimes.com/2019/07/28/world/americas/brazil-deforestation-amazon-bolsonaro.html; Shanna Hanbury，“巴西亚马逊地区原住民领导人谋杀案达到二十年来最高水平”，Mongabay，2019年12月14日， http://news.mongabay.com/2019/12/murders-of-indigenous-leaders-in-brazil-amazon-hit-highest-level-in-two-decades。

[8] Frank J. Thompson，“特朗普如何破坏《平价医疗法案》的六种方式”，布鲁金斯学会，2020年10月9日， http://brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/10/09/six-ways-trump-has-sabotaged-the-affordable-care-act；Phil McCausland，“密西西比州和其他13个州就扩大医疗补助进行辩论，居民饱受痛苦”，NBC新闻，2019年11月4日， http://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/residents-suffer-mississippi-13-other-states-debate-medicaid-expansion-n1075661；Dylan Scott，“由于共和党人拒绝扩大医疗补助，数千人在新冠疫情爆发期间将没有保险”，Vox，2020年5月5日， http://vox.com/2020/5/5/21247204/coronavirus-unemployment-medicaid-eligibility-health-insurance。

[9]“凯撒家庭基金会和The Undefeated的全国民意调查显示，黑人对医疗保健系统不信任”，凯撒家庭基金会，2020年10月13日， http://kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/press-release/new-nationwide-poll-by-the-kaiser-family-foundation-and-the-undefeated-reveals-distrust-of-the-health-care-system-among-black-americans。

[10] Zeke Miller和Jill Colvin，“特朗普抨击安东尼·福奇博士，称‘人们厌倦了听’他以及‘所有这些白痴’谈论冠状病毒”，芝加哥论坛报，2020年10月19日， http://chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-trump-fauci-coronavirus-20201019-rofykxwrabcxdghjpa3r6tdjmu-story.html；Toluse Olorunnipa、Ariana Eunjung Cha和Laurie McGinley，“特朗普推广的‘改变游戏规则’的抗病毒药物与死亡的联系日益增加”，华盛顿邮报，2020年5月15日， http://washingtonpost.com/politics/drug-promoted-by-trump-as-coronavirus-game-changer-increasingly-linked-to-deaths/2020/05/15/85d024fe-96bd-11ea-9f5e-56d8239bf9ad_story.html；Libby Cathey，“时间线：追踪特朗普与羟氯喹的科学发展”，美国广播公司新闻，2020年8月8日， http://abcnews.go.com/Health/timeline-tracking-trump-alongside-scientific-developments-hydroxychloroquine/story?id=72170553；Libby Cathey，“特朗普淡化病毒，数月来嘲笑戴口罩”，美国广播公司新闻，2020年10月2日， http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-downplaying-virus-mocked-wearing-masks-months/story?id=73392694；Robin Givhan，“特朗普拒绝戴口罩，将口罩变成了一个可悲的国家象征”，华盛顿邮报，2020年10月3日， http://washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/10/03/trumps-refusal-wear-face-masks-turned-them-into-sad-national-symbol；Michael D. Shear和Sarah Mervosh，“特朗普鼓励抗议州长实施病毒限制”，纽约时报，2020年4月17日， http://nytimes.com/2020/04/17/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-governors.html。

[11]“在无法无天的特朗普治下，我们的制衡体系正在被摧毁”，华盛顿邮报，2020年9月18日， http://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/18/trump-law-checks-balances/?arc404=true；Kimberly Wehle，“国会已失去对特朗普的权力”，大西洋月刊，2020年2月4日， http://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/checks-and-balances-trump-has-swept-away/606013；Glenn C. Altschuler，“特朗普总统对制衡的攻击：四周五幕”，国会山报，2020年2月24日， http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/484299-president-trumps-assault-on-checks-and-balances-five-acts-in-four-weeks；Melissa Quinn，“特朗普解雇或替换的内部监督者”，CBS新闻，2020年5月19日， http://cbsnews.com/news/trump-inspectors-general-internal-watchdogs-fired-list；Becca Damante，“至少有15名特朗普官员的职位不合法”，Just Security，2020年9月17日， http://justsecurity.org/72456/at-least-15-trump-officials-do-not-hold-their-positions-lawfully；Kyle Cheney，“特朗普呼吁共和党州议会推翻选举结果”，Politico，2020年11月21日， http://politico.com/news/2020/11/21/trump-state-legislatures-overturn-election-results-439031。

[12] Thomas B. Edsall，“美国现在是否无法治理？”，《纽约时报》，2021年1月20日， http://nytimes.com/2021/01/20/opinion/joe-biden-inauguration.html。

[13] Zia Qureshi，“应对不平等大流行”。布鲁金斯学会论文，2020年11月17日， https://www.brookings.edu/research/tackling-the-inequality-pandemic-is-there-a-cure/

[14] Quarcoo and Kleinfeld，“冠状病毒能治愈两极分化吗？”；Jamie Ballard，“三分之二的美国人会支持他们的州实施为期一个月的COVID-19封锁”，《YouGov》，2020年11月10日， http://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/11/10/americans-support-covid-19-lockdowns。

[15] “新常态？”，More in Common，2020年9月， http://moreincommon.com/newnormal。

[16] “拜登宣布拜登政府的首要任务将是全面改革，如H.R. 1法案所示”，Democracy 21，2020年4月17日， http://democracy21.org/news-press/press-releases/biden-announces-a-first-priority-for-a-biden-administration-will-be-comprehensive-reforms-as-reflected-in-h-r-1；Kim Soffen，“种族选区划分如何剥夺黑人的政治权力”，《华盛顿邮报》，2016年6月9日， http://washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/09/how-a-widespread-practice-to-politically-empower-african-americans-might-actually-harm-them；Olga Pierce and Kate Rabinowitz，“‘党派’选区划分仍与种族有关”，《ProPublica》，2017年10月9日， http://propublica.org/article/partisan-gerrymandering-is-still-about-race。

■ 本文改编自CFR讨论文件“COVID-19及其对不平等和民主的影响：五大民主国家研究”，网址为：https://www.cfr.org/report/covid-19-and-its-effect-inequality-and-democracy

■ Joshua Kurlantzick 是外交关系委员会东南亚高级研究员（jkurlantzick@cfr.org）

■ 负责人及编辑： 白珍敬_EAI研究室长

    咨询：02 2277 1683 (分机号 209) | j.baek@eai.or.kr