Pandemic welfare measures reversed fifty years of U.S. policy retreat from mutual obligation.

Evidence

Our governments didn’t do nearly as much as they could have and should have to build a true infrastructure of care and solidarity during the pandemic—not compared with what we know is possible from the New Deal and the World War II mobilizations of the home front. Still, the period when many governments paid people to stay home, and offered Covid testing and vaccination for free, represented an extreme and historic deviation from every major public policy trend of the last half century, which has been a headlong flight from the very notion that we owe one another anything by right of our shared humanity. They had no choice: without these measures, millions more would have died needlessly and entire economies would have crashed. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 766

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s overall framing of the pandemic as the moment mainstream politics briefly borrowed the language of the left, and echoes the Mirror-World thesis that the right metabolized abandoned left positions. — connects to: 1960s court rulings federalized welfare and gutted its punitive behavioral rules — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 225