Pandemics fan the instinct for closure and walling off. The U.S. can shut its borders temporarily, but there is no returning to “fortress America.” The country’s interests—and its values—are all too global.

Donald Trump’s cavalier downplaying of intelligence reports warning of a worldwide outbreak in early January—and the subsequent 70 days of what The Washington Post termed “denial and dysfunction” across his administration—squandered precious weeks when the U.S. could have taken concerted steps to prepare for and contain the coming crisis. His continued pattern of deceit and deception about the nature and scope of the public-health disaster further cost the country a “golden hour” that could have been used to begin mass production and distribution of tests and equipment, and to educate the public about the gravity of the coming pandemic and the urgent need for social distancing. A different presidential posture early on could have saved many American lives.

It didn’t have to be this way. The narrative that China is trying to promote after its rapid recovery from the virus—that its semi-totalitarian control of people and information is the only way to manage a pandemic like this—is wrong on two counts. First, China’s authoritarian instinct to suppress bad news enabled the virus to explode in Wuhan in December, when it might have been contained by the free flow of information and a rapid emergency response. Second, democratic societies in Asia—South Korea and especially Taiwan (along with a more transparent non-democracy, Singapore)—have been able to contain the virus without China’s draconian, communist-style measures. As Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has argued, they’ve done so by learning the lessons of the SARS epidemic and using strong health systems and reservoirs of public legitimacy and trust to test quickly and widely and track infected individuals.

Crises always test self-government. Unlike authoritarian regimes—which can use force, fear, and fraud to control their populations—democracies rely on open information and the consent of the governed. Unlike China, democracies cannot cover up their failures for very long. If citizens lose faith in the legitimacy of democracy as the best form of government—if their institutions cannot function effectively during a crisis, and especially if a view takes hold that authoritarian regimes are managing the crisis more “decisively”—many democracies will be at grave risk of failure.

Anne Applebaum: Epidemics reveal the truth about the societies that they hit

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic is unfolding at a time when democracy—at home and abroad—is already in distress. For more than a decade, freedom and democracy have been in recession, and more countries have lost than gained political rights and civil liberties in each of the past 14 years. In the past decade, the rate of democratic breakdown has been accelerating, and nearly a fifth of all democracies are failing (nearly double the proportion of democracies that died in each of the preceding two decades). As the advanced, postindustrial democracies have become preoccupied with their own problems and divisions; as their prestige has waned (particularly that of the U.S.) following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then the 2008 financial crisis; and as Russia and especially China have expanded their global propaganda operations, power projection, and self-confidence, democracy has been placed on the defensive.