Covid-19 Exposes Dysfunctional U.S. Political System; Missed “Sputnik Moment”
Apr 27-The U.S. currently has 56,796 Covid-19 deaths, 172 per million people, far more than many other advanced industrial areas, South Korea has 5, Japan 3, China 3, and Taiwan 0.3, the world average is 27.1.
More than 26 million Americans have filed unemployment claims in the past five weeks, completely off the chart. Congress did pass the CARES Act and other legislation to try to mitigate the economic fall-out of the crisis, but such extensive damage should have been avoided.
There have been three general models on how to deal with Covid–19. The authoritarian model of China, the dysfunctional model of the U.S., and the more efficient models of S. Korea, Germany and other smaller advanced democracies.
The U.S. can’t and would never adopt China’s model, so the lessons to be learned are from other advanced democracies. That overall lesson is clear: smarter and earlier is better, especially on testing and tracing, than a bigger, later response. A big response on government spending, though not on testing, was adopted in the U.S. because of the lack of a smart, early response.
Health-care experts continue to write useful op-eds, reports, letters, e.g. from Bill Gates the past week here and here, to try to influence U.S. government policy on how to cope with the crisis. They will continue to debate how much testing and tracing the U.S. needs, but months into the crisis, the U.S. still hasn’t enough swabs to do the necessary tests.
Thus, perhaps the main lesson of the Covid-19 crisis is that the U.S. needs a major political overhaul, because without one, such advice just continues to fall on deaf ears. Will such a major change be made in the political system? Unfortunately extremely unlikely, especially if deaths per day finally start to rapidly decline in the next month.
The IHME model , last updated April 22, projects 163 U.S. Covid-19 deaths per day on May 16. A similar-type, though not as bell-shaped, model from University of Texas projects 743 deaths on that day. Both are significant declines from current levels of around 2,000 per day, which has remained flat since April 7. [IHME 4/27 update has raised total deaths through August 4 to 74,073.-jf]
Both GOP and Dems Share Blame for Covid-19 Crisis Failure
The U.S. has had sclerotic political leadership during this crisis. The U.S. is being offered the “choice” between Trump, 73, and Biden, 77. Its other major political players are Pelosi, 80, and McConnell, 78.
Trump of course bears most of the blame for the Covid-19 Crisis. But the Dems and liberal media also share a lot. Trump dithered for many crucial weeks after China’s CCP very belatedly shut down Wuhan on January 23, many weeks after the virus emerged.
What were the Dems and liberal media doing during those crucial weeks? From December 18 to February 5 they culminated three years of wasting the nation’s time trying to impeach Trump for Russia- and Ukraine-gate, as the virus picked up steam.
The Dems and liberal media held “debates” and primaries through March 17 in which Covid-19 was barely mentioned except in the context of Sanders’ Medicare for All, focusing instead on such issues as Bloomberg’s NDA’s (Biden’s opponents are now using a similar #MeToo attack).
Perhaps some who have watched the U.S. decades-long descent into political polarization and absurdity may have hoped the Covid-19 crisis might be the U.S. “Sputnik moment” that woke it from its stupor. It hasn’t, the U.S. is still in massive denial about its failure.
Instead of a Soviet satellite orbiting the earth in 1957, the cotton swab will be the symbol of the historic current failure, along with the above old politicians.
U.S., China Leaders Too Unresponsive When It Mattered Most for Covid-19, U.S. Still Is; Which System Will Learn from Its Mistakes?
Some experts have been comparing who will come out of the Covid-19 Crisis looking better, the U.S. or China? As I said throughout Trump’s trade/tech war, the U.S. should focus on its own immense problems, not on China.
But for those keeping score, Trump lost the trade war, he lost the tech war on Huawei and 5G, and now he has suffered a disastrous defeat on Covid-19. The only “Sputnik moments” have occurred in China, first accelerating its indigenous technology and now watching as the U.S. political system self-destructs, with its appalling lack of what China calls “state capacity” to deal with the Covid-19 Crisis.
There are a few similarities between the two countries’ responses to Covid-19. Both were far too slow to initially react, which prevented those on the frontlines with the necessary information from getting their messages across to the top leaders.
Both reversed that after nearly two months of wasted time, China on January 23 locking down Wuhan, the U.S. only in mid-March, after months of watching, but China did so far more forcefully and effectively, and seems to be now more safely getting back to work.
Throughout the Covid-19 crisis both Xi, 66, and Trump have tried to maintain an image of infallibility, passing the blame onto governors and mayors, party bosses, underlings, bureaucrats, etc. Trump duels with the liberal media on a daily basis, but to no good effect for either side. And both he and Biden will likely increasingly blame China for the crisis during the upcoming campaigns, also to no good effect.
Both leaders are also heavily influenced by nationalist dreams of past glory. Trump of course had “Make America Great Again,” which appealed to his fervent supporters bygone-era biases on race and immigration. Xi has a much more forward-looking “China Dream,” but he too is heavily influenced by the past, by China’s “Century of Humiliation.”
A key question is which country will learn the right lessons from these mistakes. At this moment I don’t see much in the way of the U.S. doing so. There are experts who have negative views on China doing so, but they have been wrong as China has coped with previous crises, and much of what they write now in op-eds and policy journals and on Twitter seems to me to be more their wishful speculation on China’s problems, e.g. here.
Unfortunately the leaders of other large countries also still seem to be heavily influenced by the past. India’s Modi with the Hindu/Muslim conflict; Putin with tsarist ambitions of Russia as a great power. Even Germany’s much more rational Merkel, whose approval ratings have soared during the Covid-19 Crisis, unlike Trump’s, is usually held hostage in addressing EU issues by her country’s fears of Weimar inflation.
So essentially the world is leaderless at this critical moment, which in itself is highly troubling and dangerous.
U.S. Will Remain a Global Superpower, But a Deeply Flawed One
Right now the U.S. controls the world’s financial system and it is the leading military power. It will probably be dominant in those two areas for the foreseeable future, and thus will remain one of the world’s two superpowers, along with China, the Covid-19 Crisis will not change that.
The Federal Reserve has once again proven to be one of the only well-functioning U.S. government agencies during a crisis, as it was in the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC), but in both cases for the financial system and by extension the most wealthy, not the real economy and healthcare system, i.e., those most in need.
Nor does China appear interested in taking on the U.S. dollar and military any time soon. Rather, the much more obvious risk is that China’s economy is slowing down both short- and longer term, and India is nowhere near ready to take China’s place as the global economic locomotive that China has been for the last twenty years, especially during and after the 2008 GFC.
China has gained from the fact that during the 21st century there continues to be nearly zero accountability of U.S. elites. Cheney/Bush lied the U.S. into its Middle East morass. Wall Street committed massive fraud resulting in the 2008 GFC. U.S. elites didn’t pay much of a price for either crisis, while China “bide your time” and focused on its amazing economic growth. No elites will pay a price for the Covid-19 deaths and unemployment.
So while the U.S. will remain one of the two superpowers, it will remain a deeply flawed one, with absurd inequality of income and wealth. Others may make a similar accusation against China, often to distract attention from the U.S., but as I’ve said many times before, the U.S. must focus on its own glaring problems.
Will things significantly change? I doubt it. Biden is just a throwback to Obama/Clinton, which to many Americans now seems better than what they currently have. If he was being honest with himself, Biden could shock the country and make way for a younger, more competent alternative to Trump, as LBJ tried to do when he chose not to run in 1968 in the middle of another crisis, the Vietnam War.
When Kennedy made his famous speech in 1962, as part of that era’s response to its “Sputnik moment,” the “We choose to go the moon” at 9:13 mark of this video, he was a trim, vigorous 45. Biden was almost 20 when JFK made that speech.
That was nearly 58 years ago, almost three generations, in the interim, America, like its political leaders, has become sclerotic. By international rankings, its population is now obese with declining longevity, and poorly educated, with states failing the worst in those categories voting for Trump in 2016. Its high schools focus as much on politically correct history and sports as on math and science.
The so-called “left” tolerates out-of-control homelessness in its key cities, the “right” murderous gun violence, both unfathomable to people in other advanced nations. Both political extremes have sliced and diced the American people for decades with their “identity politics” and “culture wars,” respectively.
A continued slow relative decline for the U.S. seems likely but not fatal. The negative risks being things like Covid-19 or something worse, and/or the superpowers miscalculating each other’s intent, e.g. in the S China Sea and over Taiwan. The positive risks being technological breakthroughs, e.g. on Covid-19 testing, tracing, treatment and/or vaccine.
Make America and World Awesome, MAWA
John Furlan
Photo credit: baycare.org
