The January-February 2021 (dead of winter) issue of Foreign Affairs is certainly eye-catching/
At the bottom there is a caption, “Can America
Recover?”. It comprises seven essays.
I’ll mention two of them.
“To Stop a Pandemic: A Better Approach to Global
Health Society”, p. 36. By Jennifer Nuzzo.
The author says that the western world was “singularly
unprepared” for a pandemic of this nature. It would be hard to anticipate in advance how a
respiratory virus could seem to cause very trivial illness in most people
exposed, yet fill up hospitals and morgues quickly – it spreads that quickly
before someone has noticeable symptoms (and many more people than we realize never
have symptoms). And a troubling
percentage of people who recover from milder cases have residual complications
(long haulers). The idea that a respiratory virus does such damage to blood
vessels sounds novel. But there are many
other bizarre viruses out there. It’s just
that this one is new.
At the end, she warns that an even worse virus is
conceivable – maybe one that is slow and that causes dementia in everyone. It is impossible to avoid the possibility
that a foreign power could design a pathogen.
Indeed, the behavior of SARS_CoV2 sounds imagined to undermine western
individualism and to reinforce personal sacrifice for the group as in communist
countries.
David W. Blight has an essay on p. 44, “The
Reconstruction of America: Justice, Power, and the Civil War’s Unfinished
Business”. Indeed, the period right
after the war (as in “Gone with the Wind”) was more radical in its
interventionism in the South than most of us realize. But Blight discusses the
Radical Republicans, who made strides between 1866 and 1868 (leading to Johnson’s
impeachment), pressed for a “civil rights act” and engineered the 14th
Amendment with its refinement of individual rights and the use of the incorporation
doctrine.
On p. 78 there appears an 18 page essay “The Party
that Failed: An Insider Breaks with Beijing”, by Cai Xia.
The author worked as a writer for the Chinese
Communist Party establishment, for over a decade. She lived in a world where
you don’t originate your own thinking but sell the ideology of others. Sometimes
in doing her propaganda work she was forcefully isolated. The CCP tried to
invent a doubletalk to invent a statist capitalism that still belonged to “the
people”. But rather than talking about
workers as an exploited class, it could make something of Maoist thinking about
poverty-sharing and radical purity on a personal level. She talks about the coverup of the death of
Lei Yang in 2016.
She talks about being interrogated about her writings in more recent years.
She was caught away from home by the pandemic. Authorities wanted he to come home but she
would not. But all of her assets were frozen.
Vijay Gokhale has a December 18 FP article about China’s
commitment to ideological manifest destiny, “China is Gnawing at Democracy’s Roots Worldwide”, The Communist Party is putting ideological battles first.
Wikipedia embed of Beijing eastern skyline, click for attribution.
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