ABC Interview: ‘In Covid’s Wake’ by Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee

In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025) is addressed to American liberals. Written by two eminent Princeton political scientists, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, it propels into the mainstream the view that, at heart, prolonged Covid lockdowns represented a failure of elite governance. A “laptop class,” primed to oppose their Republican president and possessed of plush home offices, suspended democratic deliberation and imposed restrictions on commerce, education, and association far beyond what conventional public health wisdom would have counseled. Ordinary Americans, and in particular our youngest, suffered.

 

In Tocqueville 21’s latest short-form interview—the ABC, or Author-Book-Context, interview—I press Macedo and Lee on their account of the pandemic’s class politics. Parts of their analysis, rich as it was with polarization regression models and recommendations for improved emergency governance, seemed to me to resemble more sharply class-forward varieties of anti-woke critique. “Laptop class,” or “professional-managerial class,” can fast come to prop up the same kind of confused sociological analysis as “bourgeoisie” once did. Yet Macedo and Lee sought to disabuse me of that impression; they foregrounded partisan polarization rather than social class in their responses. The book’s underlying call to introspection, moreover, seems to me fundamentally convincing. This moment in liberal discourse, heralded by the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance (2025), need not be self-flagellatory. Macedo and Lee have not intended their book to be so. The introspection, rather, can be part of a strategic retreat: a stern after-action review before the counteroffensive.

 

The interview was conducted by e-mail and has been edited for length and clarity. —Tim Vanable

 

AUTHORS

Tim Vanable, Interviewer [TV]: What has your previous scholarly work focused on? How did your backgrounds shape the division of labor you settled on for the writing of this book?

 

Frances Lee [FL]: I’m a political scientist, and my work focuses on American politics. My research and teaching center on U.S. national politics and policymaking, where I take a particular interest in the effects of party polarization. Although I am not a scholar of public health or infectious disease, variation in the pandemic response across the U.S. fit neatly into my pre-existing scholarly interests, especially given that policy in this issue area was profoundly and pervasively shaped by partisanship. I took the lead on the more empirical chapters: tracing the evolution of the policy response across the federal system over time and examining how Covid policy traded off against other public policy issues (e.g., non-Covid health, education, employment, crime, fiscal balance).

 

Stephen Macedo [SM]: I am a political theorist with—I hope!—a serious interest in empirical political science. I have written on a wide range of issues, from a defense of liberal conceptions of citizenship, civic virtue, and community against communitarian and civic republican critics, criticisms of “originalism” and defenses of moral readings of the Constitution, to conflicts surrounding the American public school system especially involving religion, to a defense of marriage equality and monogamous civil marriage, and tensions between high immigration and securing social justice domestically. I have always tried to take seriously arguments coming from the more conservative side of the political spectrum; I have never thought the truth was all on one side.

 

My interest in writing this book, which I began and then was delighted to have Frances join, was first and foremost as a window onto our profound political dysfunction, which is the result of an excess of moralized partisanship and extreme polarization, which has infected too many elite institutions including science, journalism, and, unfortunately, universities.

 

TV: Did either of you have to persuade the other of a significant piece of the argument?

 

FL: I cannot think of an example where Steve had to persuade me of something important, or vice versa. We were continually sharing research with one another as we worked on the project, and I learned a lot from him along the way. He helped to refine and sharpen my writing and arguments in the chapters on which I took the lead, and I did similarly on the chapters on which he took the lead. But our collaboration was surprisingly free of disagreement and conflict.

 

SM: I agree with Frances here. For me, this has been a seamless partnership.  She has been delighted with the things I’ve come across, and I’ve found her insights and contributions to be indispensable throughout. For me, the great thing about Frances is that she combines extraordinary rigor with an equally astonishing range of intellectual interests. She never questioned the relevance or importance of advancing an argument that was grounded in normative analysis.

 

Single parents defined as essential workers had to keep on working in person even when schools and daycares were closed. Millions of Americans lost their jobs.

 

BOOK

TV: I wonder about the tenability of ascribing a policy like extended school closures to a “laptop class.” Support for school reopenings did not fall neatly along educational lines. The parents most reluctant to send their kids back to school in blue cities in the spring of 2021 were black and Hispanic, research has consistently found, not white. And the most organized opposition to school reopenings, as you know, came from teachers’ unions, who can hardly be considered stormtroopers of the managerial elite. What really drove blue states to impose restrictions on education so far beyond those of red states and Western Europe?

 

FL & SM: Our argument is that Covid policy was profoundly shaped by class bias. The knowledge workers advocating for pandemic restrictions—public health officials, academics, think tank scholars, and opinion leaders in media and journalism—suffered vastly less from pandemic policies than economically and politically disadvantaged groups did. Pandemic policies, including but not confined to school closures, had profoundly inequitable effects along class lines. Knowledge workers were able to migrate their work online, enjoyed opportunities for travel and remote work, had the time and experience with technology to assist their children with remote schooling or the money to hire tutors, watched their asset values inflate during the pandemic, and never missed a paycheck. It was easy for such people to be blind to the harsh costs being paid by others, including the essential workers, disproportionately low-wage, who had to continue on the job regardless of their age or health status (about 1/3 of the workforce). Single parents defined as essential workers had to keep on working in person even when schools and daycares were closed. Millions of Americans lost their jobs when closures were imposed and, in many cases, had to wait months for their unemployment benefits from overwhelmed state systems. Learning losses were most severe among poor students, racial minorities, those struggling academically before the pandemic, and those with learning disabilities. Small business owners disproportionately saw their businesses close and close permanently.

 

And that is all in spite of the fact that progressive politics is defined by a special concern with the less well-off, so one might have expected greater attention to the disproportionate impact of lockdown measures on the poor, which was anticipated in the pre-Covid pandemic planning documents. In addition, there appears to have been little media coverage in the U.S. and elsewhere of the potentially profound impact of lockdown measures on developing countries. Toby Green, an award-winning scholar of African history and culture and professor at King’s College, London, argued in a 2021 book, The Covid Consensus, that the “Global South” was the most overlooked of all the world’s disadvantaged peoples. He had an important point, but few paid attention.

 

With that said, the politics of pandemic restrictions in the U.S. was primarily shaped by partisanship, not by social class. This fact should perhaps not be surprising given that it is well-off people who have the leisure time to follow public affairs and participate in politics in an ongoing way. Party structured every aspect of the pandemic response. Democratic governors imposed stay-at-home orders more quickly, kept them in place longer, maintained more restrictions even as they reopened their economies, and kept their schools closed to in-person instruction much longer. At the individual level, Democrats were more personally compliant with pandemic restrictions than Republicans.

 

Decisions about school closures fit into this larger policy landscape, which is mostly a story about partisan divides. Nevertheless, there is no question that teachers’ unions pushed for prolonged school closures, or—as they preferred to put it—they pressed for policies that would supposedly allow schools to reopen “safely” (such as large investments in new buildings and ventilation systems, elaborate testing and contact tracing regimes, requirements for classroom and school closures in the presence of positive Covid tests, etc.). The effect of these demands was to keep schools closed, but teachers’ unions claimed that they only wanted schools to be safe.

 

Although teachers unions were important players—and probably help explain why schools in all states were closed so much longer than were institutions in adult society—they do not bear primary responsibility. The single best predictor of the length of school closures—more important than local epidemiological conditions or the strength of teachers’ unions—was the partisan lean of the state and or local jurisdiction. The story of pandemic policy in the U.S. turns primarily on party polarization, not on interest-group politics.

 

We do not present an overall theory to explain why partisanship drove the pandemic response in the way it did. Undoubtedly, it has something to do with a reaction against President Trump, who vacillated on pandemic policy while musing about the cure being “worse than the disease.” There was an intense policy backlash against Trump’s call for schools to reopen in the fall of 2020, a reaction that even led the American Academy of Pediatricians to backtrack on their initial recommendation for reopening. It was an election year, and Democrats were primed to react against a president they loathed long before the pandemic, and to blame him for what they saw as a uniquely terrible pandemic response that made it too unsafe for schools to reopen.

 

The pandemic response in Europe was not nearly so party-polarized as in the U.S., which may have made it easier to evaluate the accumulating evidence in favor of school reopening. Sweden, for example, never closed schools for children under age sixteen or imposed masking or social distancing on their open schools. It became clear by early summer 2020 that Swedish teachers were not suffering high risk of severe outcomes relative to other professions in society, nor had Swedish schoolchildren suffered worse Covid outcomes than schoolchildren in countries that had closed schools. In his new book on U.S. closures during Covid, David Zweig details how little American news media attended to the reopening of schools across Europe in spring 2020. EU education ministers held two meetings (one in May, another in June 2020) at which it was reported that there was “no indication that reopening furthered the spread of COVID-19” (Zweig 2025, 145). Amazingly, Zweig finds that these announcements about the low risks associated with European school reopening received no coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, or on broadcast news (NBC, CBS, ABC).

 

 

TV: I have other doubts about the broader class determinacy of the preference sets we ended up with. Public health officials were writing pandemic-planning documents opposed to the use of broad-based non-pharmaceutical interventions as late as September 2019. They proved then, and indeed they proved during the George Floyd protests, that they were capable of subordinating narrow epidemiological concerns to broader social considerations. Tyler Cowen also points out that top vaccine scientists—in defiance, I think, of the class dynamics this book depicts—continued throughout the pandemic to publish papers dubious about the potential for vaccines to halt transmission. How contingent and localized was the most extreme of the Covid hawkishness we saw?

 

FL & SM: Our book narrates the major shift in the stance of public health officials between pre-Covid skepticism about the efficacy of non-pharmaceutical interventions to wholesale embrace of those measures. We date this shift to late April 2020, after closures had been imposed. In March and early April 2020, there were still establishment voices in mainstream media questioning the wisdom of broad-ranging closures. In mid-March, for example, former CDC director Tom Frieden pointed out: “We must consider the huge societal costs of closing schools against what may be little or no health benefit.” Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, wondered how governors would later reopen schools if they were closed when there were so few cases: “We’ve got people literally just following each other off the edge of a cliff because they’re not thinking.”

 

Our argument is not that class bias determined these decisions. Instead, we see class bias as a blindness that enabled advocates for these policies to overlook their inequitable distributive effects. In the first instance, these policies were adopted for reasons that were warned about in pre-Covid pandemic planning documents. Politicians were under enormous public pressure to “do something” in order to abate public fear and to show that they were in control. As a 2006 Institute of Medicine report examining the possible use of non-pharmaceutical interventions warned, politicians would have incentives during crises to adopt such measures “even in the absence of proven benefits and without consideration of secondary effects.”

 

Vaccine policy was driven by similar “do something” pressures, despite the lack of any evidence base that vaccines would be capable of stopping Covid transmission. The vaccine trials that were the basis of the emergency use authorization for the Covid vaccines did not even test for an effect of vaccination on Covid transmission. The end point for the Pfizer and BioNTech trials evaluated whether people in the test and control groups tested positive for Covid, not whether receipt of the vaccine protected their close contacts from catching Covid. Nevertheless, despite the lack of scientific evidence that vaccines stopped Covid transmission, CDC and other public health officials went out and told people that getting vaccinated would protect you from giving Covid to others. Rochelle Walensky, for example, told MSNBC that “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Anthony Fauci claimed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that vaccinated people become “dead ends” for the coronavirus.

 

The CDC itself had to walk back Walensky’s remarks, saying that “the evidence isn’t clear whether [people who are fully vaccinated] can spread the virus to others.” The point became incontrovertible in summer 2021 after a CDC report about an outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the virus was found to have spread quickly among fully vaccinated people. The CDC report emphasized that vaccinated people who were infected carried high levels of the virus. After this Provincetown outbreak, the CDC recommended that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people wear masks, because both were at risk of spreading Covid.

 

Nevertheless, policymakers unaccountably forged ahead with policies predicated on the idea that Covid vaccination stopped transmission, including vaccine mandates on workers. Those workplace vaccine mandates would have required frequent Covid testing of unvaccinated people, but not of vaccinated people, despite the fact it was clear by that point that vaccinated people could spread the virus, too. Our view is that false claims about the capacity of vaccines to stop transmission undermined public trust, as did the imposition of vaccine mandates predicated on those false claims.

 

TV: As the book documents, state-level Covid policy closely mirrored party alignment, with strong Democratic states imposing the most stringent measures, strong Republican states the least stringent measures, and battleground states measures somewhere in the middle. Governors who presided over their state’s pandemic response by and large were not fired by voters when up for reelection between 2020 and 2024. Liberalism, one could say, undoubtedly suffered in our knowledge-making institutions during the pandemic; constituents were undoubtedly subjected to a barrage of dishonest propaganda; but is it possible to underestimate the salience of the fact that democracy seems to have prevailed during the pandemic?

 

FL & SM: Indeed, one might say that American democracy under federalism worked quite well during the pandemic. Democratic states got the restrictive pandemic policies their residents preferred, and Republican states got the more lax policies their residents preferred. Regardless of party, governors claimed credit for handling the pandemic well and enjoyed high approval ratings. Nearly all got reelected in 2022. So in that narrow sense democracy prevailed.

 

If one holds out hope that democracy promotes the public interest in substantive ways, obviously the performance of democracy under Covid is more ambiguous. Aside from the topic of vaccines, there has been no convergence of either expert or public opinion on what pandemic policies advanced the public good. We still don’t know what non-pharmaceutical interventions worked, if any. Reviewing the available research, Scotland’s official COVID-19 inquiry concludes: “There was insufficient evidence in 2020—or alternatively no evidence” to support most pandemic measures—including “face mask mandates outside of healthcare settings, lockdowns, social distancing, [and] test, trace and isolate measures”—and “the evidence base has not changed materially in the intervening three years.” If one holds out hope that democracy can mean more than “policymaking in accord with public preferences,” then it is hard to see how American democracy performed well under Covid.

 

Young people seem especially eager to engage, perhaps because a discussion of this topic finally allows them to have their experiences and sacrifices acknowledged.

 

CONTEXT

TV: The Vietnam War generated endless debate both on university campuses and in ordinary political channels over the federal government’s misconduct. Why the greatest promoters of lockdowns would not want to talk about the pandemic today is obvious. But why haven’t ordinary Americans seemed interested in it either?

 

FL & SM: It is a painful topic to reexamine. The closures that were initially imposed were hugely popular across party lines. A Pew Research poll found that 87% of Americans and large majorities of both parties approved of the closures and other restrictions implemented in March. Nobody likes to feel that they have been duped, so that fact alone likely accounts for some disinclination to reexamine the past. This generalization would apply even more strongly to those who advocated most strongly for pandemic restrictions. University campuses tended to be more restrictive than society generally, and those policies received broad support from faculty. It isn’t pleasant to consider the possibility that one might have been wrong about something so important.

 

Add to that the fact that a comprehensive reckoning with respect to the Covid response may not pay the sorts of clear partisan dividends that so many are so concerned with these days. It is hard to find evidence to support the efficacy of lockdowns and school closures, which persisted considerably longer in Blue states on average. On the other hand, vaccine hesitancy has taken a considerable toll in Red states.

 

With that said, we have some doubts about the premise of the question. Our book has received a much stronger response from audiences than we were anticipating. We have had many media inquiries and invitations to discuss the book. We have had emails from people around the country reacting to the work. Young people seem especially eager to engage, perhaps because a discussion of this topic finally allows them to have their experiences and sacrifices acknowledged. It is hard to know what the public taste would be for the sort of content our book delivers given that there are so few people delivering it. We spoke to a major national media figure recently who did not realize until our conversation that so-called gain-of-function research—research that makes viruses more transmissible or more dangerous, such as the research that the U.S. has funded in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere—was still going on.

 

We are puzzled by the extent to which elites in the media, science, and the academy—our peers—have been complicit in downplaying or ignoring stories of enormous and ongoing public significance related to Covid. And this is in spite of the fact that Covid 19 led to the most deadly pandemic in a century and the greatest global crisis since World War II. We know of no law school conferences on the free speech issues raised by the Biden Administration’s extensive and secretive efforts to suppress social media posts at odds with administration policy, as detailed in the case of Missouri v. Biden (renamed Murthy v. Missouri on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court). We know of few, if any, university conferences aiming to comprehensively assess the nation’s Covid response. We are unaware of major conferences reassessing the profound risks and uncertain benefits of gain-of-function research on deadly pathogens. 

 

It seems to us something is wrong.

 

To find our other ABC interviews, click here.