1. Informed by the experience of the 08 financial crisis, the one thing we can be sure of about the COVID-19 crisis - including the economic and political fallout - is that it will be bigger and less predictable than people anticipate .
2. An economic shock of this size and scale will ripple for a long time, impacting not just businesses but peoples' own sense of how they relate to the economy, how their family can have any security, and what they want to do with their lives.
3. Governments - especially our own - are not well positioned to respond. Trump's tax bill emptied out the coffers. We've had low rates. The Fed has already fired a bunch of bullets. And the emergency spending feels like a drop in an ocean.
4. The nationalists running most major countries are totally ill-equipped to cooperate across borders to deal with an economic crisis that as global as the pandemic.
5. Similarly, the need to blame others - internal enemies, are foreign enemies - will be the obvious play for many. As Trump has already done with China. Raising the risk of increased geopolitical tensions and potential conflict.
6. In the short-run, we'll definitely see more authoritarianism. Either naked power grabs like we've seen with Orban. Or creeping state powers through needed tracing of the virus. But...
7. Political blowback will last years. The 08 crisis happened under Bush, but the blowback came with the Tea Party under Obama - a right wing populism that ultimately led to Trump.
8. So while authoritarians may drive round 1 of the COVID-19 fallout, the economic impact is likely to blowback on them down the line as things don't get better - and may get worse. The smarter ones know this.
9. The key question for progressives is whether they will have policy and political strategies that speak to unease people already felt, which will be exacerbated by COVID-19 - in the same way that the 08 crisis exacerbated frustrations with globalization and the liberal order
10. COVID-19 shows the danger of nationalism, disinformation, disdain for governance, and structural economic inequality that left so many people so vulnerable to this shock.
11. That suggests progressives should prepare for a multi-year effort to speak to the anger and instability that people are feeling - both because of COVID-19, and because of what it revealed in our respective political systems and economies
12. We're in for a very bumpy ride. Can we emerge on the other side having been warned off nationalism, the misuse of technology, the dangers of widening inequality, the failure to listen to science - whether its a pandemic or climate change?
13. That will depend upon people mobilizing, staying engaged, not succumbing to strategies of diversion and distraction - and even new crises - manufactured by nationalist and authoritarian leaders. A key early test will be the November election
14. It will also depend upon not just going back to how things were - the gap between how people are feeling and what politics is producing has to be closed. That will take many years. This is only the very beginning.
