Pounding the footpaths, watching the hedgerows change with the seasons, was my one permitted outlet from an otherwise claustrophobic daily routine. Nor was it just me. The run tracking app Strava, which combines fitness monitoring with social-networking, has grown so rapidly in popularity since the pandemic that it’s planning to launch an initial public offering.

I didn’t use Strava to log my runs, but I did track them with a smartwatch. Looking back over the data, I realized I’d clocked up more than a thousand miles during that first pandemic year. I wasn’t the only one: since Covid, endurance sports have only grown in popularity. The Financial Times reports that over a million people applied to run this year’s London Marathon, and across the world other “fitness races” and formats are booming.

But perhaps this is to be expected. For the preferred sporting and leisure activities of the middle class have long served as a kind of gamified echo of everyday life. In 19th-century Britain, for example, the emergence of team sports mirrored the gradual domestication of our national culture. The nation’s roaring, piratical 18th-century love of blood-sports and bare-knuckle boxing gave way to the symbolic “combat” of team competitions, reflecting both Britain’s increasingly formal and orderly public morality, and also a crystallizing sense of “team” unity in public life at scale. The assertion, popularly attributed to the Duke Wellington, that “The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton”, is probably apocryphal. But it echoes an intuitive sense that there’s a link between our sporting preferences, and the broader conduct of national life — up to and including in war.

What does it say about us, then, that amateur rugby, football, and cricket appear to be in decline, even as endurance sports boom in popularity? For those who value the idea of national “teams”, the answer is an unnerving one: we appear to be re-imagining both sports, and also politics, as a relationship less among a defined community than between an individual and a centralized, de-materialized digital mediator.

At elite level, even team sports have shifted focus. Premier League and international football, for example, are more popular than ever — but here, the real “game” often seems to take place not between competitors in a match, but rather via the many secondary ways in which the resulting data are used, mined, and gambled against. Athletes themselves are tracked and algorithmically optimized in every imaginable way, from wearables for sleep tracking to machine-learning tools to improve in-game tactics. Software systems and performance-tracking hardware devices leave elite sports players as fully “under the algorithm” as an Amazon worker (albeit considerably better paid). For fans, meanwhile, there’s an ocean of in-game and player data, covering every imaginable facet of every elite sport. This, in turn, has fueled eye-wateringly lucrative secondary sports-data subcultures, from online Fantasy Football leagues to the multi-billion-pound international sports betting industry, estimated to be worth around £625 billion a year.

In a sense, then, the real “product” of elite sport is now its digital footprint. At amateur level, though, this doesn’t work nearly as well. How do you persuade every Sunday league player to wear the same tracker, like Premier League athletes? By contrast, an individual runner can easily join Strava and gamify his or her own “performance” on an opt-in basis. So perhaps this is at least part of the appeal of individual endurance sports: unlike weekend football, it enables amateurs to enjoy the experience of data-driven sports self-optimization, just like an elite athlete.

How, then, did we get to a point where the amateur feels “real” in proportion to their ability to generate an analyzable, optimizable data trail? Arguably most of us signed the digital Faustian bargain a long time ago. I recall weighing up the benefits of a searchable email inbox against letting Google’s bots crawl my correspondence, two decades ago, and deciding to accept the deal. And, since then, the social media revolution has redefined the public square. Now it’s a non-physical space, of seemingly infinite possibility, in which participation is nominally free — but the price is accepting that your every move is tracked. In the process, those of us who grew up in a relatively un-surveilled offline world have become accustomed to the nagging half-awareness that our data are being tracked and agglomerated all the time. It creeps me out, but not enough to stop me from using Gmail.

Over those two decades, the surrounding culture has also shifted. I know one mother of a university-age daughter who still keeps an active tracker on her adult child’s phone. She told me her daughter could switch it off, but doesn’t; it feels less like surveillance than watchful care. In any case, her daughter’s friends all monitor one another using the same technology.

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The generation that read about Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map has grown up expecting to be able to locate their friends on a map in real time. And when everyone is accustomed both to this kind of hypervisibility, perhaps sport simply doesn’t feel like it has happened unless it’s also visible and analyzable on-screen.

So what does the digitization, gamification, and individuation of sport tell us about public life today? The 19th century scaled the “team” model of sport up into a nationalistic model for geopolitics: the doctrine of “balance of power” pitted a Premier League of European powers against one another, in an ever-shifting contest for supremacy. Today, by contrast, we appear to be sliding in our sporting preferences toward more individualistic endurance pursuits, enhanced by smart wearables and data analysis.

And the Strava model, applied to governance, in turn also looks considerably more borderless, more individualistic, and more data-driven. We already see wonks hailing the reconstruction efforts in former warzones as exciting test-beds for this sort of networked governance. Tory grandee Sir Ed Vaizey, for example, recently addressed an international digital cooperation summit on the benefits of digital ID in rebuilding war-torn polities such as Syria and Ukraine. The Centre for International Governance Innovation also hailed Ukraine’s innovations in digital governance. It’s hard to avoid the sense that for some, at least, warzones figure less as human catastrophes than exciting technological frontiers, spurring developments from drone tech to surveillance and digital services.

Should Tony Blair secure the role Donald Trump has allocated him, as chief colonial administrator in the Gaza demilitarized zone, will he join the push for such innovative measures to be rolled out as part of its reconstruction? A longstanding supporter of digital ID, Blair’s own Institute recently extolled the benefits of these tools for Britain, especially combined with AI and facial recognition. It would be surprising if he didn’t view the reconstruction of Gaza as an opportunity to push the envelope in digital-first governance.

What might this mean in practice? Perhaps, again, the popular shift from team sports to gamified solo endurance activities offers a clue. Vaizey invites us to imagine the benefits digital innovation brings to post-war reconstruction, such as “a refugee mother who can prove her identity on a basic phone, redeem a payment nearby and book a clinic appointment without queuing all day”, or “a mine clearance team guided by artificial intelligence maps that help families return to their fields”.

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This all sounds nice and humanitarian. What it also implies, more tacitly, is a distinctly post-national sensibility. Once equipped with a unique digital identifier, Vaizey’s “refugee mother” theoretically becomes analogous to the long-distance runner: a single unit in a data flow, with a unique digital trail. This is a very different model from the “sports team” one, which views the basic unit of governance as the national “team”, comprising citizens defined as such by a mix of esprit de corps, geographical proximity, and other common traits.

The digitally-enabled Strava model, on the other hand, views governance as a porous, opt-in constituency of highly mobile individuals, originating potentially anywhere, defined by a digital identity and associated data trail. How, in that context, do you create any sense of togetherness? If anything, this approach militates against esprit de corps, as it’s cross-border by design. As Vaizey points out, the more transnational digital governance is, the more efficient and effective it can be.

Whether you think this good or bad surely depends where you’re standing, and how much you trust your leadership class. At scale, digital governance shades potentially into alarming levels of power: it’s one thing to be kicked off Strava for going running in North Korea, another altogether to be frozen out of your bank account for protesting a government policy. In theory, for example, the Palestinian inhabitants of a hypothetical, reconstructed, shiny digital Blairtopia would be free to go anywhere. In practice, the more transnationally monitored they were, the more easily terrorist suspects could be contained — or anyone else, for that matter.

Again, whether or not you consider this a good thing depends on how much you trust Blair. Going by the recent travails of his former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, who recently lost an undisclosed sum investing in an allegedly fraudulent sports betting syndicate founded by his son Rory, New Labour’s judgment on matters of data (and sport) may not always be reliable.Closer to home, the fact that more Britons supported digital ID before Keir Starmer announced it attests how little the electorate here believe his government could wield such power benevolently. But more broadly, these developments imply the crystallization of a consensus among those in charge, on how the polity overall should be defined. Is Britain a sports team, or a Strava leaderboard? It is perhaps the most irreducible divide in contemporary politics. It ought at least to be up for discussion. But the Blairs of this world assume the latter, and seek simply to present this as a fait accompli.

But the more relevant question is surely: do we have a choice? I don’t use a smart watch to track my runs any more. But that’s more about the gloomy spectacle of my advancing age and worsening pace per mile, than any privacy concern. I worry that we made our decision when we got Gmail and Fitbits, and taught our kids to love their phone trackers and ourselves to post our Strava routes. If I’m right, it might already be too late to walk (let alone run) it back.

Few seem to believe those claims. But the more significant phenomenon is not the particular tendencies of this or that politician: it is the struggle of this government, and of all modern governments, to maintain control of information in an age when the internet has begun to pose a dangerous threat to that control. Today, information can be distributed far more easily, widely and quickly than in history’s most searing periods of revolution. It is a reality that traditional mechanisms of government find hard to accept — a discord that can have devastating consequences.

Seen through this lens, the recent flare-ups of the free speech debate — the arrest of Graham Linehan, the reprimanding of Starmer by Donald Trump over free speech in the UK, the introduction of the Online Safety Act — can all be understood as responses to the challenges to government posed by the new technology. Societies across the globe are still digesting an extraordinary change, and the crises spreading across the world are in part a reaction to it.

Yet if governments now seek to control information via new means, their desire to do so is nothing new. And, as Elias Canetti, a Nobel laureate for literature, wrote in Crowds and Power, secrecy is a fundamental component of power. Governments have always sought to monopolize information and to shape it. They have often kept large swathes of it secret, whether it is records of government meetings or the tabs they are keeping on criminal gangs and geopolitical adversaries. At the same time, they have generally sought to censor materials which are contrary to their vision.

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Any politician who is truly ignorant of this basic fact of history probably shouldn’t be anywhere near government. For if, in theory, we object to secrecy: in practice, citizens of Western liberal democracies have been quite happy to accept this reality. This is why, for instance, UK government files are kept secret for 20 years before being released to the public. No politician has ever contested this rule. That is because, until now, all politicians shared the unspoken opinion that secrecy was an important part of government; until, that is, they started leaking excerpts of cabinet meetings to friendly journalists, a symptom of the transformations now underway.

Though secrecy of information has always been a key plank of political authority, there are of course different tiers of secrecy enforced by governments. As Canetti noted, autocracy of information has often been a symptom of dictatorships. The Stasi’s network of “secret informers”, members of the public who informed on each other, remain in the living memory of the former East Germany. I saw a similar phenomenon myself in The Gambia. There, in the years preceding the end, in 2017, of Yahya Jammeh’s regime, I was doing research on Gambia’s precolonial history. Such was the fear of government informers that, at any mention of Jammeh’s increasing turn to authoritarianism, people’s eyes would cloud over and they went quiet.

It is a reaction that would have been visible at many other places and points in history. Take the Papal Inquisition, set up by the medieval papacy to police heretics like the Cathars. Where Starmer’s digital ID proposes authority over our biometric information, in late medieval and early modern Europe the Inquisition sought authority over what it too deemed to be the most important information about citizens: the purity or otherwise of their religious faith.

Having almost died in the 15th century, the Inquisition was revived as a state-backed institution in absolutist Spain, and then in Portugal, from the late 1470s onwards. The Inquisition soon became a bulwark of what were then the most powerful states in Europe, useful for attacking dissenters and confiscating their property. A cornerstone of the inquisitorial judicial process was secrecy: not only did witnesses have to swear that they would keep all aspects of the trial secret, but the accused were never told who had accused them, or even what they had been accused of.

We can understand what this meant for the human experience of power only through individual cases, which — fortunately for historians — the Inquisition archived meticulously. In 1665, for instance, the Inquisition arrested Crispina Peres, who was the most powerful trader in the port town of Cacheu (today’s Guinea-Bissau, West Africa). Peres was charged with “witchcraft” after several years of interrogations led by an ambitious cleric. Her downfall came in spite of an uprising of almost 1,000 troops marshaled by the local king, who was her ally. She was eventually deported via the Cape Verde islands to Lisbon, a journey of more than 2,500 miles. Peres languished for three years in the inquisitorial jail, at one point spending over 12 months in her cell without being summoned for an interview. By the time she returned to Cacheu, after confessing her guilt in an ritualized form of penance known as an Auto da Fé, her health was shot through and the power she had held as a trader in Cacheu was gone.

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For historians like me, the Inquisition’s insistence on secrecy is a gift. Because of their desire to rule out anyone whose evidence was partial, Peres and her husband Jorge spent long depositions mentioning all of their enemies, offering in the process a unique window into the daily lives of people who lived so long ago in West Africa. As her husband Jorge said, her actions were nothing out of the ordinary in Cacheu. Indeed, some of her main accusers freely admitted to partaking in the same African religious ceremonies as she did. In essence, she was arrested because her power threatened the secrecy which was the cornerstone of the political authority which Portuguese institutions of empire were developing in West Africa.

How does all this relate to the debates over digital ID and freedom of speech — and the recent comments by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and many politicians, over what the Government can and can’t do to police speech and information on the internet? The answer is that breaches of secrecy have always been seen by political leaders as constituting a major threat to power. This is an insight that helps us understand several key global events of the past 15 years.

The Wikileaks affair, which led to the multi-year solitary confinement of Julian Assange in HMP Belmarsh, is about more than the specific information that Assange leaked. Instead, the harsh punishment stands as a warning to any others who might seek to challenge the secrecy of our political elites. For them, Assange’s real threat lay not so much in the details of what was revealed as in the structural challenge posed by Wikileaks to their view of politics, which required their unquestioned right to secrecy in the exercise of government. Nor has this relationship between secrecy and power been just a Western phenomenon, as the widespread “secret societies” in Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa make clear.

In the 21st century, political elites impose censorship not only by punishing individuals, but through the actions of increasingly nebulous organizations. In June 2019 — two months after Assange was removed from the Ecuadorean embassy in London — an alliance of the world’s biggest broadcasters founded an organization whose putative goal was to combat misinformation. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) is an alliance of the world’s biggest publishers: hosted by the BBC, it includes major news agencies, major newspapers from the UK, the US and abroad, and big tech companies such as Google and its subsidiary YouTube.

Within a year, the TNI played a key role during the Covid pandemic in censorship of “fake news” — including, in the first 18 months of the pandemic, the mere suggestion that Covid-19 could have leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Those from Left (such as me) and Right who questioned whether strict lockdowns were necessary, and whether a cost-benefit analysis including real-world harms to young and old in the West and the Global South should not be considered, had their views ruthlessly suppressed by the TNI in the press and in social media — with a price that the whole world is now paying.

The TNI was seen by conspiracists as a key plank in the “plandemic”. But skeptics of a different sort would see the TNI as a weapon created and deployed by political elites to defend their monopoly of information. In this sense, it doesn’t really matter whether the information is true or false. What matters is the importance of secrecy to political authority, and the vicious efforts which those in power will make to maintain their grip on this secrecy.

Thus it is no surprise that new research is revealing the lengths that the West’s political leaders are taking to impose their preferred information paradigm. During Covid, Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, tried personally to communicate in private with the then CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey — to precisely what end, we still do not know — while French state-affiliated NGOs sought special access to Twitter’s internal data and content moderation process. Similarly, the UK, like the EU, has sought backdoor access to digital communications services such as WhatsApp. Woe betide those who do not comply: Pavel Durov, the defiant founder of the Telegram app, was arrested last year.

All this shows the depth of the political reaction now in place to shore up Western authorities’ control of information, in which digital ID is a further move. Yet the accompanying debates often show a general lack of structural understanding of the historical relationship between political power, secrecy, and information. In its pugilistic response to the Linehan affair and the Online Safety Act, the Right shows its naïveté: these instincts to control information are a fact of political life.

But the Left is guilty of comparable naïveté in its railing against conspiracy theories and the Right’s alleged predisposition to swallowing them. While egregious conspiracy theories should of course be called out, the Right — contrary to the dismissive claims by the Left — is correct to see conspiracy as part of power. The Left, at times, has shown similar attentiveness. Indeed, prior to their 1917 coup, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks had a strongly conspiratorial critique of the levers of capital. And, in terms of more prosaic politics, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did not stumble into the leadership of their political parties. Instead, they reached the top thanks to conniving backroom deals, secret manipulation of information known only to a few, and conspiratorial deployment of relationships with various players which might often be kept hidden.

What this shows is that in this debate over information control and secrecy, both Left and Right are currently tilting at strawmen: the Left at the spread of conspiracy, the Right at supposedly unprecedented government secrecy and authority over perceived safety. Biometric information, which is the key resource for the “BritCard”, is simply the latest tug-of-war.

This is all quite normal in politics, and distracts from the broader issues at stake. What is true is that, as Canetti observed, the impulse to assert control through a strong-arm policing of information tends to be typical of more authoritarian governments. This is what historians can observe in the absolutist dictatorships of Spain and Portugal in the era of the Inquisition, and with the trial of Crispina Peres. It is what we can now observe with the trend towards policing the internet and using it to monitor citizens. The question is not, therefore, whether governments should control information, since all governments of all time always have tried to do this: but what levels of control and secrecy are compatible with democratic life. With neither politicians nor technocrats to be entirely trusted with the levers of power, a different playing field if society is to manage the circulation of information. Perhaps the mechanism might be a combination of judicial separation of powers and sortition (election from the general public via a lottery).

At the same time, the firestorms around this topic are also a distraction from the enormity of the crisis which current governments have plunged into. Fear for the future is mounting as quickly as fury at politicians. The distraction, then, is highly useful to political elites in an age when over-reaction to threats to their control of information has caused such massive harm.

As writers who have always positioned ourselves on the Left, we are disturbed at this turn of events. Is there really no progressive criticism to be made about the quarantining of healthy individuals, when the latest research suggests there is a vanishingly small difference in terms of transmission between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated? The Left’s response to Covid now appears as part of a broader crisis in Left-wing politics and thought — one which has been going on for three decades at least. So it’s important to identify the process through which this has taken shape.

In the first phase of the pandemic — the lockdowns phase — it was those leaning towards the cultural and economic right who were more likely to emphasise the social, economic and psychological damage resulting from lockdowns. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s initial lockdown scepticism made this position untenable for most of those leaning towards the cultural and economic Left. Social media algorithms then further fuelled this polarisation. Very quickly, therefore, Western leftists embraced lockdown, seen as a “pro-life” and “pro-collective” choice — a policy that, in theory, championed public health or the collective right to health. Meanwhile any criticism of the lockdowns was excoriated as a “right-wing”, “pro-economy” and “pro-individual” approach, accused of prioritising “profit” and “business as usual” over people’s lives.

In sum, decades of political polarisation instantly politicised a public health issue, without allowing any discussion as to what a coherent Left response would be. At the same time, the Left’s position distanced it from any kind of working-class base, since low-income workers were the most severely affected by the socio-economic impacts of continued lockdown policies, and were also those most likely to be out working while the laptop class benefitted from Zoom. These same political fault lines emerged during the vaccine roll-out, and now during the Covid passports phase. Resistance associates with the Right, while those on the mainstream Left are generally supportive of both measures. Opposition is demonised as a confused mixture of anti-science irrationalism and individualistic libertarianism.

But why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures? How did such a simplistic view of the relationship between health and the economy emerge, one which makes a mockery of decades of (Left-leaning) social science research showing just how closely wealth and health outcomes are connected? Why did the Left ignore the massive increase in inequalities, the attack on the poor, on poor countries, on women and children, the cruel treatment of the elderly, and the huge increase in wealth for the richest individuals and corporations resulting from these policies? How, in relation to the development and roll-out of vaccines, did the Left end up ridiculing the very notion that, given the money at stake, and when BioNTech, Moderna and Pfizer currently make between them over US$1,000 per second from the Covid vaccines, there might be motivations from the vaccine manufacturers other than “the public good” at play? And how is it possible that the Left, often on the receiving end of state repression, today seems oblivious to the worrying ethical and political implications of Covid passports?

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While the Cold War coincided with the era of decolonisation and the rise of a global anti-racist politics, the end of the Cold War – alongside the symbolic triumph of decolonisation politics with the end of apartheid – ushered in an existential crisis for Left-wing politics. The rise of neoliberal economic hegemony, globalisation, and corporate trans-nationalism, have all undermined the Left’s historic view of the state as an engine of redistribution. Combined with this is the realisation that, as the Brazilian theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger has argued, the Left has always prospered most at times of great crisis — the Russian Revolution benefited from the World War One, and welfare capitalism from the aftermath of the World War Two. This history may partly explain the Left’s positioning today: amplifying the crisis and prolonging it through never-ending restrictions may be seen by some as a way to rebuild Left politics after decades of existential crisis.

The Left’s flawed understanding of the nature of neoliberalism may also have affected its response to the crisis. Most people on the Left believe that neoliberalism has involved a “retreat” or “hollowing out” of the state in favour of the market. Thus, they interpreted government activism throughout the pandemic as a welcome “return of the state”, one potentially capable, in their view, of eventually reversing neoliberalism’s allegedly anti-statist project. The problem with this argument, even accepting its dubious logic, is that neoliberalism hasn’t entailed a withering away of the state. On the contrary, the size of the state as a percentage of GDP has continued to rise throughout the neoliberal era.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neoliberalism relies on extensive state intervention just as much as “Keynesianism” did, except that the state now intervenes almost exclusively to further the interests of big capital – to police the working classes, bail out large banks and firms that would otherwise go bankrupt, etc. Indeed, in many ways, capital today is more dependent on the state than ever. As Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan note: “[A]s capitalism develops, governments and large corporations become increasingly intertwined. … The capitalist mode of power and the dominant-capital coalitions that rule it do not require small governments. In fact, in many respects, they need larger ones”. Neoliberalism today is more akin to a form of state-monopoly capitalism – or corporatocracy – than the kind of small-state free-market capitalism that it often claims to be. This helps explain why it has produced increasingly powerful, interventionist, and even authoritarian state apparatuses.

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This in itself makes the Left’s cheering at a non-existent “return of the state” embarrassingly naïve. And the worst part is that it has made this mistake before. Even in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, many on the Left hailed large government deficits as “the return of Keynes” – when, in fact, those measures had very little to do with Keynes, who counselled the use of government spending to reach full employment, and instead were aimed at bolstering the culprits of the crisis, the big banks. They were also followed by an unprecedented attack on welfare systems and workers’ rights across Europe.

Something similar is happening today, as state contracts for Covid tests, PPE, vaccines, and now vaccine passport technologies are parcelled out to transnational corporations (often through shady deals that reek of cronyism). Meanwhile, citizens are having their lives and livelihoods upended by “the new normal”. That the Left seems completely oblivious to this is particularly puzzling. After all, the idea that governments tend to exploit crises to further entrench the neoliberal agenda has been a staple of much recent Left-wing literature. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, for example, have argued that under neoliberalism, crisis has become a “method of government”. More famously, in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explored the idea of “disaster capitalism”. Her central thesis is that in moments of public fear and disorientation it is easier to re-engineer societies: dramatic changes to the existing economic order, which would normally be politically impossible, are imposed in rapid-fire succession before the public has had time to understand what is happening.

There’s a similar dynamic at play today. Take, for example, the high-tech surveillance measures, digital IDs, crackdown on public demonstrations and fast-tracking of laws introduced by governments to combat the coronavirus outbreak. If recent history is anything to go by, governments will surely find a way to make many of the emergency rules permanent – just as they did with much post-9/11 anti-terrorist legislation. As Edward Snowden noted: “When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky. The emergency tends to be expanded”. This confirms, too, the ideas on the “state of exception” posited by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who has nonetheless been vilified by the mainstream Left for his anti-lockdown position.

Ultimately, any form of government action should be judged for what it actually stands for. We support government intervention if it serves to further the rights of workers and minorities, to create full employment, to provide crucial public services, to rein in corporate power, to correct the dysfunctionalities of markets, to take control of crucial industries in the public interest. But in the past 18 months we have witnessed the exact opposite: an unparalleled strengthening of transnational corporate behemoths and their oligarchs at the expense of workers and local businesses. A report last month based on Forbes data showed that America’s billionaires alone have seen their wealth increase by US$2 trillion during the pandemic.

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Another Left-wing fantasy that has been shuttered by reality is the notion that the pandemic would usher in a new sense of collective spirit, capable of overcoming decades of neoliberal individualism. On the contrary, the pandemic has fractured societies even more – between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, between those who can reap the benefits of smart working and those who can’t. Moreover, a demos made up of traumatised individuals, torn apart from their loved ones, made to fear one another as a potential vectors of disease, terrified of physical contact – is hardly a good breeding ground for collective solidarity.

But perhaps the Left’s response can be better understood in individual rather than collective terms. Classic psychoanalytic theory has posited a clear connection between pleasure and authority: the experience of great pleasure (satiating the pleasure principle) can often be followed by a desire for renewed authority and control manifested by the ego or “reality principle”. This can indeed produce a subverted form of pleasure. The last two decades of globalisation have seen a huge expansion of the “pleasure of experience”, as shared by the increasingly transnational global liberal class – many of whom, somewhat curiously in historical terms, identified themselves as on the Left (and indeed increasingly usurped this position from the traditional working-class constituencies of the Left). This mass increase in pleasure and experience among the liberal class went with a growing secularism and lack of any recognised moral constraint or authority. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the support from this class for “Covid measures” is quite readily explained in these terms: as the desired appearance of a coterie of restrictive and authoritarian measures which can be imposed to curtail pleasure, within the strictures of a moral code which steps in where one had previously been lacking.

Another factor explaining the Left’s embrace of “Covid measures” is its blind faith in “science”. This has its roots in the Left’s traditional faith in rationalism. However, one thing is believing in the undeniable virtues of the scientific method – another is being completely oblivious to the way those in power exploit “science” to further their agenda. Being able to appeal to “hard scientific data” to justify one’s policy choices is an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of governments – it is, in fact, the essence of technocracy. However, this means carefully selecting the “science” that is supportive of your agenda – and aggressively marginalising any alternative views, regardless of their scientific value.

This has been happening for years in the realm of economics. Is it really that hard to believe that such a corporate capture is happening today with regard to medical science? Not according to John P. Ioannidis, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford University. Ioannidis made headlines in early 2021 when he published, with some colleagues of his, a paper claiming that there was no practical difference in epidemiological terms between countries that had locked down and those that hadn’t. The backlash against the paper – and against Ioannidis in particular – was fierce, especially among his fellow scientists.

This explains his recent scathing denunciation of his own profession. In an article entitled “How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science”, Ioannidis notes that most people – especially on the Left — seem to think that science operates based on “the Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism”. But, alas, that is not how the scientific community actually operates, Ioannidis explains. With the pandemic, conflicts of corporate interest exploded – and yet talking about them became anathema. He continues: “Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science – and science lost”.

Ultimately, the Left’s blatant disregard and mockery of people’s legitimate concerns (over lockdowns, vaccines or Covid passports) is shameful. Not only are these concerns rooted in actual hardship but they also stem from an understandable distrust of governments and institutions that have been undeniably captured by corporate interests. Anyone who favours a truly progressive-interventionist state, as we do, needs to address these concerns – not dismiss them.

But where the Left’s response has been found most wanting is on the world stage, in terms of the relationship of Covid restrictions to deepening poverty in the Global South. Has it really nothing to say about the enormous increase in child marriage, the collapse in schooling, and the destruction of formal employment in Nigeria, where the State Statistics agency suggests 20% of people lost their jobs during the lockdowns? What about the reality that the country with the highest Covid mortality figures and excess death rate for 2020 was Peru – which had one of the world’s strictest lockdowns? On all this, it has been virtually silent. This position must be considered in relation to the pre-eminence of nationalist politics on the world stage: the electoral failure of Left internationalists such as Jeremy Corbyn meant that broader global issues had little traction when considering a broader Western Left response to Covid-19.

It is worth mentioning that there have been outliers on the Left – radical-left and socialist movements that have come out against the prevailing management of the pandemic. These include Black Lives Matter in New York, Left Lockdown Sceptics in the UK, the Chilean urban left, Wu Ming in Italy and not least the Social Democrat-Green alliance which currently governs Sweden. But the full spectrum of Left opinion was ignored, partly due to the small number of Left-wing media outlets, but also due to the marginalisation of dissenting opinions first and foremost by the mainstream Left.

Mainly, though, this has been a historic failure from the Left, which will have disastrous consequences. Any form of popular dissent is likely to be hegemonized once again by the (extreme) Right, poleaxing any chance the Left has of winning round the voters it needs to overturn Right-wing hegemony. Meanwhile, the Left holds on to a technocracy of experts severely undermined by what is proving to be a catastrophic handling of the pandemic in terms of social progressivism. As any kind of viable electable Left fades into the past, the discussion and dissent at the heart of any true democratic process is likely to fade with it.