3 Lessons from COVID-19 to America After the Elections
The pandemic took our planet by surprise. It arrived to the United States on a year marked by presidential elections. At a moment where American society is extremely divided in both social and political levels. What has been clear enough so far is the fact that America is not leading the path towards a more cooperative world, at least since Trump took office. But lately, the country has shown no interest in leading the way on the fight against coronavirus.
Trump’s administration has damaged existing international agreements and now is turning against the national Food and Drugs Administration bureau, accusing them of deliberately delaying coronavirus vaccine trials. This unprecedent behavior will bring to the table consequences for America’s image to the eyes of the world. Leading the country to learn, in the hard way, three lessons from this pandemic:
- Global problems require global solutions. Countries as powerful as the U.S. should work with the same agendas when dealing with global problems. States that have better control of the pandemic within their borders tend to share their national statistics with other governments. In order to count with trustworthy data, these countries have to allign their national bureaus and work for the sake of their people and not for political interests. No global issue can be properly addressed if a key player of the international arena prefers to isolate from the others. This will have a considerable political cost for the United States.
- If a nation is broken from within, it will project a broken leadership. In times of crisis, people and governments look out for leaders that can guide them outside the tunnel. America has been renouncing from the leadership place it could claim due to its enormous influence. This is happening mainly because the country’s national issues are quite challenging at the moment. Racial discrimination, social division, police force brutality, inequality and local economic crisis. All these problems are occupying the heads of the owners of political will, specially in a year of presidential elections. Therefore, there is no space for questions of international leadership, when the current government is not even able to hold its own national leadership. And the world can see this.
- People greatly support or strongly reject governments after crisis. It is well known that within democracies, people tend to be reactive voters. Meaning they base their votes on their own reaction to the current government’s actions. There has been multiple kinds of reactions accross America during this crisis, mainly because the extended quarantine measures. However, we can add all of them in two basic categories. The people that are almost living their normal lives within their state-of-the-art houses. And the people that are having a really bad time, counting pennies in order to survive another week. The former living a luxury lockdown and some of them even resembling the American president’s lifestyle outside the oval office. The later suffering from not having health access, from a poor online education through unefficient or outdated technological devices, from unemployment and a long economic tradition of consumption rather than focusing on savings. People know this crisis could have been better handled and they will not forget this when casting their vote at the ballot. This pandemic may have already sealed the outcome of the coming presidential election.
To sum up, the United States will learn from this crisis that it cannot solve a global problem all by itself, that unattending domestic issues leads to an unattended international leadership, and that people can throw governments away (by democratic measures or not) specially when evaluating their response to crisis like this. It is a matter of time to see if America will learn from this lessons and move forward, or if it will fall into a state of denial.
MVP
