Lawrence Wright on COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

“Wealth and power breed hubris, and perhaps Covid-19 was the force that America needed—to be humbled, to reckon with itself, to once again attempt to create the democracy it had always intended to be. On the other hand, America’s moment at the forefront of history might have passed, and Covid-19 was a blow it was no longer strong enough to fend off. Rival powers—with China at the top—were competing for control of the new millennium. This was a challenge to democracy, which was America’s cause in the world. The alternative to American preeminence was not a globe full of mini-Americas but a world dominated by tyrants. Freedom was at stake, as it always is, but America had tied itself into a political knot. The cyclonic forces of fascism and nihilism gained in power as the center weakened. The only thing that kept democracy from winding up in a suicidal brawl of self-interest was a sense of common purpose, but the pandemic exposed that the United States no longer had one.”

“COVID-19 arrived in America at a vulnerable moment in the nation’s history. The country was undergoing a wrenching political realignment, brought to a head by the 2016 election of Donald Trump, whose policies on trade, deficit, alliances, and immigration were at odds with traditional Republican conservativism. His election pulled the country further into a cataclysm of identity politics, shrinking the GOP into a pool of aging white voters who felt disparaged, resentful, and left behind. The #MeToo movement had ignited an edgy dialogue between the sexes. As the stock market soared, long-delayed questions of income disparity and racial justice were pressing forward. Every dissonant chord among the parties, the races, and the genders was amplified within the echo chambers the fractured communities had made of themselves. Into this turbulent, deeply troubled, but prideful society, the coronavirus would act as a hurricane of change, flattening the most powerful economy in the world, leveling not the physical cities but the idea of cities, strewing misfortune and blame and regrets along with the tens, the hundreds, the thousands, the hundreds of thousands of obituaries. No country would escape the destruction the virus inflicted, but none had as much to lose as America.”