Winners and Losers -- What There Is After -- or -- "le jour d’après

     ...."le jour d’après" ... {as Macron is suggesting "after"be called}

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/11/coronavirus-who-will-be-winners-and-losers-in-new-world-order

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In Hong Kong, graffiti reads: “There can be no return to normal because normal was the problem in the first place.”
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“The crisis also represents a stark test of the competing claims of liberal and illiberal states to better manage extreme social distress. As the pandemic unfolds it will test not only the operational capacities of organisations like the WHO and the UN but also the basic assumptions about the values and political bargains that underpin them.”

Many are already claiming that the east has won this war of competing narratives. The South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in an influential essay in El País, has argued the victors are the “Asian states like Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Singapore that have an authoritarian mentality which comes from their cultural tradition [of] Confucianism. People are less rebellious and more obedient than in Europe. They trust the state more. Daily life is much more organised. Above all, to confront the virus Asians are strongly committed to digital surveillance. The epidemics in Asia are fought not only by virologists and epidemiologists, but also computer scientists and big data specialists.”
He predicts: “China will now be able to sell its digital police state as a model of success against the pandemic. China will display the superiority of its system even more proudly.” He claims western voters, attracted to safety and community, might be willing to sacrifice those liberties. There is little liberty in being forced to spend spring shut in your own flat.

Indeed, China is already on a victory lap of sorts, believing it has deftly repositioned itself from the culprit to the world’s saviour. A new generation of young assertive Chinese diplomats have taken to social media to assert their country’s superiority. Michel Duclos, the former French ambassador now at the Institut Montaigne, has accused China of “shamelessly trying to capitalise on the country’s ‘victory against the virus’ to promote its political system. The kind of undeclared cold war that had been brewing for some time shows its true face under the harsh light of Covid-19.”
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Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, also fear an authoritarian contagion, predicting in the west “a new barbarism with a human face – ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy, but legitimised by expert opinions”.

By contrast, Shivshankar Menon, a visiting professor at Ashoka University in India, says: “Experience so far shows that authoritarians or populists are no better at handling the pandemic. Indeed, the countries that responded early and successfully, such as Korea and Taiwan, have been democracies – not those run by populist or authoritarian leaders.”

Francis Fukuyama concurs: “The major dividing line in effective crisis response will not place autocracies on one side and democracies on the other. The crucial determinant in performance will not be the type of regime, but the state’s capacity and, above all, trust in government.” He has praised Germany and South Korea.

South Korea is in fact selling itself as the democratic power, in contrast to China, that has best handled the crisis. Its national press is full of articles on how Germany is following the South Korean model of mass testing.

But South Korea, an export-oriented economy, also faces long-term difficulties if the pandemic forces the west, as Prof Joseph Stiglitz predicts, into a total reassessment of the global supply chain. He argues the pandemic has revealed the drawbacks of concentrating production of medical supplies. As a result, just-in-time imports will go down and production of domestically sourced goods will go up.
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Europe’s chief solace is to look across the Atlantic and watch the daily chaos that is Donald Trump’s evening press conference – the daily reminder that rational people can plan for anything, except an irrational president. Nathalie Tocci, an adviser to Josep Borrell, the EU foreign affairs chief, wonders whether, much like the 1956 Suez crisis symbolised the ultimate decay of the UK’s global power, coronavirus could mark the “Suez moment” for the US.

As someone else suggested somewhere: what's happening economically in the USA is mob cronyism taking place of capitalism. The entire function of the so-called government is to protect and amplify the power, possessions and survival of the very rich. The rest of us aren't even human beings, merely a herd, that may or may not survive the culling via 'herd immunity.'