The question, of course, is whether this crisis will shock us enough to change our ways. The Japanese did eventually react to Commodore Perry’s squadron of ships with something more than fear. They stopped talking about themselves as the vertex of the Earth. They overhauled their education system. They adopted Western scientific methods, reorganized their state, and created a modern bureaucracy. This massive change, known as the Meiji Restoration, is what brought Japan, for better or for worse, into the modern world. Naturally, the old samurai-warrior class fought back against it, bitterly and angrily.
But by then the new threat was so obvious that enough people got it, enough people understood that a national mobilization was necessary, enough people understood that things could not go on that way indefinitely. Could it happen here, too?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-showed-america-wasnt-task/608023/The experience of the past three years has shattered the myth that the US Constitution on its own can protect American democracy from a narcissistic, unpredictable, polarizing, and authoritarian president. But the country’s problems are not limited to the menace in the White House. All Americans also bear responsibility for the current state of affairs, because we have neglected critical institutions and ignored the intensifying structural weaknesses that created the conditions for a demagogue like Trump to emerge in the first place.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/american-policy-reform-agenda-after-trump-by-daron-acemoglu-2020-03Perry explained why, in his view, the United States will ultimately need a truth commission to begin healing from the harm done to the country by the Trump administration's lies and systematic abuses of the rule of law, not to mention its criminality, corruption and other assaults on democratic norms and values. Such a commission would also be a necessary first step in documenting the Trump regime's crimes and assaults on truth, reality and America's collective memory.
https://www.salon.com/2020/03/17/historian-david-perry-after-trump-well-need-a-truth-and-reconciliation-commission/Discuss about what doing after Trump's presidency.
