The state we're in: will the pandemic revolutionise the role of government?

The state has been in retreat since the 80s heyday of Reagan and Thatcher but that could change as coronavirus delivers a shock to the system of historic proportions

Ronald Reagan’s 1986 wisecrack – “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help” – would not get a lot of laughs today. In much of the world, people are desperate for the government to show up and rise to the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic.

Reagan’s attitude to government solidified into orthodoxy for more than three decades, spreading abroad – particularly in the UK with the help of Margaret Thatcher – and captured the centre ground of politics in both countries.

The antipathy to the state was selective: Reagan, like Donald Trump today, racked up huge deficits, spent heavily on defence and built up a system of corporate welfare through subsidies and tax breaks. But on both sides of the Atlantic, the prevailing wisdom was the state should wherever possible get out of the business of trying to control inequality and provide services to the less fortunate.

There are already some signs that the Covid-19 shock may challenge those attitudes. Disease and mass unemployment have always been far better recruiting sergeants for the cause of big government than any party manifesto – and this crisis is unlikely to be an exception.

Some social scientists and historians argue that this pandemic could become a turning point in social history – on a par with the New Deal in the US or the post-war Labour government in the UK.

“We’ve been on this kind of trajectory for last 30-odd years where the individual was taking priority over the collective. And now we’re actually back into the kind of spirit that our parents and grandparents lived through in which communities have to pull together,” Fiona Hill, a British-born historian who served on Trump’s national security council.