Watching from Europe, the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on the United States seems like a ‘Fall of the Soviet Union’ moment in history. The landmarks of that momentous event are etched in memory – the celebratory crowds tearing down the Berlin Wall, Boris Yeltsin’s storming of the White House in Moscow, and the democratic uprisings that reconfigured Europe from Poland to Romania.
Most of all though, the fall of the Soviet Union is remembered by many as the end of a bad idea – the idea that a one-party state can violently suppress its citizens in the name of the collective good. In practice, that idea has always translated into tyranny and the mass violation of human rights.
The ‘Fall of America’ moment we are currently witnessing - with world-leading infection and mortality rates and a disastrous lack of federal leadership - is of a different nature. It can be understood, not as the end of a bad idea, but rather as the pyrrhic victory of a whole set of bad ideas long present in U.S. culture which have grown to define the country in the last few decades.
