What ’ s in a Name Post-liberalism, COVID-19 and Science (Education)

. This paper argues that the coterminous trends of post-liberalism ’ s shifting global power relations and right wing populism (RWP) have been apparent in the persistent attacks on the World Health Organisation, controversies over the SARS-CoV-2 name, and other forms of disinformation during the current pandemic. Scientific expertise and technocratic knowledge have been diminished in a cacophony of political blaming and posturing, exposing once again the entangled nature of science and politics. It is critical for science education to consider this perspective given its central role in the production of future science and medical professionals able to navigate highly charged and contested political spaces.

virus hides no deeper meaning," the global response to COVID-19 has emerged as an assemblage -a technoscientific, geopolitical, sociocultural and economic fluidity -that contrarily veers from gracious acknowledgements for those on the 'front line' ('clap for carers'), to deep ambivalence (sometimes disregard, as in the case of the hydroxychloroquine dispute) for expert health advice, even as that same advice is simultaneously legitimated and disparaged from political podiums. The President of the Federation of American Scientists, Ali Nouri, on April 15th, 2020, denounced the Trump administration's response as "grossly inadequate," admonishing it for "not letting the science drive the conversation … We're letting the Dow Jones Industrial Average drive the conversation and that has been a problem … ." A month later in the US, despite the virus' human costs (topping 100,000 deaths as I write), little seems to have changed. On May 12th 2020, at the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Senate Committee hearing on reopening the US economy, Republican Rand Paul challenged Trump's most senior pandemic advisor and Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci, when the latter urged caution: "Dr. Fauci, I don't think you're the end-all. … We can listen to your advice but there are people on the other side saying there's not going to be a surge [in cases] and that we can safely open the economy" (Feuer & Wilkie, 2020).
So why are the expert "scientists and other respected professionals" (to borrow Pelosi's phase) from the WHO and national institutions like the CDC (which has been heavily criticised by the Trump Administration) being simultaneously valorised and vilified? Clearly, understanding the "contiguous nature of science and politics" is now more pressing than ever, as we grapple with arresting the pandemic and charting new ways forward. It is a fundamental question for science education to consider, given its role in the production of future science and medical professionals, who will be called to navigate these highly charged and contested political spaces. Moreover, the virus has thrown the public's understanding of science into renewed focus, underscoring the importance of the technical knowledge required to interpret graphs, growth rates and spread, understand basic virology, vaccine development, antibodies, hygiene and so on. Long an agenda within science education, the public understanding of science is vital to enable citizens to distinguish disinformation and 'fake news' from important public health messages, promoting public acceptance of social distancing, contract tracing and other practices fast becoming the new normal.
Developing a perspective on some aspects of the current geopolitical landscape helps render the entangled scientific and political currents of the COVID-19 pandemic a little more intelligible. More specifically, the coterminous trends of post-liberalism's shifting power relations and the rise of right wing populism (RWP) offer some explanation, I believe, as to why scientific expertise and technocratic knowledge has been diminished in a cacophony of political posturing and blaming. Developing this argument requires a more detailed political discussion -in this case, genealogy -than is usual in science education scholarship, but finds support in the 2021American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting theme requiring political literacy to better understand the interplay between our scholarship and societies (AERA, 2020). Hence, I begin with a review of the Western political positions of liberalism, neoliberalism and post-liberalism, focusing on the decline in the liberal global economic order in place since the 1950s, thereby proposing the contemporary post-liberalism trend as a consequence of its liberal and neoliberal antecedents. Following on, I consider the rise of RWP as an instance of postliberalism apparent not only in the recent attacks on scientific elites/experts/institutions, but also in declining multilateralism that erodes organisations like the WHO. I finish with some comments on the effects of these trends for science education though its early days in these fluid spaces.

Liberalism and Neoliberalism
Liberalism can be understood as the ideology, political theory, practice and discourse of modernity. With its roots in the Western Enlightenment, and in its many iterations across various temporal, geographic and sociocultural settings, the liberal project, Gray (1995) argues, sought universal principles by which plural and divergent conceptions of the world could coexist. Generally, three facets of liberalism have been important in the West, post World War 2. Firstly, 'embedded liberalism,' agreed at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference shaping future international governance/economics, meant Keynesian economics and regulated market capitalism within social democracies (Ruggie, 2003). In many settings, this rationale underpinned the creation of the welfare state. Secondly, liberalism informed the establishment of multilateral institutions and bureaucracies like the United Nations, of which the WHO is a part, and spaces for international debate and accord (Helleiner, 2019). Finally, the moral purpose always encoded and prominent within liberalism was increasingly expressed in progressive agendas like individual and human rights, gender and racial equality, and religious tolerance (Duncombe & Dunne, 2018). Science (as Western modern science), engineering and other specialist rational technocratic knowledges and practices flourished under this liberal world order. Since Bretton Woods, liberalism has arguably been US dominated -economically, politically, militarily and diplomatically -and, while clearly a hegemonic and colonialising project, it has enabled some functional multilateral consensus and emancipation (Barrinha & Renard, 2020). Gray (1995), however, reminds us that what was fit for purpose in modernity was always going to flounder in the postmodern.
Social welfare liberalism began to fray during the 1970s fiscal crises, when Keynesian economics could not halt stagflation. At the same time, increased technological innovation, digitisation, extensive physical infrastructure growth, greater global mobility, identity politics and the decolonialisation of the Global South, was propelling the world economy into its next stage -globalisation. Neoliberalism prevailed as the new mode of capitalist global relations, privileging free markets above regulated social capitalism. The welfare state and domestic economic sovereignty was out and the financialisaton of the global economy was in. The state's new mission was to govern principally for the market, drafting laws, instituting (fiscal and other) regulatory apparatuses, and recalibrating public administrative entities to align with the enterprise state. Competition was the central logic upon which neoliberal marketisation rested: competition between enterprises, between workers, for goods and services, and for scarce natural resources. Along with the highly visible 'winners,' competition also produced 'losers,' be they nations, groups or individuals, allowing Davis (2014) to observe that competition and inequality are the very essence of neoliberalism.
By the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and onwards, neoliberal globalisation was so dominant that it prompted Francis Fukuyama (1992) to proclaim the 'end of history.' Nations around the world including Russia and China embraced market economies as the only way of doing business, with China, in particular, a spectacular 'winner.' Over these decades, institutions and practices of liberal multilateralism also reflected the changes from social welfarism to neoliberalism with many multilateral organisations being reformed along corporatised market lines (Helleiner, 2019).
Twenty-five years on, however, global markets have reconfigured the world's economic and sociopolitical landscape to such an extent that even powerful states like the US could not protect their citizens from the resultant inequality. Economist Thomas Philippon (2018) argues that globalisation and unfettered neoliberalism has, within the US, progressively concentrated corporate power. Rising corporate profits have been directed upwards as middle and working class employment have spiralled downward, becoming casualised, insecure and low wage. For Martin Wolfe (2019), this heralds a move towards oligopoly, where the market is dominated by a small group of large players (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, etc., incidentally all turbocharged by , and towards a politics of plutocracy, where power is invested with a small number of wealthy people. Within this trajectory, neoliberalism alters as larger and larger monopolies disavow the competition that is collapsing the very heart of the project. Intensifying deregulation, privatisation and mounting inequality has provided fertile ground for the growth of populism, particularly right-wing populism (RWP). Most recently, populist groups helped propel to power Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Trump in the US, amongst others, and advanced the agenda of right-wing or ultranationalist political parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Political philosopher Nancy Fraser (2017) discusses Trump's ascendancy around the twin tropes of 'distribution' and 'recognition,' where 'distribution' refers to the economic structure of society or how goods, especially income, are allocated, and 'recognition' explores how society apportions respect and esteem (for experts and others) and the moral marks of belonging. Writing for the US context, but with applications more broadly, Fraser (2017), argues that political economies of any shade -left, right or center -have all embraced neoliberal distribution which, as we have seen, ensures the net transfer of wealth from the majority to an increasingly concentrated minority. It is thus, in recognition, where the politics play out. In the postmodern era of identity, 'progressive' recognition retains liberalism's moral purpose promoting egalitarianism and emancipation amongst diverse groups. Hence, progressive neoliberalism (usually associated with former US President Barak Obama or the Third Way politics of Tony Blair in the UK, as well as with the ideological project of the European Union), has successfully advanced some minorities/identity groups already in possession of the requisite social capital. Progressive anti-neoliberal agendas on the other hand, like those of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn promoted a more socialist vision, that appealed largely to educated, middle class and youthful constituencies who were highly vocal but ultimately marginalised.
By contrast, 'regressive' recognition or RWP drawn from traditional social conservatism promotes "ethnonational, anti-immigrant, and pro-Christian, if not overtly racist, patriarchal, and homophobic" discourses and practices (Fraser, 2017 p. 54). The imagery is one of an at-risk, idealised and homogenised homeland. Regressive recognition or RWP rejects elites, particularly middle class technocrats/experts, multilateralism and pluralism (in other words, it rejects the liberal project), as it simultaneously venerates charismatic anti-establishment leaders offering simple solutions to complex issues. Neoliberalism and concentrated corporatisation remain firmly entrenched as the blame for inequities are directed elsewhere. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, run on tropes of protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia, successfully melded these exclusionary regressive positionings with the mass of neoliberal 'losers' (particularly working class white males) into what Fraser (2017 p. 56) identifies as "a new proto-hegemonic bloc." As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, it has been leveraged by reactionary populism decrying economic lockdown, as well as the immigrants and elites who have bought in the pestilence -literally and figuratively -enabling it to take hold amongst the undesirable, and racialised other. Rallies, sometimes armed, in Europe, Brazil and the US sloganise: in Germany, facemasks are described as 'Merkel's muzzle,' in the UK 'corona is the cure -humans are the disease', while placards in the US entreat 'liberty or death ' and carry the infamous phrase that crowned concentration camp gates, 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ('work sets you free.') With hindsight, the fragmenting social fabric, and global financialisaton untethered from any moorings, was always going to challenge the 75 year plus framework of postwar liberalism. We have seemingly arrived at a point of post-liberalism where Trump's (and others') protectionism, nationalism and regressive or reactionary populism has denied liberal democratic multilateralism and moral purpose. It is to this post-liberal reality that I now turn. Barrinha and Renard (2020) suggest that, while scholars differ in nuance, there is general agreement "that the hegemony of the liberal world order (in place since Bretton Woods) is over". Given previous US dominance in the liberal world order, post-liberal essentially means 'post-Western' or 'post American,' and signals a "

Post-liberalism
' crisis of authority' in American leadership (p. 4)," particularly on the global economic stage. A second feature of post-liberalism are the calls to reform (or disregard) rules-based multilateral institutions like the UN (including the WHO), alongside the emergence of new non-Western international institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). Thirdly, post-liberalism focus on the loss of liberal norms and values as a consequence of the rise of illiberal practices and discourses like RWP. These trends are mutually reinforcing, argues Hendrick-Wong (2019), as populists see neoliberal globalisation and Western economic decline as failures of the liberal world order. Barrinha and Renard (2020) go on to suggest that the 'post' prefix highlights the uncertainty surrounding liberalism's current direction, echoing Fraser's (2017) use of Antonio Gramsci's dictum (1930Gramsci's dictum ( /1971: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." For Gramsci, times of interregnum are times of uncertainty and risk, as the new "is still at the designing stage, has not yet been fully assembled, or is not strong enough to be put in its place" (Bauman, 2012, p. 50). These sentiments seem particularly apt for the uncertainties that the COVID-19 crisis presents.
What we do know about post-liberal times, however, is that the world's power dynamics are shifting, with the US retreat into protectionism and nationalism, the rise of China as a non-liberal, authoritarian and competing state, along with, for Duncombe and Dunne (2018), "potent identity-based mobilisations, "illiberal democracies", as well as the rise of transnational Islamic insurgency" (p. 27). China's triad of policies constituted by the 'belt and road initiative' (massive investment to improve physical infrastructure in 70 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa), the 'made in China 2025' strategy (aimed at developing China's technological supremacy), and 'military-civil partnership' (that sees every citizen working for China's national goals), is a viable and present threat to US hegemony. Moreover, China's non-liberal authoritarianism demands acknowledgement of the relativity of values and norms that sits beside Western RWP challenges to progressive liberalism and its notions of recognition and emancipation. In other words, China's success at global market relations have not required China to embrace liberalism's other facets. Political scientist Joseph Nye Jr (2016, p. 14) argues that in the post-liberal world marked by the rise of the non-Western states and variable values, "governments will continue to possess power and resources, but the stage on which they play will become ever more crowded, and they will have less ability to direct the action." We also know that post-liberalism coincides with some global fragmentation and reduced material and people flows consequent upon the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) -known as 'deglobalisation' (Ortega, 2020). The GFC initiated a shift from fiscally cheap, offshore manufacturing and "just-in-time" global supply chains to more regionalised or localised ones. Several factors coalesced to produce these changes known as 'reshoring' in the US, and developed there during the Obama Administration. Firstly, the rapid translation of science and technology innovations into the manufacturing process of additive manufacturing or 3D printing, high-performance computing, automation and robotics, and adaptive manufacturing that flexibly produces demand-driven products, has enabled small volumes of locally produced parts to become economically competitive. Secondly, the rising production costs of China's manufacturing as a result of wage rises and China's move to a service economy, also makes local products competitive. Thirdly, growing environmental and climate costs have made consumers increasingly aware of the long supply chain impacts and energy intensive transport costs. Finally, the US-China trade war, BREXIT and other global disruptions have increased uncertainty in cross-border supply chains through both tariffs and investment restrictions (Ortega, 2020). Moreover, Linda Yeuh (2020) argues that an expanded definition of national security (for example, key telecommunications, energy, medical supplies, defence systems) has included securing supply chains, with greater emphasis on national resilience (not readily apparent though, for pandemic medical supplies…). Digital globalisation in the form of financial services, online shopping, entertainment, and so on has increased as trade goods have decreased, marking a change, rather than a decline, to globalisation. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated these prexisting trends to renewed nationalism, exacerbating the post-liberal challenges of managing environmental and technological changes, securitisation, and geo-economic concerns, in concert with preserving the open trade and investment that a sophisticated global economy requires.
An important aspect of new post-liberal world is the sustained attack by RWP on elites and experts. There is of course, great differences in meaning attached to these terms. Elites may be elite owing to wealth, celebratory, hereditary entitlement or other factors, without laying claim to any technical expertise. Experts though, are usually elite by virtue of special authority conferred by education, technical knowledge, professional self-regulation and restrictive licensing common to doctors, lawyers, scientists and others. At a time when technocratic elites from hospitals, research laboratories, universities, think-tanks, the WHO, the CDC, political agencies and NGOs are arguably vital to appropriate pandemic responses, their diminishing and conflicted place in the popular and political discourse demands greater explanation.

RWP and Expert/Elite Knowledge
Populism as an ideology conceives of post-liberal society as separated into two antagonistic groups, 'the people' and 'the other' where the latter are immigrants, non-heteronormative groups, non-Christians, non-Whites as well as experts and elites (Gökmen, 2017). In his 2016 election pitch, Trump championed 'the people' at the same time he vilified the technocratic experts, promising to 'drain Washington's swamp' (a legitimating reach back to Republican President Ronald Reagan's slogan). Similarly, UK politician Michael Gove argued during 2016 BREXIT campaign that, "I think the people in this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong. … I just want people to trust themselves rather than the elites." Given the privileged backgrounds of both Grove and Trump, Davis and Williams (2017, p. 4) wryly observe: "this blue-collar revolt against elites/experts is being managed and directed by the very same elites." Neoliberalism, as we have seen, paved the way for RWP attacks on technocratic knowledge and their actors (also Müller, 2020). Will Davis (2017 p. 236) notes that early neoliberals like Friedrich von Hayek believed "intellectuals possess too much power in circulating ideas which, when coupled to the state … believe they know what is in the interests of all, and then set about establishing plans through which to pursue this." Hayek, of course, believed the randomness (chaos) of the free markets were better instruments of distribution than the rational technocratic planning championed by 'intellectuals' or technocratic experts (such as scientists, engineers, health professionals, statisticians) that existed under the embedded liberalism and welfarism of the mid last century. With the development of pseudo-markets in universities, hospitals and research settings under neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, much 'blue sky' research was abandoned for applied processes and products that came to be equated with increasing national gross domestic product in the hyper-competitive global economy (see for example, Stephan, 2012). It also saw the erosion of technocratic self-regulation mechanisms for sanctioning knowledge acquisition, legislating membership and other conventions that ran counter to free market orthodoxy.
Not all elite/expert knowledge however, has been devalued. Financial entrepreneurs are emerging as the new elites of neoliberal globalisation (Davis & Williams, 2017). Innovative forms of digital value extraction and surveillance (see Zuboff, 2019) have forged a new alliance of bankers, traders, hedge funders, data brokers, entrepreneurs, capitalists and symbolic workers able to rapidly make or break fortunes. Previously of lesser status, the alpha elite financiers are perversely celebrated by RWP as inspirational role models. Financial elites leverage technocratic knowledge when required, on a pay per service arrangement, with the downwardly mobile specialist now seen as "'diplomatic intermediaries' whose job it is to interpret and communicate the meanings of finance (and associated machinery) for the benefit of public audiences" (Davis, 2017, p. 243). In other words, scientists, engineers, medical professionals and other rational technocrats no longer command esteem and respect afforded them under liberalism, but become service providers akin to any other in a market economy. Not surprisingly, in the post truth/fake news era, public confidence and trust in experts has declined, allowing legal scholar Albert C. Lin (2019, p. 305) to observe, in science domains, for example, that the "view of scientists is generally soft rather than strong", and "trust in scientists with respect to certain issues is comparatively low."

'Following the Science'
Various national governments have claimed that their COVID-19 response has been based on high quality expert advice -'the best scientific advice possible.' Indeed, the UK government has said on many occasions that it is 'following the science' in tackling COVID-19 (King-Hill & Powell, 2020). The difficulty, though, for populist leaders is that having bound themselves to the imaginary of 'the people' whom they alone are qualified to represent, they must necessarily be anti-elite/expert. This means at best, an ambivalence towards the expert knowledge, which helps explain why the track record of many populist politicians (Trump, Johnston, Bolsanaro) on COVID-19 has been criticised as unclear, contradictory or lukewarm.
Lin (2019, p. 252) draws attention to the 'regulatory' science regime where science intersects with politics/law in policy production of the type necessary for battling COVID-19. Regulatory science goes further than just knowledge production; it includes the knowledge synthesis and prediction required for "informed opinions about the plausible consequences of our actions (or inactions), … monitoring the effects of our choices." Lin (2019, p. 249) discusses Trump's systematic undermining of regulatory science over the past few years, arguing that: To stifle scientific activity, the Administration has proposed deep cuts to research funding on specific topics and ordered scientists not to present unfavorable results. To weaken the role of expertise, the Administration has skewed membership on some scientific advisory committees toward industry and dissolved or reduced the role of other committees. And to undermine the use of science in policymaking, the Administration has questioned methodologies and truths that are widely accepted by the scientific community.
Moreover, Trump's funding cuts and the appointment of non-scientists to head scientific agencies exemplifies a disdain for science and its expertise, characteristic of RWP and the post-liberal.
Of course, there is no such thing as 'the' science. There are many scientific views, some possibly contradictory: in short, experts disagree. Uncertainty abounds in traditional experimental science, in which the answer is narrowed with evidence over time. With COVID-19, the uncertainty is extreme and the evidence is, at this time, very provisional. At the natural intersection of scientific and political uncertainties, the selection and promotion of evidence can't help but be ideologically driven. Moreover, politicians have always favoured the kind of science that aligns with their existing preferences, Bacevic (2020) observes, even as they have declared themselves as 'following the science.' This strategy appeals to the simplistic view of science amongst the populace as an objective process that "produces clean yes or no answers" (Lin, 2019, p. 254). The challenging realities of vaccine production, questions of antibody durability, the efficacy of therapeutic agents, transmission modelling and so on can be spun, if necessary, as the failure of experts and not the failure of politicians. Such is the concern amongst scientist themselves that Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, has convened a panel of experts as an alternative to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) which officially advises the UK government on COVID-19. SAGE has been criticised for its secretive political membership and lack of transparent decision-making, which Sir David believes has eroded public trust in science (Devlin, 2020).
Similarly, Trump has been the master of scientific disinformation with his stream of tweets and press conference pronouncements, sowing confusion amongst experts and the public alike. Appropriating Franz Fanon's (1963) term from his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth, Trump is a 'bewilderer,' a master mediator, obscuring the reality between power (in this case, the oligarchs) and the people. From claims that the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory (contradicting his own intelligence community), to hyping hydroxychloroquine and the infamous 'Lysol moment,' ("1 see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute, and is there a way you can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning"), or UV light therapy, ("supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way"), Trump has relentlessly challenged the technocrats and experts. He views the over 1.9 million confirmed US cases as a "badge of honor" and a "great tribute" to the testing regime. In a play on words, Charles Sykes (2020) describes the 'Faucian Bargain' scientists at the White House have had to strike in order to exert some influence over the pandemic response (Faucian referring to Anthony Fauci, instead of Faustian). Whatever Trump's motivations, his exaggerations and false claims are rhetorical attacks on science, consistent with the post-liberal status decline of technocrat knowledge. His comments remind his RWP support base to be sceptical of the experts, as he alone knows what is best -after all, he is a self-proclaimed 'very stable genius.' Scientific authority and influence in society has been weakened when it is most needed, argues Gabbett (2020) with Keir Giles (2020), proclaiming the pandemic to be "a golden moment for disinformation." That such behaviour is tolerated is a mark of the post-liberal world, and speaks, Bruce Shapiro (2020) believes, to a larger agenda of Trump's on dismantling accountability protocols in the battle over limits to Presidential power. Ultimately, though, it is reassuring to know that many countries have followed experts ' recommendations on testing and tracking protocols, and isolation and social distancing measures within their respective economic, political and social constraints.

Scapegoating the WHO
Trump's attacks on the WHO also make some sense, given RWP's distrust of multilateral organisations and the retreat to nationalism characteristic of post-liberalism. Prior to the pandemic, the US was already reviewing WHO's funding, proposing a $65 million cut for the 2021 fiscal year, a decrease of more than 50% on the 2020 figure (Klein & Hansler, 2020). The WHO's website financial data also indicates that the US was already in arrears of over $81 million for some the 2018/2019 payments (WHO, n.d). Established in 1948 with an ambitious charter but a very small budget, public health researcher Sara Davies (2020) argues that, from its inception, the WHO was torn between members who believed its mandate should promote universal health goals and those who saw a more limited remit of technical advice. These views were variously privileged by different Directors General over the decades. Former Norwegian Prime Minister, medical doctor and human rights advocate Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General from 1998 to 2003, for example, sought to reform and expand the WHO's mandate. Controversially, during the 2003 SARS outbreak, Brundtland unilaterally issued the WHO's first borders and travel advisory against travel to the Chinese epicentre. Trump argues in his letter to the WHO's current Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on May 18th, 2020, that had Brundtland's action been replicated for COVID-19 "many lives could have been saved." Trump's letter not only rebukes Ghebreyesus, but also chronicles the WHO's "missteps" and continues to attack China. The letter demanded that the WHO "demonstrate independence from China" and "commit to major substantive improvements" or face permanent funding withdrawal. The following day, The Lancet described some of the letter's information as "factually incorrect" (The Lancet, 2020).
On May 29th, 2020, Trump announced the termination of the US's relationship with the WHO. It is not so straightforward, though, Madhukar Pai (2020) argues, with legal requirements of a year's notice and paid up financial obligations that put the withdrawal timing beyond the next election. Rather, the move is seen as an attempt to distract from the US's high COVID-19 toll, the protests consequent to the death of George Floyd, and simultaneously, an expression of Trump's distaste for multilateralism that has seen him also quit the UN Human Rights Council, the UN cultural agency UNESCO, a global accord to tackle climate change, and the Iran nuclear deal. Davies (2020) argues that, despite Trump's rhetoric, the WHO has largely followed its infectious disease notification protocols for COVID-19, established in 2005 post SARS which, in part, aimed to block precipitous moves like Brundtland's. Infectious outbreaks and public health emergencies are now the remit of a committee seeking to balance a myriad of effects resulting from border closures with transparency from member states that is not always available. The highest level of alert in the WHO's arsenal is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) warning, which it declared January 30th, 2020. PHEIC's are rare, but public recognition of their severity is "extremely low," even by the WHO's member states. Helen Thompson (2020) believes that, outside Asia, the PHEIC alert failed to be recognised and operationalised in a timely manner, as there was "no prior politics of pandemics." In other words, nations needed first, to be convinced of the problem (readily apparent after the outbreak in Italy), and second, political responses conceptualised in an acute situation with uncertain data and information flows. Clearly, the WHO is vulnerable to criticism, and challenges will remain given that member states do not always behave by the rules.
In what Patrick Wintour (2020) argues was a symbolic international endorsement of the WHO, EU and non-EU leaders together with important agencies like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the Global Fund, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) met on April 24th, 2020, promising a renewed global cooperation around five pledges. Précised from the WHO website, they pledged to: Provide access to new treatments, technologies and vaccines across the world Commit to international partnership on research and coordinate efforts to tackle the pandemic Reach collective decisions on responding to the pandemic, recognising that the virus's spread in one country can affect all countries. Learn from experience and adapt the global response. Be accountable, to the most vulnerable communities and the whole world.
On May 4th, 2020, the group committed 7.4 billion euros for vaccine, diagnostics and treatment development. The US did not, and will not, participate in further scheduled meetings. A resolution at the WHO's 73rd World Health Assembly on May 19th, 2020, passed by more than 130 countries called for intensification of virus control efforts, and for equitable access to all essential health technologies and products. Stepping into some of the void vacated by the US, China pledged $2 billion over two years to support Covid-19 response efforts, particularly in developing countries. For Chatham House's Robin Niblett (2020), "the American approach to the coronavirus continues to play into the narrative of the United States isolating itself, ….. and it also shaves off another layer of the U.S. long-term legitimacy." Certainly, these meeting of commitments indicate that multilateralism still has some currency, as does the moral purpose of the liberal world order seeking the protection of the vulnerable (Duncombe & Dunn, 2018). Nevertheless, repeated attempts to scapegoat the WHO, when coupled to member states nationalistic disregard of protocols/reforms to which they have agreed at previous World Health Assemblies, also speaks to the rise of nationalism and the decline in multilateralism that is a hallmark of the post-liberal.
While comparison amongst countries may not always be helpful, the differences between South Korea and the US who both confirmed their first COVID-19 cases on January 20 th , 2020, is worth comment. South Korean officials moved quickly to coordinate with the private sector, producing a test based on the WHO's recommended gene targets, and began testing more than 20,000 people a day. They reactivated legal and physical infrastructure in place from their prior exposure to another coronavirus first reported in 2012 -the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). In the US, the CDC developed its own test, focused on three gene targets distinct from those of the WHO. By February 29 th , 2020, CDC data indicated that only 472 patients had been tested nationwide, with 22 cases confirmed from a reportedly flawed test (CDC, n.d.), while in South Korea, nearly 990,000 tests were completed with around 2000 confirmed diagnoses (Statista, n.d.). The outcome in both countries is now a matter of record, notwithstanding a small second wave of infections in South Korea.

The Old is Dying and the New is Yet to be Born
Writing in 1996, John Gray envisioned the extraordinarily difficult task before us in developing a pluralist political theory, in which the liberal problem of finding a way amongst rival world views is solved in post-liberal terms (Gray, 1996). Gramsci's (1930) reflection on the dying old order without a new one to replace it seems apt. Ostensibly responding to Gray, and writing just prior to the COVD-19 outbreak, Hendrik-Wong (2019) posited the multipolar postliberal world as the balkanisation of the global economy into separate but overlapping, politically flexible networks formed around the 'hub economies' of the US (oligopolistic corporate political-economic model), China (authoritarian state-led capitalism), and Europe (a legalistic-bureaucratic model). Other nations would align within these self-organising and continually evolving networks in trade, technology, military and other terms, but may also straddle networks as required. Financial/digital globalisation will continue Hendrik-Wong (2019) argues, albeit it more regionalised supply lines, but without multilateralism, we will be "less effective in coordinating actions in meeting challenges like global warming and pandemics." Perhaps he was prescient. Writing from the grip of the pandemic, Adam Tooze (2020) believes we are already well along this multipolar path, but as each of these 'hubs/blocs' has entrenched structural and fiscal weaknesses, our post-liberal future faces severe difficulties that COVID-19 has only further revealed and exacerbated.
Certainly, 'lockdownonomics' (to borrow Runciman's (2020) term) and the unprecedented government financial interventions to stabilise economies has pundits prophesising anything from new democratic forms acknowledging the social side of the ledger, to austerity neoliberalism and authoritarianism to help pay the bill. Hungary's populist leader Viktor Orbán move to rule 'by decree' introduced under the pandemic emergency, is certainly an example of the latter, while Žižek (2020) celebrates the former, suggesting there is something profoundly radical in the ways states have embraced an anti-economistic logic through lock down. As we move from the pandemic's acute stage into a tentative future of easing restrictions, another Gramscian-type interregnum, we are entering what crisis and risk analysis scholars Argen Boin and Martin Lodge call a 'Twilight Zone.' The Twilight Zone, "is marked by deep uncertainty about both the chance that a threat may materialize and the escalatory trajectory it may follow." In terms of the ongoing nature of COVID-19, "it requires a capacity not just to 'relax' or restore 'full lockdown', but also to maintain and enforce partial 'lock-down' in the face of inevitable calls for more (and less) relaxation" (Boin & Lodge, 2020). Having made some sense of the crisis, we now have to make sense of the "great easing" with the need to restore economic life in flux with mitigating a potentially lethal second wave.
COVID-19 is the third of three world shocks (or possibly, resets) experienced in a century that is barely 20 years old: 9/11 and the war on terror from 2001, the GFC of 2008 and now the pandemic. We also face the creeping existential crises of climate change and ecological devastation. Clearly, living in this uncertain post-liberal world in the time of coronavirus requires of us to develop new kinds of resilience of which we are just becoming aware.

What about Science Education?
Having characterised at length the mise-en-scène in which the pandemic is situated, in the brief space remaining, I sketch three implications for science education. Each is suffused with my personal sociopolitical vision of distribution and recognition privileging social and ecological justice (see Carter, 2010Carter, , 2014Carter, , 2017). They are necessarily speculative given the pandemic's fluid, rapid and multiversal nature, requiring sustained consideration over time, for as Nancy Fraser believes, "you can't fall back on the same old bromides that are so patently useless" (Chang, 2020).
Firstly, and most obviously, COVID-19 signals curriculum possibilities including relevant knowledge and skills-based topics like, for example, basic virology and immunology, epidemiology, data modelling and interpretation, and testing and tracing. The pandemic becomes another, somewhat pressing, socially acute question (SAQ) or socio-scientific issue (SSI) with which to engage. For example, how zoonotic viruses cross species barriers with accelerated human impacts on natural environments, and their downstream effects. Another SAQ/SSI could investigate local production of medical supplies, as an example of the rapid scientific translation technologies that are so altering our world. Yet another could focus on the role of the WHO and other national and international scientific bodies in fostering better global health outcomes. These SAQ/SSIs all require multiple areas of scientific understanding, readily apparent in school science curricula, interplayed with relevant socio-political perspectives.
Further, as most schools were closed during lockdown, investigating science curriculum delivery online and by other distance mechanisms develops a new research area. Most challenging here is understanding and mitigating the inequities endemic in our schools, to improve possibilities for vulnerable students likely to miss out from prolonged school absences.
A second and related implication arises from RWP's increasing disdain for science, exemplified by, as we have already seen, authority figures legitimating scientific disinformation, as well as sustained public attacks on, and declining esteem for, scientists and institutions like the WHO and CDC. In response, the sub-specialisations within school science of 'the public understanding of science' and 'the nature of science,' require a renewed and refocussed approach. Clearly essential, is reinforcing an appreciation of the provisional nature of science: how uncertainty may be narrowed with evidence over time, and how scientists may disagree, or have contradictory views, even when discussing similar data. What is usually excluded from these discussion's though, is a consideration of the sociopolitical construction of science. While scholars like Larry Bencze (2008) and Derek Hodson (2010) have long argued for the political contextualisation of science education, such an approach is now critical given science education's role in the production of future professionals who will be called to navigate these highly charged and contested political spaces. It is no longer tenable to present science as decontextualised 'objective ' knowledge for its own sake, or in a linear progression to further knowledge. Understanding some of science's political grounding would help to address Lin's (2019, p. 254) concern regarding the public's simplistic view of science as an objective process that "produces clean yes or no answers." In addition, a sociopolitical perspective mitigates against the risk of science education being highjacked by regressive populism, in ways that are only just becoming apparent as RWP regimes (like Hungary) begin reforming education (see 12 Rules for What, 2020, also Thompson, 2016). These reforms typically leverage structural neoliberalism, and compliance to narrow vocational and utilitarian curricula that reinforces nationalism and ethnocentrism.
Finally, but perhaps most importantly -moving beyond science education's traditional knowledge and skills production remit -is the facilitation of resilience development necessary to brave social and environmental hazards that include COVID-19. A complex, dynamic and multidimensional phenomena, resilience usually refers to a range of social and emotional factors shaped by individual and situational characteristics that enable positive adaptations in challenging settings. While educators are increasingly aware of its importance, science education, with minor exceptions (see for example, Marshall, 2018;Quigley, 2017), has been slow to engage with resilience. Not surprisingly, the higher visibility of resilience within environmental education literature speak to young people's well known concerns about their ecological future. Resilience is fostered when actors are confident in their understanding of hazards and can produce risk mitigating action plans. Within science education, for example, the knowledge behind an extreme weather event like a tornado or cyclone would be developed alongside response plans for individual and local community action. Activist science education projects to address SAQs like Larry Bencze's (2020) STEPWISE (Science and Technology Education Promoting Wellbeing for Individuals, Societies and Environments) that utilises student scientific and technological understanding to inform decisions about student actions, provide great promise here.

Bewilderment in the Twilight Zone -Some Concluding Comments
As we move further into the uncertain post-liberal future, on one reading, my faith in some aspects of the 20th Century liberal tropes of social welfare, state intervention, multilaterialism, and equity and emancipation makes me not only a 'small l' liberal but a 'small c' conservative, who seeks to conserve things of worth. On the other hand, I am acutely aware of the exploitative and colonising economics of power, as well as the potential for cultural and identity erasure of this type of liberal universalism (maybe I'm a socialist?). Having lived the past few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in writing this article, I am left, all told, somewhat bewildered in the Twilight Zone. How will we navigate this risky future? What are the possibilities for education more generally, and science education in particular, in a post-liberal, pandemic world? Will we attempt 'business as usual', or as I believe, alongside AERA's 2021 conference call, should we start to take seriously the role (science) education plays as global res publica? Clearly, the emerging sociopolitical arena which ultimately constitutes science and science education needs careful and thoughtful consideration. There will be much with which to wrestle in the coming years.
And finally, in ending, I think I will give the last word to the former Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull (2020) when he suggested that "this is biology confounding politics … this virus defies our very humanity."