It’s been years, but the air still feels heavy. You can’t walk through a grocery store or scroll through a news feed without sensing that something in the American psyche—and specifically in our halls of power—snapped during the pandemic. We expected a "rally 'round the flag" moment. We got a demolition derby instead. Honestly, looking back at in covid's wake: how our politics failed us, the most striking thing isn't just that people died, but that our political systems seemed to treat the crisis as a campaign opportunity rather than a national emergency.
Leadership failed. Not just one person, or one party, but the entire infrastructure of how we govern.
The Great Partisan Divorce
Remember the early days of 2020? There was this brief, flickering second where it felt like we might actually pull together. Then the masks came out. What should have been a simple piece of medical cloth became a tribal sigil. If you wore one, you were a "sheep" to half the country; if you didn't, you were a "grandma killer" to the other half. This didn't happen by accident.
Political leaders realized early on that nuance doesn't win elections. Polarization does. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, the U.S. showed some of the widest partisan gaps in the world regarding pandemic response. While other nations had heated debates, we had a cultural civil war. The CDC became a political football. One week they were the gold standard; the next, they were being accused of "deep state" meddling or, conversely, of being too soft on corporations by shortening quarantine windows.
It was exhausting. It still is.
Politicians on both sides found that fear was a more effective mobilizer than facts. When leaders use a virus to score points against their rivals, the public stops trusting the message. They stop trusting the science. Eventually, they stop trusting each other. That’s the real legacy of how our politics failed us: a complete breakdown of the social contract.
Public Health vs. The Polling Place
Dr. Anthony Fauci became a household name, but for all the wrong reasons. In a functioning political system, a public health official is a boring bureaucrat who gives technical advice. In our failed system, he became a Rorschach test.
We saw governors like Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom become proxies for two entirely different Americas. In Florida, the focus was on "freedom" and keeping the economy open, often at the expense of clear-eyed risk communication. In California, strict mandates were the rule, until the very leaders enforcing them were caught at the French Laundry without a mask. These weren't just policy differences. They were performative acts of political theater that left the average person wondering who, if anyone, was actually looking out for their health.
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The Economic Mirage
Let’s talk about the money. Because, boy, was there a lot of it.
The CARES Act and subsequent relief packages were massive. On paper, they saved the economy from a total freefall. But look closer. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was riddled with fraud. Billions—not millions, billions—of taxpayer dollars went to people who didn't need it or didn't exist. According to reports from the SBA Office of Inspector General, the scale of the grift was staggering.
Why did this happen? Because our politics prioritizes speed and optics over oversight.
- Congress wanted to look like they were doing something.
- The executive branch wanted to flood the zone with cash before an election.
- The result was a transfer of wealth that, in many cases, bypassed the very frontline workers it was supposed to protect.
Small businesses shuttered while "essential" big-box retailers saw record profits. This wasn't just bad luck. It was a policy choice. When we look at in covid's wake: how our politics failed us, we have to acknowledge that the "relief" often mirrored the pre-existing inequalities that our political system has ignored for decades.
The Education Gap We Refuse to Fix
School closures might be the most lasting political failure of the bunch. This wasn't just about "learning loss." It was about the total collapse of the school as a social safety net.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed the largest drop in math scores for 9-year-olds in thirty years. But the political response? Mostly finger-pointing. Republicans blamed teachers' unions. Democrats blamed a lack of federal funding. Meanwhile, kids in wealthy districts had private tutors and "learning pods," while kids in rural or low-income urban areas disappeared from the system entirely.
We traded the long-term mental health and educational stability of a generation for short-term political posturing. It's a debt we’ll be paying for thirty years.
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The Trust Deficit
You can't run a democracy without trust. It's the grease in the gears.
Right now, trust in the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Presidency is at or near historic lows. The pandemic acted as an accelerant. When the "science" changed—which it naturally does during a live outbreak—politicians didn't explain the process of discovery. They used the shifts to call their opponents liars.
This created a vacuum. And you know what fills a vacuum?
Conspiracy theories. Misinformation. Grift.
When people feel like their government is lying to them for political gain, they turn to "alternative" sources. We saw this with the rise of Ivermectin and the anti-vax movement. Some of this was legitimate skepticism of a rushed process, but a lot of it was a direct result of political leaders delegitimizing expertise whenever it didn't align with their stump speeches.
The Healthcare System that Wasn't
We spend more on healthcare than any other developed nation. Yet, during the pandemic, we ran out of masks. We ran out of vents. We ran out of nurses.
Our politics failed because we have a "just-in-time" healthcare system designed for profit, not for resilience. For years, public health funding had been gutted at the state and local levels. When the fire started, we realized we’d sold the fire trucks to pay for a tax cut.
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- Nurse Burnout: Thousands left the profession, not just because of the virus, but because of the administrative nightmare and lack of support.
- Supply Chains: We realized we couldn't make basic antibiotics or PPE in our own country.
- Rural Hospital Closures: While we were arguing about mandates, rural hospitals were—and still are—closing at an alarming rate because the "market" decided they weren't profitable.
Looking Forward: How to Stop the Bleeding
We can't change what happened in 2020 or 2021. But we are still living in covid's wake: how our politics failed us today. If we don't fix the underlying rot, the next crisis (whether it's another virus, a climate disaster, or a financial meltdown) will follow the same script.
It's not about "returning to normal." Normal was the problem.
We need a political culture that values competence over charisma. That sounds boring, right? Good. Government should be a little bit boring. It should be about logistics, infrastructure, and clear communication.
Actionable Steps for a Post-Pandemic World
- Demand Independent Oversight: We need a non-partisan "9/11 Style" commission that actually has teeth. Not to assign blame for a "win," but to identify exactly where the supply chains broke and why the CDC's messaging was so inconsistent. We need the raw truth, even if it makes both parties look bad.
- Decouple Public Health from Election Cycles: We should look at models where health agency heads have staggered terms that don't align with the Presidency. This reduces the pressure to "say the right thing" to keep a job.
- Invest in Local Resilience: Stop waiting for a federal "saviour." The most effective responses often happened at the community level. Support local health departments and community-led mutual aid. These are the people who actually know who needs help in a crisis.
- Hold Leaders Accountable for Misinformation: This is the hard one. We have to stop rewarding politicians who use "alternative facts" to rile up the base. If a leader prioritizes a viral clip over a life-saving truth, they don't deserve the office.
- Fix the Healthcare Infrastructure: We need to move away from the "just-in-time" model. Building stockpiles and maintaining excess capacity in hospitals isn't "wasteful"—it's an insurance policy for civilization.
The pandemic was a stress test. We failed. The engine smoked, the tires blew out, and we ended up in the ditch. But the car is still fixable if we stop screaming at each other long enough to pick up a wrench.
Politics failed us because we allowed it to become a spectator sport instead of a tool for collective survival. The wake of the pandemic is still washing over us. We can either learn to swim together, or we can keep drowning in the same partisan vitriol that got us here in the first place.
The next move is to look at your local school board and city council. That is where the most immediate failures happened, and it’s the only place where you can directly influence how the next "unprecedented" event is handled. Check their meeting minutes from 2021. See who prioritized grandstanding over the actual data. Start there.