The Face of Things to Come

7 January 2021 (Wall Street International)* — By mid-February 2021, American deaths from Covid-19 may well surpass the country’s 405,400 deaths during the Second World War.

By around mid-May, more Americans will have died from Covid-19 than during the Civil War, which killed 655,000, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when 675,000 are estimated to have perished.

The unraveling of American politics

Yet America’s largely self-inflicted Covid-19 disaster may be eclipsed by the US’s political unraveling, which has proceeded with warp speed in the last few weeks, with the once-celebrated American way of succession in power via the ballot box dealt a body blow by a large sector of the electorate that has marched in lock step with their leader in refusing to accept the results of the presidential elections.

Joe Biden will be seated this time around, but this may well be a Pyrrhic victory purchased at the cost of being regarded as illegitimate in the eyes of the majority of the 71 million Americans under the spell of Donald Trump. Future electoral contests for power may well end up being decided by a strong dose of street warfare, as the US goes the way of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic. The violent storming of the Capitol by a Trumpian mob underlined the face of things to come.