The coronavirus crisis has put scientific expertise back in the political driving seat. After years of undermining by populists, the urgency of the situation means chief medical officers and central bankers are now calling the shots. The time for playing around with the truth is over. Though there are some, like Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro, who hold out against the tide, support for their positions is slipping. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has changed his tune, and is now being praised for listening to experts.

Technocracy seems to be back. But how definitive is this shift, and will the authority of science be bolstered or weakened by the drastic responses to coronavirus?

The rancorous politics that ensued from the twin 2016 shocks of Trump and Brexit seem a long time ago. Those events prompted some to declare the end of the ‘End of History’, the period first announced by Francis Fukuyama. As the US scholar proclaimed in 1989, liberal democracy was the final form of human government; the big questions were settled, and all there was left to do was enact ‘evidence-based policy’. Beginning in 2008, this ideology began to unravel: the global financial crisis dealt a blow to neoclassical economic expertise, and the 2016 events devastated the authority of pollsters and pundits. The experts had failed us.

But now, under the extraordinary conditions in which we find ourselves, most Western states have been given over to a high-handed epidemiological technocracy. The liberal press is not-so-subtly pleased by this situation, quite satisfied to declare the present a “time for experts” and to remind us that “the crisis has reinforced the value of mainstream media.” A recent Financial Times editorial concedes that “one of the few silver linings of the Covid-19 cloud is the return of respect for scientists and specialists, after rising populism threatened to push them to the margins.” Meanwhile, representative institutions are being sensible. UK Parliament dissolved itself so as to “lead by example”. The independent Bank of England has stepped up and is providing unlimited Quantitative Easing. Technicians rule, populists are cowed.

It is worth recalling that pre-pandemic politics had been in a nervous state. The establishment, in particular its liberal wing—that is, parties of the broad center, civil servants, NGOs, the academy, the media—did not react very well to the ‘end of the End of History’. For many, it felt like an inexplicable and unconscionable turn of events; the populists were winning. In the Anglophone world, the status quo ante of Obama and Cameron may not have pleased everyone—be it the austerity economics or the foreign policies—but there was a recognition that at least these were sensible, rational politicians.

2016 witnessed a full meltdown. Trump was held to be a great aberration in the history of the US presidency. Some even thought he could be the last ever president, or at any rate that he signalled the end of American exceptionalism. Brexit meanwhile was national suicide. Indeed, it might lead to actual suicide. This could not be happening. There were no explanations for why, either. It must have been due to nefarious foreign interference (we’re looking at you, Mr. Putin) or political lies. Voters were deplorable or, at best, misled victims.

Suddenly, the most outré conspiracy theories were finding a home amidst a social stratum that sees itself as the moral and intellectual guardian of society. British journalist Carole Cadwalladr won a prestigious journalism prize for refusing to countenance that her side had lost a fair election. Rachel Maddow pretended the Cold War never ended and ranted about subversive foreign agents, rather like the sort of tinpot dictator she would otherwise admonish. George W Bush, mocked in the 2000s (much in the same way that Trump is today), was rehabilitated as a voice of reason. Even Silvio Berlusconi became an anti-populist. This nostalgia for an extremely recent (and rather mediocre) past found risible objects of longing. Witness the belief in Britain that the London 2012 Olympics was a civilizational pinnacle, only a year after riots burned through cities across the country.

This inability on the part of a complacent liberal establishment to accept, explain and respond to political change became so widespread as to require labelling. ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ seemed insufficient: after all, panic about fake news was global, and a failure to take responsibility for sowing the seeds for populism was the sin of establishment liberals everywhere. The people reacting with incredulity to the events of 2016 were the same who had allowed regional inequalities to grow, opportunistically played to anti-immigration sentiment, and maintained sadistic tight money policies. Instead of a political reckoning, liberal establishments across the West gave themselves over to unhinged fantasies of imminent fascist takeover.

On the podcast that I co-host, Aufhebunga Bunga, we thus proposed ‘Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome’ (NOBS) to describe the psychotic reaction to the fracturing of the neoliberal order, that world in which political decision-making would take its cue from experts rather than popular pressures and demands. For someone like Tony Blair, a neoliberal through and through, the post-2016 world was a “populist nightmare”—as he called the 2019 faceoff between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. Further to the left (where ‘neoliberal’ is understandably a slur), political change also proved difficult to handle: the idea that “progressives” would not be the immediate beneficiaries of the breakdown was unthinkable. But so it proved. Rather than offer self-criticism over UK Labour’s missteps, journalist Paul Mason lashed out over the 2019 election result, spitefully calling it “a victory of the old over the young, racists over people of colour, selfishness over the planet.”

NOBS embraces a range of different symptoms. The incredulity and denial of political change was followed by a lack of belief in political causation. If the Democrats lost the rust belt, then surely Obama’s economic policies were at fault? No, it must be something else… maybe the deplorables’ inherent racism? (Never mind that in key counties, many had voted for Obama before switching to Trump in 2016). This incuriousness about what motivated political change, and why voters might have broken with liberalism, led many to reach for cognitive or informational theories. Surely it was the mind-control techniques of Cambridge Analytica or Putin’s bots that did it? And if that didn’t prove satisfactory, the liberal establishment could always play the victim. The well-heeled and well-educated—who now largely vote for center-left and liberal parties—were, we learned, the real unfortunates. Here came the #Resistance.

Was this all a short-lived spasm, one that will be forgotten after the COVID crisis wreaks its havoc? A few months ago the British commentator Will Hutton was suggesting Boris Johnson was a fascist. Now he celebrates Johnson’s rather banal recognition that ‘we live in a society’, and eagerly awaits further anti-pandemic action from the Prime Minister. As the role of the state grows, the demand from progressives is now merely for more quarantine, and quicker. If NOBS is no longer symptomatic, could it be that the pandemic, and its seeming vindication of expert-led politics, have put the professional-managerial classes at ease?

Liberals would never come out and admit that they actually wanted this world of emergency measures, states of exceptions and draconian lockdowns, but the inverse proportion of cases of NOBS and COVID suggests otherwise. Could the same highly educated ‘progressive neoliberals’ whose heads spun in 2016—and continued spinning for the past few years—really feel more at home now, in 2020?

Evidence shows that people in the center of the political spectrum are more authoritarian and less wedded to democracy and liberal institutions than either those on the left or the right. Liberal Hollywood has served us up dark dreams of pandemic and lockdown for quite a while now. If it’s true that the dystopias we dream up are the ones we secretly desire, then is our exceptional situation not the one centrists craved? If this sounds like an outrageous proposition, consider whose authority is being redeemed at this moment. Professionals and specialists are being listened to. Expertise has a direct pipeline to power. Flouters of quarantine—be they errant fun-seekers or Trumpian protesters—can be shouted at and even shopped to the police, by those armed with the right knowledge and sense of urgency of the moment. Evidence-based moral certitude is finally at hand.

So has Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome been cured by the virus? This seems unlikely, so profound and universal were these pathologies. We might instead consider the patient to be experiencing ‘terminal lucidity’—the clarity that sufferers regain just before death. In other words, this might be a mere end-of-life rally for technocracy.

The global revolt against political establishments, rooted in a profound lack of legitimacy and distrust of elites, will not evaporate. Medical professionals consistently score towards the top of the trust charts, so it might be natural that, in a pandemic, we would see a return of trust to politics, as long as the authority for making political decisions is deferred to medical experts.

But it is worth recalling that experts cannot rule directly, because they are divided as to analyses, models and courses of action. Politicians are discovering that ‘The Science’ isn’t as settled as they thought, and scientists are just as ‘political’ as anyone. The scientists, for their part, are disgruntled by the realization that politicians are hiding behind the evidence, in a play to avoid political responsibility.

So it’s not as easy as to say, ‘put the experts in charge’. Which epidemiological model’s assumptions are best? Priorities, values and interests need to be mobilized in order to adjudicate, and this is an intensely political process. Does your epidemiological model assume a free market in the provision of personal protective equipment or a state-directed allocation of resources? Does it assume people will stay at home because their jobs and wages are guaranteed? In the UK, scientists did not initially push for lockdown, believing it was not politically feasible.

The strains against this technocratic revival are already being felt. Protest thus far has been confined to middle-class, right-wing rebels against the lockdown, outraged that they cannot play golf or get a haircut. But what happens when the working class refuses to be the victim? Appealing to the supposed virtues of the ‘scientifically mandated’ lockdown—really, a white-collar quarantine—will not suffice.

It is worth recalling that popular distrust of ‘experts’ was never about expertise as such. The problem was the veto power of those who wield self-serving knowledge over the rest of us, and over all other values and principles. That was the source of antagonism. Who will bear the brunt if larger bodies of citizens begin to call BS on that veto power?

Contrary to the intentions of liberal technocracy boosters, science itself may end up taking the flack. When politicians and intellectuals misleadingly hold up ‘The Science’ as writ—rather than treating science as an open-ended process of discovery—they create unrealistic expectations as to how consolidated that knowledge is, and how capable we are of acting on it. Technocracy and its advocates, in seeking to enthrone evidence as the guide to politics, unwittingly erode the authority of science by articulating it to narrow political imperatives. Future cries to ‘listen to the science’ may sadly fall on deaf ears.

But it is not just outmoded liberal centrists who are falling into this trap. The Left has largely given itself over to cheerleading the lockdowns too. Mass quarantines may well prove to be a lamentable necessity; or they may be shown to have been a grave misstep. What we do already know is that they were the fruit of a panicked response. When we uphold with moral certitude the continued need for lockdown, we distract from governments’ lack of preparation and implementation of pandemic responses, and unwittingly serve the narrow interests of liberals. The shortage of personal protective equipment and the absence of testing and tracing regimes are damning; governments must be held to account. Would left-wing energies, then, not be better served fighting layoffs and lost incomes, defending civil liberties, and fighting for appropriate protection for essential workers—rather than carrying water for technocracy?

This world-historic crisis is an opportunity to fundamentally alter inequalities of wealth and power. Failing to do that because you don’t want to appear to be in accordance with the right-wing denialists is myopic. Soon, elites will need to provide for a resumption of the conditions for capital accumulation in a drastically changed world. This really is the end of the End of History. A form of state capitalism is emerging, by iteration and experimentation rather than by design. Will it be authoritarian or democratic? Will it be universalist or exclusionary? To try to lay low and let the pandemic storm blow over, all the while urging everyone else to seek shelter, is to abandon the crisis to the powers that be. Neoliberalism is ending, but that does not mean we will suddenly get to have nice things.

For liberals living in the vain hope that this pandemus ex machina might resuscitate evidence-based policy, now might be a good opportunity to embrace political change and rediscover leadership through persuasion, rather than through scientific diktat. This is the only way liberals will be able to guarantee whatever values they hold dear—be it tolerance or rationality or individualism. Judging by centrism’s recent record, though, it’s likely that the liberal establishment will abandon itself again to nervous breakdown once the full unfolding of this crisis is laid bare.

Alex Hochuli is a freelance writer and research consultant based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is the co-host of the global politics podcast, Aufhebunga Bunga, and co-author of the forthcoming Politics at the End of the End of History (Zero Books, 2020).