European Space Agency

By Lisa Van Dusen

December 5, 2024

On December 1st, 2019, the first laboratory-confirmed case of SARS-CoV-2 was diagnosed in Wuhan, China. By December 8th, 41 other people had been diagnosed. The first case in Canada was confirmed in British Columbia on January 25, 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) named the acute respiratory disease “COVID-19” on February 11, 2020. On March 11, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. By St. Patrick’s Day, Canada’s lockdown had begun.

These facts provide the basic early timeline of the pandemic, absent the revised first-case scenarios, the Wuhan bat POV, the geopolitical domination theorizing and the worldwide infamy of the Hunan Seafood Wholesale Market. (As with all events of consequence these days, readers are encouraged to choose their own adventure among the deluge of available plot lines).

Between 2020 and 2022, COVID-19 and the socioeconomic lockdown it provoked “sent shock waves through the world economy and triggered the largest global economic crisis in more than a century,” per the World Bank.

The health and economic impacts of the pandemic and lockdown on human beings were multiplied by blocked supply chains, inflation, shrinkflation, housing market disruption, accelerated automation, and a range of societal issues from the transformative normalization of remote work and social distancing to, according to WHO, a 25% increase in anxiety and depression worldwide. It has also, at this writing, killed 7,076,316 people, 60,000 of them in Canada, with WHO placing the number of total excess, direct and indirect deaths associated with the pandemic at 14.9 million in 2020-21 alone.

In positive terms, the pandemic and lockdown revealed in humanity levels of resourcefulness, adaptability, resiliency, creativity, and adversity-spawned solidarity previously unseen outside wartime. It made comparing sourdough starters a thing, and DIY grooming a whole new realm of improvisation. “Our untrimmed lockdown locks made Zoom galleries look like the Brady Bunch hippies episode,” looking back to my 2021 Policy piece,  A Key Pandemic Takeaway: The People Prevailed.

Today, five years after COVID first emerged, the pendulum has swung back not to a pre-pandemic status quo but to an altered, post-pandemic reality whose defining characteristics will forever be judged through the prism of a global health crisis and its aftermath.

That reality includes this year of democratic disruption, in which people in more than 70 countries representing half the world’s population voted in elections of varying degrees of free-ness and fairness, with outcomes in 80% of those elections bad news for incumbent governments.

“It could be something directly to do with the long-term effects of the COVID pandemic,” University of Manchester political scientist Rob Ford (no relation) told the AP last month about the anti-incumbency trend. “A big wave of ill health, disrupted education, disrupted workplace experiences and so forth making people less happy everywhere, and they are taking it out on governments.”

“A kind of electoral long COVID,” he added.

Political anxiety has replaced pandemic anxiety, with 69% of respondents in the 2024 Stress in America survey reporting that the presidential election was a source of ‘significant stress’ in their lives.

Whether citizens across the world have become addicted to anxiety via the gateway of pandemic stress and now rely on belligerent, fearmongering autocratic actors for their supply, or anti-democracy interests have leveraged the transformative impact of the lockdown to extend its disruption dividend, many of the leaders who have been elected or re-elected in the great churn of 2024 are not fans of peace, order and good government. At least not the democratic version.

So, political anxiety has seamlessly replaced pandemic anxiety, with 69% of respondents in the American Psychological Association (APA) 2024 Stress in America survey reporting that the US presidential election was a source of “significant stress” in their lives.

From Narendra Modi to Nicolas Maduro to Donald Trump – just three “illiberal” leaders who’ve manifested melodramatic, often criminal, sometimes violent, always propaganda-camouflaged efforts to secure a state of permanent incumbency – power has been entrenched this year in ways that are clearly not meant to serve the interests of citizens. In the context of global change rationalized by anti-incumbency sentiment, they might be categorized as Stage 2 autocrats who’ve sufficiently doubled down on anti-democracy change through multiple election cycles to be anti-incumbency proof, but are still abusing the features of democracy (including the courts, the media, the legislative branch, security interests, etc.) to continue weaken the system as an existential threat.

“The supposed popularity of authoritarian leaders belies the cruel and unjust lengths they have gone to to stifle political competition, restrict civil liberties, and undermine the rule of law,” wrote Freedom House Vice President Adrian Shahbaz in July of the first half of the 2024 outcomes. “In contrast, low approval ratings for democratic leaders should not be mistaken for declining faith in democracy. Recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows that support for representative democracy remains high, even if voters are dissatisfied with the results their democracies are delivering.”

If, as Shahbaz’s piece states via subhead, “a popular autocrat is an oxymoron”, are autocrats winning because the misrepresentation of popularity has – like so many other trademarks of autocracy, from the targeting of citizens by intelligence and security agencies to the corruption capture of the media and judiciary – migrated from full dictatorships to fragile and besieged democracies?

Our recent clash of world orders, including the competition over which one would ultimately prevail post-pandemic – autocracy or democracy – has come down to which side owns narrative outcomes and, therefore, which side owns change. One side has been willing not just to resort to, but to embrace what has become the 21st century’s borderless covert operations, change-owning arsenal of strategic corruption, tactical misrepresentation, performative propaganda, rhetorical bullying, coercive chaos and brute force over diplomacy to produce otherwise impossible results as a means of anti-democracy power consolidation. This century’s war on democracy is based on operations, not ideology.

Meanwhile, the truly important questions surrounding these events have been largely upstaged and eclipsed by an accompanying contagion of chaos, coercive and otherwise. Since 2016, major democracies from Britain to the United States to Germany to France to Canada have been experiencing varying degrees of siege by tactical intractability, obstructive propaganda, operationalized regime change and autocracy-normalizing policy assaults posing as right-wing populism.

The good news is, of course, that the Five Eyes countries plus Germany and France ‑ representing the most well-resourced, omniscient, intelligence and narrative disruption force in history ‑ have finally launched the Global Defense of Democracy Task Force to combat all the chaos and save democracy. (Ooops…Please disregard that misleading piece of disinformation – they’re doing no such thing!!).

In classic operational form, democracy itself is being framed as the cause of this ongoing contagion of chaos rather than the target, in the same way an individual victim of an incrimination frame-up, honeytrap operation, legal entrapment, financial depletion narrative or orchestrated political defenestration is meticulously, systematically portrayed as the architect of their own misfortune.

Which makes this latest global war on democracy much more insidious than any previous one, if not quite as deadly as a global pandemic.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, deputy editor at iPolitics, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.