A few days ago, along with others, I was asked to predict the future in a paragraph. I wrote,
America won't be the biggest dog in the pack anymore. We'll be too busy scavenging in the rubble. World leadership will pass to Europe and/or Asia -- countries who are dealing with the pandemic much better than we are. They won't face our level of ruin.
We have the catastrophic misfortune to have a catastrophically incompetent government at just the wrong time. This will not end well.
Today’s NYT —
The coronavirus pandemic is shaking bedrock assumptions about U.S. exceptionalism. This is perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking for Washington to lead.
… The pandemic sweeping the globe has done more than take lives and livelihoods from New Delhi to New York. It is shaking fundamental assumptions about American exceptionalism — the special role the United States played for decades after World War II as the reach of its values and power made it a global leader and example to the world.
Before the crisis, inequality, student loan debt, health care, and many other systems were already stretched to the breaking point. This will crush them.
Key democratic institutions -- the press, the courts, voting itself -- were already under vicious attack from the right. They’re on the defensive.
We do not have coherent, credible, competent leadership. In a crisis, this is catastrophic.
So far, putting our collective fingers in the dyke seems to be working. Kind of. Our health care system hasn’t completely collapsed. We have enough food, we just have to find better and more equitable ways to distribute it. People aren’t starving quite yet, at least not too much more than they were before.
But IMHO, over the next six months or so, we’ll start to experience genuine, irredeemable losses. Certain things will wink out of existence, which will be impossible to recreate.
Case in point. Colleges. Despite saddling our youth with crushing debt loads, many of them are still running on fumes. What happens in August and September, when the Class of 2024 is half the size it was supposed to be? Or less? Half of them go out of business, right? And having turned them off, you can’t just turn them back on again.
Multiply that by as many sectors as you care to count.
Come January 21, 2021, even if we’re lucky enough to have Joe Biden as president, and even if we’re lucky enough to keep the House and take the Senate, we’ll still be preoccupied with rummaging through the ruins. If McConnell keeps the Senate, we’re utterly lost.
Nobody will look to us for leadership. The rest of the world may shed a tear, or they may laugh.
We’re done.
