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The Post-Pandemic WorldRichard Fernandez, once a prolific geo political writer, has slowed down the past few years. Always worth a read. The Post-Pandemic World Together with guarded hopes that the decline of the omicron COVID-19 wave marks the beginning of the end of the pandemic comes the question: what happens when it has finally run its course? What will the post-pandemic world be like? The most likely scenario is that it will unleash the greatest political jailbreak since the end of the second world war. Only a few months after Hitler’s armies surrendered, the British electorate, eager to put the restrictions of war behind them, handed Winston Churchill a landslide defeat and replaced him with Clement Atlee. Once victory removed the rationale for all the regulations they had willingly accepted, they set about removing them. With the end of the current pandemic, the justification for lockdowns, masks, mandates, tracking, and restrictions on the public will similarly vanish and the desire for a new world will be unleashed. This may expose the bureaucrats who’ve spent the last three years building ’empires of fear’ to a widespread political backlash. What will make it worse is that the bureaucrats cannot even claim victory over the virus for their policies. It just seemed to have run its course, with omicron representing the final stage of the viral evolution to an endemic disease.
That is to say, the pandemic may soon be over or at least tolerable. While this development is good news, it will raise questions over whether many of the powers assumed in the name of scientific authority were inflated in retrospect. Its one undoubted legacy has been to damage the reputation of the ruling class. As Daniel Henninger writes in the WSJ, “Omicron has killed certitude. People no longer care what government or ‘science’ tells them about Covid-19.” The public has concluded that officials have overreached, and this has — at least temporarily — ruined their credibility.
It’s not that the concept of science per se has been discredited, but the limits of governance based on the state of the art have been laid bare. Already the signs of political disillusion are plain to see, from Joe Biden’s collapse in the polls, the SCOTUS rejection of his vaccine mandate, and Boris Johnson’s slipping hold on power to Novak Djokovic’s amazing one-man stand against Australia’s vaccine visa policy: a worldwide storm is brewing, and it will break over the political scene in 2022. Related: It’s Joe Biden’s Pandemic Now In the aftermath of the pandemic, hard questions will be asked about the origins of the virus, the integrity of the social media censors, the ‘snail speed’ at which the administration pursued anti-COVID therapies, and the future of all the controls promulgated in the name of necessity. And what people learn may not exactly please them. David Brooks, writing in the NYT, notices a sour mood abroad in the land and wonders why the public is so surly. “I couldn’t figure it out. Why would Americans be driving so much more recklessly during the pandemic?”
Maybe David Brooks doesn’t know the cause of the anger he senses, but we’re about to find out. The pandemic wound up the world like a huge spring and it threatens to snap back with as yet incalculable results. The next few years will be full of surprises, not more of the same. |
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Msg # | Subject | Author | Recs | Date Posted |
482601 | Re: The Post-Pandemic World | RichAbe | 0 | 1/17/2022 1:45:56 PM |
482605 | Re: The Post-Pandemic World | stockmonger | 4 | 1/17/2022 10:58:58 PM |