What Next

 Carlos Lozada runs through some of the literature from Very Serious People about what comes after the pandemic. He looks at three books, and - while I confess I haven't read any of them aside from his summaries - they seem to follow similar themes. Basically, the pandemic has exposed whatever we believed prior to the pandemic to be absolute truth. If you believed that massive restructuring of American health care delivery systems before Covid, then Covid simply proves you were right. 

The assumption is that whatever your prior beliefs, the pandemic will prove you right and accelerate whatever trends you prioritized before. 

Some of these beliefs are certainly "accurate" in the broad sense. American governance has been degraded since Reagan, though not uniformly. Republicans have systemically undermined the efficacy and efficiency of government for ideological reasons. Trump and Dubya added rank incompetence to the mix. Trump was more obvious, but I think the people of New Orleans can attest to the incompetence of Bush's bureaucracy. 

There is another lesson that might be true of Trumpistan: Institutions hold. There is almost uniform skepticism among the online left that the institutions have held. They point to the current immunity Trump has enjoyed from accountability for his actions. While this is true, this is a huge problem among (young) online commentary, in their desire for instant gratification. We don't know the final accountability of Trump. We know that the electoral system worked. Trump has been thwarted in the courts both as president and as a sore loser. Trump's footprint on our institutions is likely to be shallow.

So people predicting that the pandemic will dramatically reshape institutions are likely wrong. We will shift things at the margins here and there. The piece is right that it will likely reshape things for the well off more than the poor. Zoom and other changes will modify how work is done among certain service industries. Online medicine will take a step forward...for the wealthy. Work will change in interesting ways...for the wealthy.

One trend we have seen is the fundamental disaffection from large segments of the population with the status quo. Trump was the champion of those petty bourgeois white Americans who feel increasingly left behind. There is a massive opportunity here for Biden and the Democrats, but it's pretty clear the GOP will obstruct every effort to make things better. 

Things are unlikely to change the way they should because our institutions simply don't change fast enough. If Biden had the sort of majorities Obama enjoyed for a few months at the beginning of his presidency, we could see major legislation that could make a tangible, positive difference in people's lives. What we have seen, however, is that we will continue to limp along with systems inadequate to our governing needs. Biden will improve many things, but absent a Senate supermajority, it's unclear what real changes will be made.