Josh Marshall extrapolates from health care workers being reluctant to take the vaccine with the general decline in public trust in institutions. There are many root causes for this, including four years of Trump's assault on the basic notion of objective truth, but this war on truth predates Trump.
Marshall ends by discussing how when Britons came over to the US after WWII, they realized - painfully - how far their standard of living had fallen behind their cousins. As America roared into the mid-'50s, Britain was still rationing. He notes that the way Asia and other places have managed this pandemic so much better than us is similar to the shock that those British visitors felt.
Good governance - even in authoritarian regimes - is dependent on shared truths and assumptions about civic life. America no longer has that. The fact that supermajorities of Republicans can't accept that Trump got smoked in the election implies that the civic assumptions that underlie American democracy are toast/
I'm skeptical of peaceful secession and the ability of the country to divide neatly along ideological lines. But if there is to remain an "American superpower" it would almost have to secede from the red states that have basically given up on entering the 21st century.
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