Rub it in, why don't you?

Kidding aside, I think that the problems of American politics and British politics share a similar root, which is that we've never found our footing after the Cold War ended. A war as an analogy to covid doesn't quite work for me, because in a war you have an enemy, and we Americans love having an enemy. We had a singular focus from the end of WWI until 1991 on hating the USSR, with the brief WWII interruption where we were allies who were very skeptical of one another. Basically the entire society was organized around being against the USSR and its allies.

Finally, we "won", and after a brief moment of envisioning a peaceful world, all of our politicians realized that it's easier to refocus their constituents on an enemy than on solving domestic crises. Since we're a two party nation, it was pretty easy to make the enemy the other party. It's only accelerated since then, sort of reaching a fever pitch in the previous financial crisis. I never thought it could be that bad again, but here we are 10 years later seeing things that one could never have imagined in a dystopian movie. Every time I think that the Republicans have pushed too far, their people move right along with them. And that, I think, basically signifies how little policy and conviction have to do with it, and how much needing an enemy does.

All that said, the "protesters" have gotten a hugely outsized media response relative to their actual size. Some of these "rallies" have had like two dozen people out of the millions and millions who are adversely affected economically by the restrictions. I hope that's a sign that Republican support is cratering. Their lapdog newspapers are literally writing stories that contain lines like, "The president said 'X', but he actually meant 'Y'", after the public blows up about what a moron he is.

I think most thinking people thought the Republicans were going to collapse after the last crisis and somehow be reborn as a new party. It didn't come to pass because of Byzantine electoral and procedural rules that have protected them. But it will happen. I'm not going to predict when, because very close to all of my predictions have been wrong. But there's no other conceivable alternative, given how the demographics of the US is changing, and how support for Republicans in concentrated among the old and the uneducated. It's only a matter of time before they make themselves irrelevant, and we can start the big policy debates from a center-right to farther left position, rather than a extreme right to center right position. To say that it's unfortunate that a pandemic is the ting that might precipitate this change is a vast understatement, but it was always going to be a crisis of some sort that would lay bare their absurdist positions. It's all up to Joe Biden's people now to convince the Republican small business owner that Republican graft is the reason they can't get a loan. If he can do that, I think we'll start to see the light at the end of the very, very long tunnel.

I've actually got a lot of issues with this article, which I'll enumerate when and if I get time (chief among them being the possibility that it was good fortune, not good policy, which allowed Australia to escape mass dying (so far)). Still an interesting read, though.