There is now little doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic will upend the global order - ushering in the "breakout" second decade (2020-30) of the seventh capitalist regime, Chimerica (2010-2050). By this fall's US presidential election, only one domestic and one foreign issue, respectively, will predominate American voters' minds: the novel Coronavirus and its origin country, China.
Though this moment in history has been a long time coming, its sheer suddenness is downright remarkable: it turns out that a virus was the missing link between the twilight of the Western world order and its transition to a bona fide Chinese one.
Without need to go into details, the most salient features of the current crisis speak for themselves: built upon the principles of individual autonomy and liberty, Western democracies are particularly vulnerable to a microbe that renders it imperative for a collective all-of-society effort to suppress its potentially lethal spread; particularly in nations like the United States, which are ethnically and culturally diverse, the many strands of authority - and rebellion against authority - render it difficult to impossible to implement a centralized response policy.
More tellingly, however, we are witnessing the virulent death of an entire worldview: that of "American exceptionalism" or, perhaps more expansively, "Anglo exceptionalism." This in essence holds that, by virtue of their being the bearers of God-given political and civil freedoms to the rest of humanity, the Anglo-American, "Atlanticist" civilization which reached its zenith in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, has a providential and predestined mission to prove the supremacy of personal and individual autonomy over collective and communal conformity and harmony.
The hard truth is now exposed: when individuals are lionized over the whole of society, the whole of society suffers so much that the individual is inadvertently an even greater victim. The stubborn early resistance to the very idea of lockdowns and quarantines in both the US and UK meant that both countries adopted these crucial mitigation measures far too late to avoid severe dislocation and disruption to their economies. Worse still, once these adverse economic consequences really sunk in, the imperative to undo them has proven - at least in the US case - to be so great and pressing that even an extremely risky (some would say reckless) effort to lift the pandemic mitigation effort has been deemed preferable to waiting out the virus longer.
In America's case, this is particularly striking: the reason that Republican and Republican-leaning states are so impatient to reopen their economies is that - to date - their predominantly Caucasian majority populations have been only lightly and unevenly touched by the novel Coronavirus disease. Owing to the mere fact that their communities are less intensively and immediately intertwined with the global economy, these conservative parts of the country consider it unfair that they've already sustained far more economic damage than direct harm from the virus itself - as though the virus would treat them any differently than regions it's already ravaged (i.e. New York) once it found their defenses lowered.
As the Communist regime in Beijing watches gleefully, America - and especially the once so arrogant Trump administration, which boasted of a trade war that supposedly brought China to its knees - finds herself stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The economy will not recover for the simple fact that most people will not resume their normal pre-pandemic level of public activity even if the authorities deemed it perfectly safe to do so; workplaces and businesses cannot function above half capacity for quite some time, crimping any hoped for rebound in revenues and profits. Jobs will therefore not come back - nor will wages avoid longer-term cuts.
Against this backdrop, one can only expect the Trump administration to double down further: to the point of seeking penalties against businesses and workers that refuse to get back to a normal footing. But this will itself smack against the solid brick wall of a resurgence in both cases and deaths from even the partial economic relaunch that fails miserably in its objectives.
A repeating cycle of lockdowns and reopenings now looms for not just the US, but most Western democracies: they have not made a firm decision to eradicate the virus by any means necessary - and hence are condemning themselves to trying to cope with its devastating effects for a long, long time. The "magic bullet" of either a vaccine or universal treatment drug will also prove to be a mirage hope - there are no such panaceas in the ugly real world of completely new strains of highly infectious and mutable virus.
By contrast, China is already on the strong road to recovery - albeit with reduced growth expectations for the foreseeable future. It is far better equipped to handle any resurgence in Covid cases - and already has far fewer potential spreaders to begin with.
More tellingly, the Chinese economy is now restructuring and reorienting itself in a longer-term shift to prioritize public health and general social welfare over private profit and even heavy fixed-asset investment (i.e. infrastructure, real estate): something its Western, especially US, counterparts are incapable of even seriously attempting without even worse political gridlock.
So the ascendancy of Chimerica - as opposed to "Amerina" - is now assured. China is headed for accelerated value-chain climbing, currency internationalization alongside healthy deleveraging and interest rate stabilization, and slow but high-quality growth driven by consumption and innovation; the US by contrast is headed for asset deflation, real economic stagflation, and exploding debt. China will end up setting the terms for future trade and investment with the US - whatever Trump or his possible Democratic successor may say on the campaign trail.
The US Covid pandemic will pick up again by late this month - and probably experience a "secondary peak" by mid-June; while that may spur Trump to impose another lockdown, it will probably fail - even then - to compel him to actually see through a comprehensive mitigation and then containment strategy. The true "second wave" of the Coronavirus will almost certainly strike with a vengeance by the end of August into early September: and it will probably cause enough additional havoc to both the US economy and physical well-being to cost the White House reelection.
