At some point in the coming weeks, the total number of US deaths from Covid-19 will reach 1mn. For reference, the American Civil War took twice as long to kill three quarters as many people, and that figure is an upward revision on older estimates. All the nation’s external wars have together claimed around 700,000 US personnel over almost 250 years.
A million: even allowing that America has a larger population now than in, say, 1945, the size and speed of the loss are eerie. And so is its impact on domestic politics. For there isn’t much of one.
At the turn of 2020, the two big parties were headed by Joe Biden, who had led the Democratic primaries for more than a year, and the Republican then-president Donald Trump. The same men are the betting markets’ favourites to contest the 2024 election. The pandemic has not lastingly toppled established figures (as Vietnam did Lyndon Johnson) or elevated new ones (as the second world war did Dwight Eisenhower). Each party’s leaders on Capitol Hill are the same, even as two of them wade into their eighties.