The COVID-19 crisis is different from anything we have ever experienced, and different from what the majority of us ever imagined experiencing. Yet alongside the suffering and dislocation, a huge window of opportunity has opened, to leverage the best of the present into a future that works for all. I argue that that this future could centre around care, which has been irrupting back into the mainstream of public and political life. Our task as political actors is to harness the hope, possibility and desire for change that this is generating and to channel it towards that better future. This chapter aims to contribute to efforts in this direction.

Why is now so different?

In ‘normal’ life, those deemed economically expendable are left to suffer and often die. Given this, one may have expected our political leaders to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak in neo-Malthusian ways, letting it root out the ‘weak’ while business carries on as usual and perhaps even benefits. Yet this is not how they have responded. In fact, for all their dithering, their basic response, at least in the first major phase, has been to subordinate business in the service of society, with the express intention of caring for all, and in particular for vulnerable groups. Concretely, this has involved pressing pause on most of the economy, taking progressive steps such as infrastructure nationalization, and even efforts to end homelessness. Most leaders have been exhorting us to look after each other. This both acknowledges that there is another principle around which society can be organized – care – and, temporarily at least, sees the system logic of profit suspended in favour of it.

Part of this radical divergence from the status quo can be explained by the universal nature of a pandemic. One individual can ultimately be a vector of transmission for all others. Likewise, protecting (caring for) one individual becomes a universal imperative – if we fail to protect the one, we might all get ill. In the same vein, if we are to protect all of us, we must act as if each individual life is all our lives. That is why contained in the logic of social distancing – however worrying it may also be – is something so potentially transformative.