The American Mega-Crisis: COVID-19 and Beyond

Abstract The United States arguably has entered the greatest crisis in its history—bar none. Recent studies have illuminated the political and socioeconomic dimensions of the crisis, but observers have given too little attention to accelerated scientific and technological change as perhaps its central feature. This acceleration has generated a widening range of dangers extending from recurring pandemics and unchecked genetic engineering to intrusive artificial intelligence and global warming. Combined with the U.S. constitutional crisis, such dangers constitute a mega-crisis that is likely to evolve in unpredictable ways. To address it, we must think imaginatively about our past national crises without being blinkered by them. The COVID-19 pandemic shows the urgent need for major reforms of U.S. political, economic, and intellectual institutions—reforms that will become possible only with a dramatic repudiation of Donald Trump and the Republican Party in November.