I In a recent Financial Times column, Janan Ganesh asserted this, “For a sense of how little I believe in belief, here is an experiment that I have been running in my head for two years. Imagine, at the start of the pandemic, that Donald Trump had shut his country down and Angela Merkel had kept hers open. He justified his action as a protection of the homeland while she stressed liberal ideals. (“As a girl in East Germany, I saw the human cost of draconian…”)