Biden Can’t Save America
Joe Biden might as well be Joe Gorbachev. He’s a nice guy but the USA is going to collapse anyways. The USSR at least contained Chernobyl. The US will never contain COVID-19, with all the knock-on effects that brings. Namely, the last superpower has already fallen. There’s nothing Joe Gorbachev can do.
How do you lockdown a nation of fools?
The biggest problem Biden faces is not figuring out how to suppress COVID-19. That’s known. America has always been 4–6 weeks away from beating COVID-19. They just need a two month lockdown while they get test/trace/isolate in place, like the rest of the world did months ago.
This has always been true, everywhere. Countries like South Korea and Taiwan already had the infrastructure so they could skip the lockdown part. Everyone else sacrificed and figured it out.
The US never did and so here we are. The US has never had a national lockdown and still doesn’t have a national plan. But the prescription remains the same. They can lock down now after 160,000 deaths or in 2021 after 300,000, but that’s the only way out. Cases have to be held to a manageable level, and they need national public health. Even a vaccine would require working public health infrastructure.
The only problem is that this will be impossible.
No public health tool can work on a population where 40% of people will not comply. Masking, distancing, even vaccines — none of these things work without nearly universal public support. Forget national lockdowns or vaccines. Americans can’t even agree to not breathe on each other.
Also forget national governance, that’s just imploded into a horrible TV show. Trump has thrown everything to the states in a plan that can only be described as feral federalism. Every region on its own, in the wild.
The result is that any functioning central government will have to reintegrate cities and states that have been living in the wild for a year. Many of them won’t want to come back. America’s national policy will only be as secure as its dumbest governor or mayor, which is pretty dumb.
