American “Populism” and the Spatial Contradictions of US Govern-ment in the Time of COVID-19

John Agnew

doi:10.5209/geop.69018

Abstract

President Donald Trump has been the public face of the blundering managerial response of the US federal government to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, beyond Trump’s personal failure lies a failure of the US governmental system. More specifically, the role of the federal government in fashioning nationwide policies across a range of areas, including public health, that one think would be empowered by a self-defined “nationalist” or right-wing populist in the White House, has been crippled by an anti-federalist ideology and the institutional inertia it has created. These have roots going back to the 1980s and the distortion of historic US federalism that these have entailed.

Highlights

Pandemics are by definition global in character and spread from place to place through travel and community spread. They are a test for different governmental systems and the geopolitical arrangements upon which they rest
Much of the critique has focused on the lackluster performance of President Donald Trump; from his months-long dismissal of the dangers posed by the pandemic to his chaotic administrative approach to the challenges posed by the spread of the virus
The manifest federal-government failures in managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the US are the outcome of this contradiction

Summary

Introduction

Pandemics are by definition global in character and spread from place to place through travel and community spread. They are a test for different governmental systems and the geopolitical arrangements upon which they rest. There is a fundamental contradiction between a President like Trump elected on a national-populist basis and the reality of a national-level governmental system that since the 1980s has been increasingly anti-federalist in its legislative and executive preferences for privatization and “small government” and immune to any sort of forward-looking role for the federal government in domestic policy. The manifest federal-government failures in managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the US are the outcome of this contradiction

Trump and National-Populism

Populism and the National

The Retreat of the Federal Government since the 1980s

The Spatial Paradox of Trump’s “Populism” and the COVID-19 Pandemic