The US is somewhere past 30% unemployment and hasn't peaked. Just that is going to produce an upheaval, though I think you're correct about all your specific points.
(The thing with COVID-19 is that it's pretty obvious you don't necessarily recover, and the whys and wherefors are down to something close to genetic luck. Nobody wants to risk getting maimed.)
It comes down to (I think) three things.
Will the supremacists admit defeat on demographic and public opinion grounds without opening fire? Maybe, in Ontario (though I kind of doubt it); in the US? No way.
Will the Mammonites, faced with the obvious and certain end of open-loop extractive capitalism and the policies necessary to sustain it ("if you don't work you starve, and sometimes then", "no land tenure but corporate tenure", and "pollution is free to the polluter"), accept structural change that lessens their relative degree of wealth? Absolutely not. They've been pushing hard for human extinction in preference.
Government that does things. The single best predictor of COVID-19 policy success is whether or not the government responsible engages in direct production of goods and services. In polities where that's anathema, the response has been poor to actively terrible. In polities where the government manufactures medical supplies directly, the response has been effective.
Canada has a terrible case of squeems about direct production. Canada's COVID-19 response has been much worse than recognised, mostly because no one can get the excess death statistics for this year until next year.
I don't think we're -- Canada -- going to come out of this with a functioning economy. There's a leadership vacuum just about everywhere and nobody talking about sufficient policies, never mind optimal policies. Nobody is talking about the necessity of being something other than a petrostate. Nobody's talking about the need to close the loop. Everybody's stuck in an imagined past of one sort or another in preference to dealing with the certain future.
So I'm not expecting upheaval so much as I'm expecting slumping collapse; there are enough mammonites to prevent a useful public response and enough supremacists to prevent a useful mass movement to demand a public response.
And, well, even a perfect policy response in Canada isn't going to matter much if the US slides into anarchy.
no subject
(The thing with COVID-19 is that it's pretty obvious you don't necessarily recover, and the whys and wherefors are down to something close to genetic luck. Nobody wants to risk getting maimed.)
It comes down to (I think) three things.
Will the supremacists admit defeat on demographic and public opinion grounds without opening fire? Maybe, in Ontario (though I kind of doubt it); in the US? No way.
Will the Mammonites, faced with the obvious and certain end of open-loop extractive capitalism and the policies necessary to sustain it ("if you don't work you starve, and sometimes then", "no land tenure but corporate tenure", and "pollution is free to the polluter"), accept structural change that lessens their relative degree of wealth? Absolutely not. They've been pushing hard for human extinction in preference.
Government that does things. The single best predictor of COVID-19 policy success is whether or not the government responsible engages in direct production of goods and services. In polities where that's anathema, the response has been poor to actively terrible. In polities where the government manufactures medical supplies directly, the response has been effective.
Canada has a terrible case of squeems about direct production. Canada's COVID-19 response has been much worse than recognised, mostly because no one can get the excess death statistics for this year until next year.
I don't think we're -- Canada -- going to come out of this with a functioning economy. There's a leadership vacuum just about everywhere and nobody talking about sufficient policies, never mind optimal policies. Nobody is talking about the necessity of being something other than a petrostate. Nobody's talking about the need to close the loop. Everybody's stuck in an imagined past of one sort or another in preference to dealing with the certain future.
So I'm not expecting upheaval so much as I'm expecting slumping collapse; there are enough mammonites to prevent a useful public response and enough supremacists to prevent a useful mass movement to demand a public response.
And, well, even a perfect policy response in Canada isn't going to matter much if the US slides into anarchy.