It seems astoundingly natural and predictable to me actually. The wheres of various implementations of different failed “solutions” can be a bit surprising, but their failures are kinda predictable. Ultimately, we needed to lockdown for a bit but that was impossible if the wheels of capitalism were gonna keep moving in the short term so the implementation was botched.
Capitalism rewards short-term thinking on the individual scale (occasionally, but when it does it does so at obscene returns) and punishes it on the collective. So long as those rewards grant the wealth and power necessary to change policy, countries implementing various social democracies will drop the ball eventually. The culture war aspect of politics also serves to be very detrimental to most social democracies.
Want to address this one separately. China’s whole literal social fascist bullshit will fall apart the moment they can’t keep delivering increases in standard of living. It’d also fail miserably if it had to actually function as a superpower and be more open, as that’d introduce more ethnic tensions and grind their political system to a crawl. Honestly, while China is the rising power right now, their model is no less fucked than the typical neoliberal one, as their inability to end protests in Hong Kong after a fucking year demonstrates.
Agreed.
Liberals can bleed too, and their model is falling down around them as we speak. They aren’t able to enforce their shit in the third world as easily anymore, they’re losing to autocrats at home, the EU is falling apart, Russia’s probably out influencing them in much of Eastern Europe. Finally, climate catastrophe is gonna be a hell of a problem for them. We’re gonna get capitalism in crisis whether we want to or not. The question is which direction it falls in, whether some new model takes over and engages in another cycle of colonialism (which, hey, who knows if that one really will follow the cycle, though I’m betting it will) or if it does just fall apart once and for all.