by The National Interest has a story headlined “The Coronavirus Crisis and the Chimera of Authoritarian Competence“. I expected to read about failure of Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump and other autocrats to contain the pandemic. But it was all about China. China is the only autocracy that has had a serious pandemic and controlled it. Xi has told lies and suppressed info, just like all the other autocrats, but at least he hasn’t denied the severity of the problem and actively undermined measures to control it. Lots of democracies have achieved the same outcome at lower cost, but the article mentions only Taiwan by name. What makes it truly bizarre is that one of the authors is a Republican member of Congress. He has had more than three years to observe the chimera of authoritarian
Topics:
John Quiggin considers the following as important: World Events
This could be interesting, too:
John Quiggin writes Billionaires in space
John Quiggin writes Not CRT but critical thinking about race
John Quiggin writes The tribute vice pays to virtue.
John Quiggin writes All politics is global
The National Interest has a story headlined “The Coronavirus Crisis and the Chimera of Authoritarian Competence“. I expected to read about failure of Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump and other autocrats to contain the pandemic. But it was all about China.
China is the only autocracy that has had a serious pandemic and controlled it. Xi has told lies and suppressed info, just like all the other autocrats, but at least he hasn’t denied the severity of the problem and actively undermined measures to control it.
Lots of democracies have achieved the same outcome at lower cost, but the article mentions only Taiwan by name.
What makes it truly bizarre is that one of the authors is a Republican member of Congress. He has had more than three years to observe the chimera of authoritarian competence failing at first hand.
A Twitter thread posted using Spooler