The coronavirus election

I will say it right now: the growing COVID-19 pandemic will be the defining issue of the upcoming election. And it won't even be close.

As readers of this space know, I'm no fan of Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All. No, not because I want people to die. No, not because I'm a heartless capitalist. But because I want to build on and improve the existing healthcare system, and make it a true public/private partnership, like you have in most countries which have universal healthcare without a single-payer system.

However, COVID-19 has the potential to upend all of our sacred cows for health delivery.

Look at that tweet from Dana Milbank again. Now think ahead when infections are in the thousands, and when deaths are in the hundreds. And then think ahead again when infections grow even more, and deaths likewise grow. And then think ahead when we have no response, partly due to our ramshackle healthcare system, but mostly due to the current soi disant "leadership" steering the ship on this pandemic. When the non-MAGAts see the deaths and the infections, and a healthcare system unable to handle something which South Korea—a country which was developing just a few short decades ago, mired in a US-supported military dictatorship—is doing with aplomb and minimizing fatalities, expect that explosion to be volcanic.

If there's one thing Americans hate is thinking that they're worse at something than any other country. No matter how many statistics you show them that we're not, in fact, #1 in many indices, they still hold on to that nationalist chauvinism that we're God's Country. And, to be fair, most people's eyes glaze over dry statistics. But have the nightly news lead every evening with death and infection totals, and a government both unwilling and unable to take steps to stop the carnage, and you're setting up an untenable situation.

You have the CDC scrubbing infection numbers from its website, likely at the direction of coronavirus czar Mike "Mother May I" Pence. You have red states like Florida not testing possible infections. Nothing concentrates the mind more than illness and death. MAGAts will drink bleach to cure the virus, or rail that there is, in fact, no virus, not on this, God's green and pleasant land. But the non-crazy 65-70% who don't want to get sick, or see those they love get sick, will have a differing opinion. The incompetence which this regime has already displayed will grow only worse. And the inability of our healthcare system to protect us from a pandemic will have people thinking of how it can be reformed so that everyone has care and no one falls through the cracks ever again.

Tell a husband watching his partner contract a potentially terminal illness that he has to make do with the system we have because of freedom. Tell a normally conservative woman that she has to watch her child suffer in order to "stand with the president". Americans grouse about political incompetence daily; it's a different order of magnitude when a pandemic sweeps the nation, and no one supposedly entrusted with promoting the common welfare seems to be able to do anything, either out of malice or idiocy.

Political revolts can begin from small things. And viruses are small. It was bound to happen that this regime would be faced with a clusterfuck not of its own creation, one of whose parameters it couldn't control. It's the regime's bad luck, and possibly our saving grace, that it's happening now, as people are making decisions as to who to send to slay it. And in times like these, people tend to choose someone who's been there, who has experience, and who scares the bejeezus out of the West Wing interloper.

As I've taken to quoting from the end of the 1953 film adaptation of The War of the Worlds:

The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune. Once they had breathed our air, germs which no longer affect us began to kill them. The end came swiftly. All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall.

Populist regimes last only so long as things don't go wrong. But once they turn, they turn quickly.