What are we facing?

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

...When we reach the now politically incorrect, taboo term “herd immunity” through vaccinations and antibodies, and when the virus ceases to be a pandemic, the lethal tally may have exceeded 600,000 Americans.

If so, the nation will have lost more countrymen than were killed in World War I and World War II combined—with thousands more suffering disabilities, from “long haul Covid” to stress and psychological impairment from losing livelihoods and lockdown cabin fever.

Americans have additionally suffered likely over $15 trillion or so in economic damage from the lockdowns, lost labor, soaring healthcare costs, and the silent killers of substance, familial, and spousal abuse, along with missed medical procedures and surgeries, aborted K-12 schooling, depression, and suicides. It will take years and millions of hours of scholarship to tally all the losses and damage.

The strangest thing about the origins of the virus was its Wuhan birthplace—both next to an experimental viral laboratory engaged in dangerous research and a “wet” market that allegedly served as a petri dish for exotic new viruses. Or perhaps stranger was the second phase of the Chinese Communist Party’s exegeses of the pandemic: they transmogrified from momentary contrition to braggadocio about the superior reaction to the pandemic by totalitarians to a defiant “shut up—and what are you going to do about it anyway?”

At home, we find similar paradoxes. Joe Biden has only begun to interrupt the deregulation and tax policies that sparked the historic Trump economic boom of 2017-19 prompting unemployment to reach near-record peacetime lows. It will take time for new taxes, regulations, and elements of the New Green Deal to undermine the foundations of a robust economy.

All the talk of a dismal Trump response to the virus will soon and reluctantly wane, as our vaccination rate, our prior national leadership in creating vaccines, and our earlier end to the pandemic will be positively compared with other nations, especially those in Europe. As a result, Biden will transmogrify from a shrill critic of what he inherited to a plagiarist of that recovery.

If Biden and his team get what they wish—a neo-socialist, big government transformation—we will enter tough times. But not yet and perhaps not until after 2022.

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