In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

Stephen Macedo

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Book cover for In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
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In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

Stephen Macedo

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Description

One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of the Year
Featured on the New York Times' The Daily podcast and CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS
What our failures during the pandemic cost us, and why we must do better

The Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history. By early April 2020, half the world's population--3.9 billion people--were living under quarantine. People were told not to leave their homes; businesses were shuttered, employees laid off, and schools closed for months or even years. The most devastating pandemic in a century and the policies adopted in response to it upended life as we knew it. In this eye-opening book, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee examine our pandemic response and pose some provocative questions: Why did we ignore pre-Covid plans for managing a pandemic? Were the voices of reasonable dissent treated fairly? Did we adequately consider the costs and benefits of different policy options? And, aside from vaccines, did the policies adopted work as intended?

With In Covid's Wake, Macedo and Lee offer the first comprehensive--and candid--political assessment of how our institutions fared during the pandemic. They describe how, influenced by Wuhan's lockdown, governments departed from their existing pandemic plans. Hard choices were obscured by slogans like "follow the science." Benefits and harms were distributed unfairly. The policies adopted largely benefited the laptop class and left so-called essential workers unprotected; extended school closures hit the least-privileged families the hardest. Science became politicized and dissent was driven to the margins. In the next crisis, Macedo and Lee warn, we must not forget the deepest values of liberal democracy: tolerance and open-mindedness, respect for evidence and its limits, a willingness to entertain uncertainty, and a commitment to telling the whole truth.

About the Author

Stephen Macedo is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of Just Married: Same-Sex Couples, Monogamy, and the Future of Marriage (Princeton); Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy; and Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism. Frances Lee is professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. She is the author of Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign; Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate; and (with James M. Curry) The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Age.

Critical Reviews

"Important . . . Unique. . . . It's an invitation to have a reckoning. "---Michael Barbaro, New York Times' The Daily

"Thanks for writing this book. Really, really important. The country needs a reckoning on a lot of these things."---Jake Tapper, CNN's The Lead

"Compelling."---Fareed Zakaria, CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS

"A revelatory look back on the pandemic. Its conclusions are devastating to both the left and the right; most of us got big things wrong. (I certainly did.)"---Daniel Immerwahr, New Yorker

"Essential and revelatory."-- "Andrew Sullivan"

"Convincing ."---David Scharfenberg, Boston Globe

"Must read. Among other things, a frank discussion of how the Laptop Class championed policies--lockdowns and school closures--that primarily impacted the Have Nots, while the Haves enjoyed remote work, online shopping, booming stock portfolios, and groceries delivered by the poor."---Tyler Austin Harper

"This is a very good book and I think ongoing progressive denial about what went wrong here set the table for a lot of what's happening today under Trump."---Matthew Yglesias

"Provocative."---Sara Talpos, Undark

"Eye-opening . . . . [The book] persuasively and passionately details what went wrong."---Daniel Bell, Literary Review

"In Covid's Wake should be required reading for every American--in truth, for every citizen of a democracy. It's the harsh diagnostic necessary before we can hope for a cure."---Martin Gurri, Free Press

"Many people who now see America's pandemic response as regrettable nevertheless still believe that, taken in proper perspective, we couldn't really have done much better. That belief will not survive the reading of [In Covid's Wake]."---Philip Wallach, Wall Street Journal

"Compelling, extraordinarily readable. You will not regret reading this book . . . . Really terrific."---Andrew Sullivan

"

The authors have produced the most dismaying dissection of U.S. policymaking since David Halberstam's Vietnam War policy autopsy, "The Best and the Brightest.' Their book is more dismaying, but also exhilarating. Vietnam revealed the insularity and hubris of a small coterie of foreign policy shapers. Macedo and Lee identify much broader and deeper cultural sicknesses. But their meticulous depictions and plausible explanations of the myriad institutional failures demonstrate social science at its finest.

"---George Will, Washington Post

Publishing Information

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Pub date: 2026-04-21
Length: 400 pages

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