It's not surprising that the argument over how to best deal with a dangerous disease has mutated into a vicious battle over individual liberty vs. the power of the State. We're not really just arguing about a virus anymore.
As usual, the statists are the aggressors as a cold civil war starts to heat up. Hopefully voters are paying close attention to the people openly gushing that the virus is a golden opportunity to force coercive change on us and "fundamentally transform" America. They mean it.
If Democrats win in 2020, they will start nationalizing industries, beginning with health care, which they've lusted after for a century. They won't stop there. They're already trying to nationalize private property ("rent should be frozen!") and airlines will be an easy target.
The pandemic isn't just an opportunity for Democrats to loot the treasury to fund a grab bag of madcap left-wing initiatives and pay off their special interests. They see a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rewrite the social contract while the middle class is too weak to resist.
For those paying attention, the coronavirus exposed a catastrophic failure of Big Government bureaucracy at every level, but statists see the opposite: a miraculous opportunity to reverse the erosion of public confidence in the State that has frustrated their ambitions for years.
Post-coronavirus America will be, for at least a good long while, a land of diminished freedom, increased restrictions, and reduced opportunity. People are conditioned to expect a New Normal where some things have changed forever in just a few weeks. They'll be in shock.
Like ambulance-chasers who try to trick dazed accident victims into signing papers they wouldn't accept once they could think more clearly, the Left will swoop down upon a nation in shock and push it to accept permanent changes it would never have agreed to in February.
And in a bitter irony, the system we end up with - more state-owned industries, the state controlling nominally private businesses with a heavier hand, one Party controlling much of the national wealth - will resemble China's. We'll contract an incurable case of their ideology.
This was an ideological crisis we were headed toward anyway. As in the first war against fascism, much of the Western elite admires the ideology of the enemy because it flatters their intellectual vanity, and they think free-market capitalist democracy can't compete with it.
Sadly, the battle to contain China's virus will leave our ideological immune system weakened against their fascist ideology. They know this, which is one reason they cooked the books to claim they handled the pandemic so much better than sloppy, undisciplined democracies.
The next job report will be a stunning horror after a series of incredible shocks. We'll be told capitalism is on a ventilator and it's time to switch off the machine. The surge in dependency on government will be met with a demand for a permanent increase in power.
And after an incredible three years of shattering Barack Obama's vision of Hospice America - a compassionate Big Government nurse doing what it can to make a once-great people comfortable as they fade away - we'll be right back in those hospice beds, with restraints this time.
The strangest thing is that people who see themselves "true conservatives" are comfortable with this,and will do what they can to make it happen, even though the Fundamental Transformation crowd makes no secret of its ambitions, and China makes no secret of supporting them. /end
