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There are quite a few lessons we will all just have to wait to draw from the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted last December in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The coronavirus that causes the sickness is still rampaging across the face of the Earth. The economic and geopolitical shockwaves are still shattering almost everything that was commonplace and routine and familiar from the days before the plague began.

But there is a lesson that we all should have learned quite some time ago, which is proving its merit and value now that we are being forced to learn it in the hard and horrific way that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is teaching it. It’s that thriving liberal democracies cannot coexist for long within a model of neoliberal globalization that admits into its embrace such a tyrannical state-capitalist monstrosity as the People’s Republic of China.

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The arrangement would end badly. It was already putrefying long before the plague began radiating outward from the offal-strewn alleys in the wild animal section of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan’s Jianghan district, and outward across the province of Hubei, and then, for weeks, as a human-borne contagion undisclosed by the Chinese Communist Party, outward around the world.