Janan Ganesh: “In the past two years, America’s favorability score is close to having doubled in much of the rich world. Currently 9 out of 10 Poles and South Koreans are well-disposed to it. Germans are as smitten as they were in the first years of President Barack Obama. Brits are back on board.”
“What, besides human fickleness and whimsy, is at work here? The departure (for now) of Trump is part of it. But the timing and violence of the swing point to the pandemic being the machine element. In 2020, America’s handling of that crisis seemed to discredit not just a nation but liberal individualism itself. Now? No one would extol the record, not with more than a million dead Americans. But one might reasonably prefer it to the untenable rigours of zero Covid.”
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